Life on the West Island - A martyr for the cause?

On 22 March 1921 – that is, almost 102 years ago - the West Island recorded its first ever political assassination at the unlikely location of the small town of Riverton in the Festival State. But the events were complicated and there is no compelling evidence that the killer, Koorman Tomayeff, set out specifically to assassinate a sitting member of parliament when he unleashed a hail of gunfire on passengers from a train bound from Broken Hill to Adelaide which had stopped at Riverton Station. But as a serving MP was killed, the event went into the record books as an assassination.

Several people were wounded and two were killed, including Percy Brookfield - a charismatic, maverick MP who had held the balance of power in the New South Wales Parliament. A recent ABC investigation summarised the events as follows:

Both men were aboard the train to Adelaide when it stopped at Riverton to allow passengers to disembark for breakfast. It was then that Tomayeff launched his terrifying attack, firing more than 40 shots into the crowd. As mass panic ensued, police and Brookfield bravely confronted the shooter, but Brookfield sustained two bullet wounds before Tomayeff was detained. "I'm done, he has shot me," said the stricken MP, who died in hospital. Famed author Dame Mary Gilmore later eulogised Brookfield as a martyr and commemorated the incident in verse, describing the moment "the madman's bullets came flying" like a "gallop of fiery rain".

Brookfield was hailed in the press as a hero, but most contemporary reports neglected to mention that he held a revolver which he was firing at Tomayeff when he was shot.

Brookfield’s heartland was Broken Hill, where he was regarded as a giant of socialist politics. But his popularity among his followers had been hard won - his opposition to wartime conscription (the picture above shows him wearing an anti-conscription badge) and his support for the Russian Revolution made him a controversial figure. During the First World War, he had publicly clashed with Australia's pro-conscription Prime Minister Billy Hughes, condemning him as a traitor, viper and skunk. In turn, Brookfield was widely regarded as a traitor by the political right, especially after he told a gathering, at Broken Hill in early 1917 that he would not spill one drop of my blood for any flag, the Union Jack included.

Brookfield was elected in 1917 as a Labor state member for Sturt, a Broken Hill electorate. He was from the radical left and expressed his support for the International Workers of the World (“the Wobblies”) and for the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1919, he resigned from Labor to sit as a radical socialist MP. After the 1920 election, he held the balance of power in the Legislative Assembly, using his position to support many radical causes and becoming a revolutionary icon among the miners of Broken Hill and their militant union. But he had many powerful conservative enemies within and outside parliament.

By contrast, Koorman Tomayeff was an unemployed drifter, originally from Russia but temporarily residing in Broken Hill. Aged 36 at the time he shot Brookfield, he had migrated to Australia before the outbreak of World War One and was classified by authorities as a foreign "alien".

After the shootings at Riverton, he was apprehended and charged with murder, but explanations of his motives were confused, to say the least. At various stages, he claimed to be both pro- and anti-Bolshevik, while at another time he said he had been paid £100 to kill Brookfield. But the police record of his interview shows that he said he was sorry I shot Brookfield. I'm not sorry for the others. He also claimed that his motive was to shoot at two men who were carrying knives and poison.

Railway historian John Wilson researched the case extensively for his book The Riesling Railway. He believes that Tomayeff was driven close to poverty by his inability to find paid work, fired by intense local racism after the 1915 “Battle of Broken Hill,” in which two men of Turkish descent fired on a train, killing four passengers before being shot dead by troopers.

A police officer who searched Tomayeff’s lodgings reported that he had searched the room which had been occupied by him, but found nothing that would show any motive for the shooting of Mr Brookfield or any other passenger on the train.

Historian John Wilson states that if Brookfield was assassinated, it was the first political assassination in Australia, but I'm not sure he was the target. John Wilson believes political motives are a red herring and has developed a theory, based on archival foraging, that hinges on a woman called Madge Kewey, who he believes was a sex worker for Tomayeff, who made his living as a pimp.

Wilson reports that Madge Kewey died days before the shooting of Percy Brookfield. This was never followed up by the investigators. We don't know very much about her but it seems that Tomayeff went ballistic at the time she died - that's what tripped him. But I think it goes deeper than that. He got on the train with a pistol and 70 rounds of ammunition - he was out to get somebody on that train. Mr Wilson thinks that Tomayeff suspected Kewey had been assaulted before her death, and was out for revenge.

But whether the 1921 shootings at Riverton were a political assassination or an act or revenge or an act of a deranged man may never be known, since the case against Tomayeff never went to trial. This fuelled suspicions of a cover-up, and he was instead adjudged to be "criminally insane", spending the rest of his days in Glenside asylum's infamous Z Ward. The shootings caused a sensation at the time, but attention soon turned to other events and the West Island’s “first political assassination” was forgotten for many decades.