Ep264: Sudan 1885 - Australia's First Deployment

In March 1885, thirty years before Gallipoli, 770 men from New South Wales sailed for the deserts of Sudan — the first Australian soldiers ever sent to fight in a foreign war.

In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the forgotten story of Australia's Sudan Contingent — the part-time soldiers, weekend volunteers and colonial clerks who marched through Sydney in scarlet jackets to a crowd of 200,000, then crossed the world to serve alongside the Scots Guards and Grenadier Guards at Suakin. Through the soldiers' own words, we follow their journey from the excitement of departure to the brutal reality of an African desert — where the nights were more dangerous than the days, the enemy poisoned the waterholes, and the real killer wasn't bullets but disease.

From Acting Premier William Bede Dalley's extraordinary decision to send troops without consulting parliament, to the Guards' bewildered reaction to their colonial allies, from Private Robert Weir's father farewell — "I look upon you as going to your grave" — to the cruel death of Martin Guest, who survived the desert only to die in the rain at his own homecoming parade, this is the story of an expedition that achieved almost nothing militarily but changed Australia forever.

Nine men died. None of them in battle. All of them from disease. And out of those nine graves grew a tradition that would define a nation — the idea that when the call came, Australia would answer.

Historian K.S. Inglis called it "The Rehearsal." It was — for everything that came after.

Episode Length: 30 minutes

Features: First-person accounts from Private Tom Gunning, Lieutenant William Cope, and Private Frank Walters; primary source letters from the Nepean Times and Sydney Morning Herald; and the remarkable story of how forty baskets of fish gave a Sydney beach its name.

Presenter: Mat McLachlan

Producer: Jess Stebnicki

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