Broken Hill celebrated its victory. Souvenir hunters tore the ice-cream cart apart, scavenged bullet-riddle carriages and hunted for spent cartridges. By nightfall a mob full of beer and wind wheeled into Delamore Street to torch the German Club. Fire carts arrived but hoses were chopped up to ensure the building burned to the ground. The mob then headed to the camel camp amid cries of "Remember our women who were shot".

Police unsuccessfully attempted to halt the march. But the lynch mob ran out of steam when confronted by a detachment of civilian and military forces with fixed bayonets lined up across the road outside the camel camp.

Inflamed

The ambush inflamed Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald's six-deck headline shouted "The fight with the Turks". The Melbourne Argus was equally as shrill: "Turks Attack Train". In Adelaide, a mob tore down a Muslim flag from the minaret on the Little Gilbert Street mosque. Billy Hughes used the attack to intern all "enemy aliens" for the duration of the war.

Three days after the attack, 11 aliens were arrested in Broken Hill and sent to Adelaide for incarceration in the Torrens Island Concentration Camp. Only one company, Central Mine, stood down aliens. Union leaders said nothing, mindful perhaps that aliens helped hold the line against BHP in the 1909 lockout.

Australia also began a sort of town planning ethnic cleansing: place names like Germanton were changed to Holbrook (NSW) and Grovedale (Victoria) as authorities swept away teutonic vestiges.

Peter Black, former Labor MP for the seat of Murray-Darling who served 19 years as mayor of Broken Hill, said the attack resonated in modern-day Australia.

"It was used for quite terrible purposes. The conservative governments of the day embraced it in the same way we embracing terrorism in Australia today, as a motivational force. While we're talking about terrorism were not talking about a federal budget are we?"

Days after the attack, a miner found three Urdu statements under a rock at the last stand. One was Gool Mahomed's application to join the Turkish army. "I kill your people because your people are fighting my country," he wrote. Mulla Abdulla's mentioned the court case and said both had prayed "to Allah that life was no more use to them ... I have never worn a turban since the day some larrikans threw stones at me ... I wear the turban today." Some dispute the suicide notes' veracity.

On January 7, coroner C.F. Butler, SM, found four Broken Hill residents had died of gunshot wounds "feloniously and maliciously inflicted on them" by the "Afghans".