Port Arthur: A senseless brutality that brought out the best in Australians and created a worth legacy

For many Australians alive at the time, the nation existed in two states: before and after the Port Arthur massacre.

Today, thirty years ago, that mad bastard Martin Bryant calmly walked into the Broad Arrow Café and carried out a massacre that was incomprehensible in its pointless brutality.

There was an awful historical symmetry to the violence. Port Arthur was Tasmania’s original and toughest penal colony from 1830 to 1877, specialising in a form of psychological control that drove many inmates insane.

In 1996, the internet was in its early days, there was no social media and most people got their news from television. Tasmania was bucolic, peaceful and culturally conservative. The State’s most daring social experiment was opening Australia’s first casino overlooking the River Derwent in Hobart.

Deep in placid suburbs, a malevolent force was building. Bryant, who had the IQ of an 11-year-old, should have been picked up by mental health professionals long before he used guns to kill 35 people and injure 23 others at Port Arthur and a nearby bed-and-breakfast owned by David and Noelene Martin, the first victims.

Tasmania’s weak, US-style gun laws were unexceptional at the time. Australia hadn’t experienced a massacre like Port Arthur since the colonial era. The first police who arrived at the scene were so badly outgunned they had to hide in a ditch.

Memorial

Australia went into collective shock. In the same way December’s Bondi Beach attack changed perceptions of the risk of terrorism, Port Arthur demonstrated Australia could not escape senseless mass murder.

The aftermath showed Australia at its best. The unexpected decision by Prime Minister John Howard, an arch conservative, to ban private use of semi-automatic firearms and pump-action shotguns became a turning point in Australian public policy. Academic studies found it saved thousands of lives. The ban remains an example for the world, often cited after US gun massacres.

The site was turned into a memorial that even today has the power to bring visitors to tears. The Broad Arrow Cafe was gutted, leaving only stone-brick walls and a chimney, a physical testament to the emptiness left in the wake of that day.

The victims are listed on a cross made from distressed timber.

Initially, less attention was paid to the importance of mental health care. At the time, the unemployable but well-financed Bryant had a history of aggressive behaviour dating to primary school, and in 1992 may have killed his only friend and benefactor, Helen Harvey, an heiress to the Tattersall’s lottery fortune.

That gradually changed. Today, receiving psychiatric treatment for depression is grounds for rejection of a gun licence. Magistrates and judges are far more assertive about denying access to weapons, particularly in marital disputes.

Even now, three decades later, a darkness remains at the heart of that day. Neither Bryant nor any of the professionals who interviewed him could get to the motivation for such insanity. Bryant vanished into the Tasmanian prison system, a ghost in his drama.

Movies, books

The story has been told in different ways.

A 2009 book-length journalistic account, Born or Bred: Martin Bryant? the Making of a Mass Murderer, was so graphic it suggested some readers might prefer to stop reading half way through, when the killing began.

The gripping 2021 movie Nitram (Martin reversed) explored Bryant’s psychological makeup through the experiences of his mother, Carleen Bryant, played by a haunted Judy Davis. It ended the moment before the first shot.

The 30th anniversary has seen a shift. Bryant has been moved away from the story, replaced by survivors.

Melbourne writer Martin McKenzie-Murray today published Sirens, which has an account of a paramedic named Peter who arrived while SES volunteers were searching for tourists thought to be hiding in bushland around the site.

“If there’s a hell, Peter said, it would look like the Broad Arrow Cafe that day,” McKenzie-Murray writes. “It was in there, and the adjacent gift shop, that Bryant, in just ninety seconds, had fired twenty-nine rounds of his AR-15, killing twenty people and injuring another twelve.

“When Peter approached the cafe to assist in the scene’s processing, there was a police officer on guard at the front, signing in those who entered. He had a warning: ‘Just know that the man who goes in there will not be the same man who comes out,’ he said.”

“Never has a truer word been spoken,” Peter told the author.

The anniversary was commemorated with a private service at Port Arthur for survivors, families and the local community. At 1.30pm they held a minute’s silence in front of the twisted cross, a symbol of collective sorrow — and rebirth.