The Bag on the Table: The Port Arthur Massacre and the Twelve Days That Changed Australia Forever

He had lunch at the Broad Arrow Café on a Sunday afternoon in April 1996. He put his bag on a table. He ate his meal. Then he reached into the bag and removed a Colt AR-15 and killed twenty-two people in the room in less than ninety seconds. Thirty-five people died that day in Tasmania. Within twelve days, Australia had agreed a National Firearms Agreement. He is serving 1,035 years. He has never explained why.

He put the bag on the table before he sat down. It was a Sunday afternoon; April 28, 1996 and the Broad Arrow Café at the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania was doing what it did on warm autumn Sundays when tourist season was ending and the site was still drawing visitors to the ruins of Australia’s most famous convict settlement. People were eating. People were talking. The particular unhurried atmosphere of a heritage site café in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. No urgency, no particular awareness of anything beyond the meal and the company and the light coming through the windows.

Martin Bryant was twenty-eight years old. He had driven from his home in New Town and had already, that morning, killed two people at the Seascape guesthouse several miles away. He sat at a window table in the café. He ordered food. He ate. The bag- a large sports bag, the kind that anyone might carry, sat on the table beside him. Nobody paid particular attention to it. Nobody had any reason to.

When he finished eating he pushed the table back. He reached into the bag. He removed a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He stood up and shot the man at the table next to him. And then, in the specific, terrible language that the evidence would later reconstruct from the positions of the bodies and the paths of the bullets, he moved through the room.

Twenty people were dead inside the Broad Arrow Café within ninety seconds. Two more died just outside the entrance. Twenty-two people killed in a single room in less than two minutes, the deadliest single-room shooting in modern criminal history. Bryant then walked out into the parking lot and continued.

The Morning Before The Café

The Port Arthur massacre did not begin in the Broad Arrow Café. It began at Seascape guesthouse, a property on the road to Port Arthur owned by David and Sally Martin. An elderly couple whose refusal, years earlier, to sell the property to Bryant’s father Maurice had become, in Bryant’s distorted understanding of events, the source of a family grievance that had festered across the years since Maurice Bryant’s death by suicide in 1993.

Whether this constituted a coherent motive has always been disputed. Bryant’s IQ had been assessed at 66, in the range of mild intellectual disability and multiple psychiatric evaluations across his childhood and adolescence had documented a young man who was profoundly detached from ordinary social reality, who was described by teachers as either unemotional or as expressing inappropriately timed emotions, who had been severely bullied throughout his schooling and who had developed, in the years before April 1996, an obsessive interest in weapons and military equipment. The connection between his father’s death, the Seascape property and the massacre that followed has never been established with the clarity that the word motive implies.

What is established is that Bryant arrived at Seascape early on the morning of April 28, knocked on the door, and shot David and Sally Martin when they answered. He then drove the roughly twenty kilometres to the Port Arthur Historic Site with two weapons and a bag, arriving in time for lunch at the Broad Arrow Café, setting his bag on the table, eating his meal, and doing what he did next.

The Parking Lot And The Road

After the café Bryant moved into the parking lot. He shot the drivers of two tour buses. He shot passengers. He shot a mother named Nanette Mikac, who had been walking toward him with her two small daughters- Alannah, aged six, and Madeline, aged three; apparently believing that approaching the armed man was safer than running. He killed all three. He shot four people in a BMW, commandeered the vehicle, drove it to a service station where he shot a woman and took a man named Glenn Pears hostage, loaded Pears into the boot of the car, and drove back to Seascape guesthouse.

An eighteen-hour standoff followed. Police surrounded Seascape. Negotiators spoke to Bryant by telephone. He was, by all accounts of those who heard him, by turns chatty and agitated and apparently disconnected from the scale of what he had done, speaking about trivial matters with the same conversational register he applied to the killings, an absence of the appropriate gravity that those who assessed him later connected to the intellectual disability and the personality disorder that had been documented since his childhood. Glenn Pears died in the guesthouse at some point during the standoff; apparently killed by Bryant, the exact circumstances never established.

At dawn on April 29, Seascape caught fire. Bryant ran out through the flames, burning, and was immediately arrested on the grass outside. He was taken to hospital with burns to his back covering thirty per cent of his body. He was charged the following day at his hospital bedside with his first count of murder.

“A forensic psychiatrist who examined him described to the court a man with the mind of a child who delighted in tormenting others. Tasmania has chosen, collectively, not to speak his name if it can be avoided. Every Tasmanian knows who he is. The name simply has no place in ordinary conversation. It belongs, for Tasmania, to a category of things that happened and cannot be undone and should not be given more space than they have already taken.”

Twelve Days

Prime Minister John Howard had been in office for seven weeks when the Port Arthur massacre occurred. He attended the memorial service at Port Arthur on May 1. He was, by his own account and by the accounts of those present, genuinely and visibly moved. Not as a calculated political performance but as a man who had just seen what a single individual with legal access to semi-automatic weapons had done to an ordinary Sunday afternoon at a tourist site in his country.

He announced immediately that gun laws would change. His own political base, the conservative Liberal-National coalition, included significant numbers of rural constituents for whom firearms were tools of everyday working life and for whom any restriction was a genuine imposition. He wore a bulletproof vest to a gun control rally in Sale, Victoria, because the threat of violence from opponents was considered credible enough to require it. He went anyway.

Within twelve days of the massacre, by May 10, 1996; the Council of Australian Governments had agreed the National Firearms Agreement. It banned semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns. It established mandatory licensing and registration for all legal firearms. It instituted a government-funded buyback programme for newly prohibited weapons. In the months that followed, approximately 650,000 firearms were handed in and destroyed under the buyback. Melted down, gone, removed from private ownership by a government that had decided the calculus of freedom and safety had produced the wrong result and corrected it.

The legislative and political achievement was, by any measure, extraordinary, a democratic government identifying a problem, designing a solution, securing political consensus across party lines, legislating the change, and implementing it within a timeline that most comparable democracies could not have approached. It has been studied internationally in every subsequent debate about mass shootings and gun legislation as the model of what rapid, decisive democratic response to a massacre looks like. It has also been studied, by those who oppose such measures, as the model of what they fear most.

Australia has not experienced a mass shooting of comparable scale since April 28, 1996.

What He Has Never Said

Bryant initially pleaded not guilty to all seventy-two charges. He changed his plea to guilty on November 7, 1996; seven months after the massacre. His defence lawyer told the sentencing hearing that Bryant would not say why he did it. At the sentencing, forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen described to the court a man who had the mind of a child and who had delighted in tormenting others across his lifetime. Pulling the legs off insects as a child, directing cruelty at those weaker than himself with a consistency that adults around him had documented and that the system had never adequately responded to.

Chief Justice William Cox sentenced Bryant on November 22, 1996. He received thirty-five life sentences, one for each murder, plus 1,035 years for the other charges. Cox ordered that he remain in prison for the rest of his natural life.

Bryant has attempted suicide six times since his imprisonment. For the first eight months he was held in a purpose-built suicide prevention cell with four glass walls, almost complete solitary confinement, under constant observation. He was eventually moved to the Wilfred Lopes Centre, a secure mental health unit at Risdon Prison. He is fifty-eight years old. He has never, in the twenty-nine years since Port Arthur, provided any explanation for what he did on April 28, 1996.

Tasmania has made a collective decision not to speak his name where it can be avoided. The choice is not mandated, it is cultural, a community consensus that the man who killed thirty-five people at a heritage site on a Sunday afternoon has taken enough from Tasmania and will not be given the additional gift of continued public use of his name. He is known. He is not named. It is, in its particular way, the most precise form of condemnation available to a community, not erasure, but deliberate, sustained, chosen silence.

He put the bag on the table before he sat down. He ate his lunch. He reached into the bag. Twenty-two people were dead in the room in ninety seconds. Thirteen more died before the day ended. Nanette Mikac walked toward the man with the rifle with her two daughters because she thought it was safer than running, and she was wrong, and Alannah was six and Madeline was three. John Howard wore a bulletproof vest to a gun rally and went anyway and within twelve days Australia had agreed legislation that removed 650,000 firearms from private ownership. Bryant pleaded guilty in November and said nothing about why. The psychiatrist described a man with the mind of a child who had always delighted in tormenting things weaker than himself. Tasmania does not say his name. He is serving 1,035 years in a secure mental health unit in Hobart and has tried to kill himself six times and has never explained the bag on the table or the rifle or the ninety seconds or any of the rest of it. He is fifty-eight years old. He has a long time left to not explain.