NSW Contingent to Sudan 1885
A Public Lecture by Dr Michael Tyquin
The actual involvement by Australian military forces in Britain’s Egyptian campaigns of 1881 to 1899 was tiny – some five months overall including the pre-deployment phase. Sending the contingent has been seen as the most important expression of Australian nationalism in the nineteenth century.
The Sudan Contingent prefigures several themes which have emerged in Australia’s military history over the past century or more. These include generally enthusiastic despatches of forces to conflicts which soon soured in the public mind; as a junior partner in coalition warfare; and in the way Australian soldiers captured overseas imagination in terms of a distinct image.
It was the first time the British Army operated in a dual role: to project a force against an enemy scattered over a vast area of inhospitable land; and support and protect civilian contractors on an engineering project. This posed its own challenges to the force commander and his planners.
The Sudan Campaign was very much an engineer’s war, in which the erection of field works, the maintenance of communications; and the construction of pipe lines and railways were central to operations.
