A book written by a former Tottenham man will be launched in Sydney by Liverpool MP Paul Lynch (Shadow Attorney General) on Friday evening, October 23.
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Murder in Tottenham: Australia’s first political assassination is written by Dr Rowan Day.
Dr Day teaches history and politics at the University of Western Sydney.
He grew up on a farm at Tottenham and has long had an interest in the area’s history.
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As World War I raged and Prime Minister William Morris Hughes urged Australia to vote for conscription, a young police constable was murdered in Australia’s first political assassination.
The only policeman in Tottenham in September 1916, Mounted Constable George Duncan was felled by a volley of rifle fire.
Within months three local members of the Industrial Workers of the World, commonly known as the IWW or ‘Wobblies’, were tried for his murder and two were executed.
Murder in Tottenham looks at the local politics behind the strikes of the 1890s leading up to the Great Strike of 1917 and explains why some members of the IWW took up arms.
Never in Australian history has a person been executed after ‘turning King’s evidence’ or becoming a witness for the Crown.
The whole affair was the most politicised and polarising example of capital punishment in Australia since Ned Kelly.
