LATE ON A February night in 1916 Ernest William Keefe, a trooper training with the Sixth Australian Light Horse Depot, was shot through the right cheek and killed by the Metropolitan Police at Sydney’s Central Railway Station. For much of the day thousands of troops from Liverpool had rampaged through the city in a booze-fuelled rage. After Trooper Keefe was shot, at 10.45 pm, the decade-old station quickly emptied, but gun smoke lingered in the thick summer air. Moments earlier five hundred soldiers and civilians, boots and shouts throwing violent echoes around the tiled cavern of Central Station, came up against a military picket.

The angry mob threw stones and bottles, and turned a fire hose on the authorities. A soldier shot a revolver into the air, and those in the picket, which included two policemen, returned fire. According to the police report to the New South Wales Coroner, the picket and police fired fifty shots, seriously injuring seven in the crowd, including a civilian.