What’s impressive is the way a posse quickly formed up that outnumbered the gendarmerie. Today’s Australia, where civilians are mostly disarmed, and about to get more so, thanks to the latest incident, would have difficulty deputizing any civilians for backup firepower, let alone be able to outnumber the cops as they did a century ago. Today’s Aussies are Eloi compared to the Morlocks of the Great War.
If it happened in a capital city in Australia, I’d agree.
In somewhere like Broken Hill, there’d still be a lot of people around who owned guns.