It wasn’t until June 30, 1914, two days after the event, that news reached Sydney of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (or Francis, as he was referred to here) by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip.

Two shots fired from a Browning pistol on a sunny Sunday in Sarajevo, resulting in the death of the heir presumptive to the Austrian throne and his wife, Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenburg, were to become the catalyst for World War I.

A yellowing and fragile copy of the Sydney Morning Herald (price one penny) shows the newspaper ran a scant item at the top of the left-hand "summary" column on a front page that was dominated by shipping advertisements.

There was only space for four paragraphs. The assassination of the Archduke and his wife on their 14th wedding anniversary had caused "a painful sensation in London", it said.

Interestingly, the news item below states: "Sir James Key Caird has contributed £24,000 to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic."

Inside the edition, half of page nine was given over to the outrage in Europe.

King George V and Queen Mary expressed their deep distress and it was announced the English Court would be in mourning for a week. A state ball was cancelled; the palace was clearly taking things seriously.

The German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt suggested the already sufficiently tense relationships of Austria-Hungary would undoubtedly be aggravated.

The rest, you might say, is world war history.