Under Fire by Nick Brodie

Author:Nick Brodie [Nick Brodie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2020-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

The judge convicted Kilty, but also suggested that ‘if you want to shoot people you must go to the front and practice on the Germans’.4

Other soldiers misused their guns en route to the front. One young fellow was charged with reckless behaviour after leaning out of a country train and firing some fifty shots ‘for practice’.5 When prosecuted, his primary concern was to keep his misbehaviour secret from his mother. Because he was heading for the front overseas, several well-wishers paid his fine. Another soldier was not so lucky. After drawing his revolver on a railway employee and demanding the next train make an unscheduled stop to collect him, he found himself arrested by military police who were forewarned and waiting at the station.6

Some cases involved fights between soldiers. For instance, a ‘man in khaki’ allegedly shot a soldier who had slipped out of Liverpool Camp in May 1918 to ‘visit a young lady’.7 But perhaps more common, or at least more newsworthy, were those stories of returning soldiers who turned guns on civilians. In a much-publicised ‘revolver duel’ in October 1917, a returned soldier and miner pulled guns on each other in Newcastle because of some earlier bad blood, and as a result the ex-serviceman was hospitalised.8

Such incidents seemed to increase as more soldiers returned after the war. There were multiple incidents in New South Wales in June 1919 where returning soldiers killed women in shocking circumstances. In a dramatic instance near Newcastle, one veteran booked a room at a hotel where his wife worked, shot a man he took for her lover, shot her in the head, and then turned the pistol on himself.9 Another soldier shot a woman in the head after spending an evening in her room in Surry Hills.10 Inland at Leichhardt, yet another returned soldier killed a woman with his revolver before also shooting himself.11 Following an editorial pattern familiar from the height of the pea-rifle days, newspapers started reporting such cases with titles like ‘Returned Soldier Again’.12

Deliberate violence aside, there was also a range of accidents. A hotel attendant in Chatswood was shot in the head by a soldier who dropped his revolver and pulled the trigger while picking it up.13 In Rozelle, a returned soldier was cleaning his revolver when he accidentally shot dead his younger brother.14 And there were near-misses too. In Bathurst in December 1919, one ex-soldier was charged with drunkenness after firing a ‘six-chambered revolver’ at a jar in his backyard.15 The jar was unharmed but his neighbours were greatly distressed.

All of this, coupled with endemic gang violence in Australia’s major cities, helped focus public and judicial attention on the role of the pistol as a significant contributory element in gun violence. During the Sydney Quarter Sessions in April 1919, an obviously exasperated Judge Edward Scholes commented on the pervasive pistol violence:

Here we are, a free people in a free country, where we ought not to have any fear of one another, yet we have these young men carrying loaded firearms.

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