BROKEN Hill’s Sulphide Street Railway & Historic Museum recently opened their new exhibition 1915, exploring the 1915 Picnic Train Attack and subsequent newspaper reporting in the Barrier Miner and Barrier Daily Truth.
The Picnic Train Attack saw four people die after being shot while aboard the train in Broken Hill, and in the aftermath, by two men carrying an Ottoman flag, marking the only enemy attack on Australian soil during World War I.
Museum Curator Christine Adams said she’d been considering a permanent exhibition about the Picnic Train Attacks since gathering information on it for a 2015 exhibition that commemorated the centenary of the event.
“About eighteen months ago, Essential Water got in touch and said they had the original doors of the Barrier Miner, and asked if the museum would take them,” Ms Adams said.
“So that sort of spurred us on, and the exhibition became about the reporting that happened in the town in 1915.”
The exhibition features memorabilia from the attack including historical photos, newspaper clippings, train ticket stubs and parts of the ice cream cart that one of the perpetrators hid behind when the shooting took place.
The museum’s location on Sulphide Street is also the location of the station where the Picnic Train left from before the attack took place.
Ms Adams said she was proud of the exhibition and that it had been received very well with great interest from both locals and tourists.
“We have included as many primary sources as possible to give visitors a real sense of the horrors of that day, its aftermath and the complex reason why it happened,” she said.
The exhibition joins five others in the museum complex: The Broken Hill Migrant Museum, Hospital Museum, Ron Carter Transport Pavilion and Tess Alfonsi Mineral Collection and the Johns Brothers Joyland Fun Fair.
