Martin Bryant

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin John Bryant, an Australian born on the 7th of May 1967, shot and killed 35 people and injured 23 others at the Port Arthur Historic Site on the 28th and the 29th of April 1996. Today he is held at Risdon Prison in Hobart, Tasmania, serving 35 life sentences plus 1,652 years without the possibility of parole. Those numbers describe an ending. They say nothing about a life that left a trail of warnings, from teachers, doctors, neighbours and even a disability pension file. This documentary asks what the people around him saw, how his world narrowed over the years, and why those two days in April still shape the way Australia thinks about firearms.

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• 2. Early Years

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  Queen Alexandra Hospital in Hobart is where Bryant was born, the first child of Maurice and Carleen Bryant. The family home stood in Lenah Valley, but part of his childhood passed at their beach house in Carnarvon Bay, right beside the Port Arthur Historic Site.

  In a 2011 interview, his mother described the very young Bryant as "annoying" and "different", a boy who frequently broke his toys. A psychiatrist who examined him told the family that his aggravating behaviour would keep him from ever holding down a job.

  A snorkel pulled away from another boy during a dive is one thing that locals later remembered. They also recalled him cutting down trees on a neighbour's property.

  In 1973, at age 5, Bryant started primary school at The Friends' School in Hobart. He was disruptive and sometimes violent, and other children bullied him severely. Teachers saw a pupil who seemed distant from reality and unemotional.

  In 1977 he was suspended from New Town Primary School. Psychological assessments afterwards noted that he tortured animals. He came back the following year with better behaviour, yet he kept teasing younger children.

  A firework accident in 1979, when he was 12, sent him to Royal Hobart Hospital. While he was there, a local television station interviewed him.

  In 1980 he was moved into a special education unit at New Town High School. Both his schoolwork and his conduct declined through the rest of his school years. Doctors would soon be asked to judge what kind of future he could have.

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• 3. Medical Verdicts

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  In 1983, as Bryant left school, a psychiatrist assessing him for a disability pension wrote: "Cannot read or write. Does a bit of gardening and watches TV... Only his parents' efforts that prevent further deterioration. Could be schizophrenic and parents face a bleak future with him." He received the pension, although he also worked as a handyman and gardener.

  After the massacre, forensic psychologist Ian Joblin examined him and found him borderline mentally disabled. Bryant's IQ measured 66, which Joblin likened to that of an 11-year-old.

  While Bryant awaited trial, court-appointed psychiatrist Ian Sale offered another frame. In his view, Bryant "could be regarded as having shown a mixture of conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity and... Asperger's Syndrome."

  Psychiatrist Paul Mullen was hired at the request of Bryant's legal counsel. He found Bryant socially and intellectually impaired, with no signs of schizophrenia or a mood disorder. His conclusion was blunt: "though Mr Bryant was clearly a distressed and disturbed young man he was not mentally ill."

  Mullen would later return to the question of why Bryant did what he did, and his answer pointed to events in Scotland.

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• 4. Helen Harvey

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  In early 1987-19-year-old Bryant met 54-year-old Helen Mary Elizabeth Harvey while looking for new customers for his lawn-mowing service. Harvey was an eccentric, wealthy heiress to a share of the Tattersall's lottery fortune. She lived with her mother Hilza in a decaying mansion in New Town.

  Harvey befriended him, and he became a regular visitor who helped with chores. Among them was feeding the fourteen dogs living inside the mansion and the forty cats living in her garage.

  In June 1990, an unidentified person reported Harvey to the health authorities. Medics found both women in need of urgent hospital care. Harvey had infected ulcers, and Hilza had a fractured hip. Hilza was moved into a nursing home and died several weeks later at the age of 79.

  A mandatory clean-up order was placed on the mansion. Bryant's father took long-service leave to help clean the interior, and the local RSPCA unit confiscated many of the animals.

  After the clean-up, Harvey invited Bryant to live with her. The two spent money extravagantly, buying more than thirty new cars in less than three years. They also shopped for all manner of items, usually after lunch at a local restaurant.

  Around then, Bryant was reassessed for his disability pension, and a note went into the paperwork: "Father protects him from any occasion which might upset him as he continually threatens violence... Martin tells me he would like to go around shooting people. It would be unsafe to allow Martin out of his parents' control."

  In 1991 the pair were no longer allowed to keep animals at the mansion. They moved to a 29 ha farm called Taurusville, which Harvey had bought in the small township of Copping. Neighbours recalled that Bryant always carried an air gun. He fired it at tourists stopping at an apple stall on the highway, and late at night he roamed nearby properties shooting at dogs that barked at him. Residents avoided him "at all costs", even as he tried to befriend them.

  On the 20th of October 1992, Harvey, aged 59, died along with two of her dogs when her car veered onto the wrong side of the road and struck an oncoming car. Bryant was in the vehicle and spent seven months in hospital with severe neck and back injuries. Police briefly investigated his part in the crash.

  He had a known habit of lunging for the steering wheel, and Harvey had already had three accidents because of it. She often told acquaintances this was why she never drove faster than 60 kilometres an hour (37 mph). She allegedly told a neighbour, "one of these days the little bastard Bryant is going to kill me."

  Bryant was the sole beneficiary of her will, which gave him assets of more than AU$550,000. Because he had only the "vaguest notions" of financial matters, his mother obtained a guardianship order that placed his money under public trustees.

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• 5. Alone

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  Maurice Bryant, aged 60, took over the care of the Copping farm after Harvey's death. He had been prescribed antidepressants, and he had quietly moved his joint bank account and utilities into his wife's name.

  On the 14th of August 1993, a visitor looking for Maurice found a note reading "call the police" pinned to the door. Several thousand dollars sat in his car. Police searched the property without success, and divers were called to the four dams.

  On the 16th of August, Maurice's body was found in the dam closest to the farmhouse, with a diving weight belt around his neck. Police called the death "unnatural", and it was ruled a suicide. Bryant inherited the proceeds of his father's superannuation fund, valued at AU$250,000.

  He sold the Copping farm for AU$143,000 and kept the former Harvey mansion. The white overalls he once wore daily gave way to a grey linen suit, a cravat, lizard-skin shoes and a Panama hat, with a briefcase in hand. He told anyone who would listen that he held a high-paying career as a businessman.

  At the restaurant he frequented, he sometimes arrived in a flashy electric blue suit with flared trousers and a ruffled shirt. The owner recalled: "It was horrible. Everyone was laughing at him, even the customers. I really felt suddenly quite sorry for him. I realised this guy didn't really have any friends."

  From 1993 to late 1995, Bryant travelled overseas fourteen times, and his record of domestic flights filled three pages. He felt as lonely abroad as he did in Tasmania and hated the places he visited. His favourite part was the long flights, where seatmates had no choice but to be polite while he talked. He later took great joy in recounting those conversations.

  He eventually became suicidal, saying he had "had enough" and adding: "I just felt more people were against me. When I tried to be friendly toward them, they just walked away."

  His drinking, once merely social, climbed rapidly, especially in the six months before the massacre. His estimated daily intake was half a bottle of Sambuca and a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, plus port and other sweet drinks. He was sober on the day itself.

  Bryant himself said the idea of a plan may have first come to him four to twelve weeks before the event.

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• 6. Port Arthur

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  "I'll do something that will make everyone remember me" is what Bryant allegedly told a next-door neighbour. His own accounts of his motives have been conflicting and confused, and attention-seeking is one possible thread.

  Paul Mullen, his defence psychiatrist and a former chief of forensic psychiatry at Monash University, pointed to the Dunblane massacre in Scotland. Mullen said: "He followed Dunblane. His planning started with Dunblane. Before that he was thinking about suicide, but Dunblane and the early portrayal of the killer, Thomas Hamilton, changed everything."

  A family grievance also played a part. David and Noelene Martin owned a bed and breakfast guest house called "Seascape". They had bought it ahead of Bryant's father, who had worked hard to find financial backing for the purchase and often complained to his son about the damage it did to the family. Bryant apparently believed the Martins acted out of spite and blamed them for the depression behind his father's suicide.

  The Martins were his first victims. He shot them in the guest house, took their weapons and the property keys, and drove toward the Port Arthur site.

  At the site, Bryant paid the entry fee and parked his car. He then entered the Broad Arrow Café carrying a large blue sports bag filled with weapons. While he ate, he tried to start conversations with strangers about the lack of wasps in the area and the lack of Japanese tourists.

  He then opened fire inside the café. Within fifteen seconds, seventeen shots had killed twelve people and wounded ten. A further twelve shots killed eight more and wounded two. As he fled in his yellow Volvo 244, shooting at people in the car park and from the car, four more were killed and six injured.

  Three hundred metres down the road, he killed a woman and her two children, who were walking along it. He then took a gold 1980 BMW 7 series by killing all four of its occupants. A short distance on, he forced a man from a white Toyota into the BMW's boot and killed the woman driving the Toyota.

  Bryant returned to the guest house, set the stolen car alight and took his hostage inside, where the Martins' bodies lay. Police negotiated for many hours until the battery in the cordless phone ran out. His only demand was transport by Australian Army helicopter to the nearest airport. During the negotiations he killed his hostage.

  The next morning, eighteen hours later, he set fire to the guest house and tried to escape in the confusion. He suffered burns to his back and buttocks and was captured. He was taken to Royal Hobart Hospital and kept under heavy guard. A courtroom would be the next stop.

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• 7. Trial and Prison

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  The 7th of November 1996 was the date set for Bryant's trial, after he had been judged fit to stand it. He first pleaded not guilty, but his court-appointed lawyer, John Avery, persuaded him to plead guilty to all charges.

  Two weeks later, on the 22nd of November, Hobart Supreme Court Judge William Cox passed the sentences that Bryant still serves. All were to run concurrently, and the life term was imposed "for the term of his natural life."

  For the first eight months, Bryant was held in a purpose-built suicide-prevention cell in almost complete solitary confinement. He stayed in protective custody for his own safety until the 13th of November 2006. On that date he moved to Hobart's Wilfred Lopes Centre, a secure mental health unit run by the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services.

  The 35-bed unit holds inmates with serious mental illness and is staffed by doctors, nurses and support workers. Inmates are not locked down and can come and go from their cells. Private contract guards patrol a three-wall perimeter outside.

  On the 5th of July 2003, an inmate sprayed a cleaning solution into Bryant's eyes, and he was transferred to Royal Hobart Hospital. In March 2007, on the 25th and again on the 27th, he made two attempts to end his own life. After the second, he was hospitalised briefly.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  The Australian published photographs of Bryant with his eyes digitally altered so that he looked deranged and "glaring". Newspaper coverage right after the massacre drew serious criticism of Australian journalistic practice. The altered images were still being used in reporting a decade later, and there were questions over whether the photos came from Bryant's house after police had sealed it.

  Tasmania's director of public prosecutions warned that the coverage compromised Bryant's right to a fair trial. Writs were issued against The Australian, the Hobart Mercury, The Age and the ABC. The Mercury had run his picture under the headline "This is the Man".

  David Flint, then chairman of the Australian Press Council, argued that newspapers regularly ignored contempt-of-court provisions, so the law needed to change, not the papers. He suggested that such a change would not necessarily lead to trial by media.

  Australian state and territory governments responded to the massacre with extensive firearm restrictions. These covered semi-automatic centre-fire rifles, repeating shotguns holding more than five shots, and high-capacity rifle magazines. Limits were also placed on low-capacity repeating shotguns and rim-fire semi-automatic rifles. The measures caused controversy, but media reporting of the massacre and mounting public opinion softened opposition.

  In March 2012, Sydney artist Rodney Pople controversially won the AU$35,000 Glover Prize for a landscape of Port Arthur with Bryant in the foreground holding a firearm. In 2019, the massacre was referenced in the lyrics of Pond's song "The Boys Are Killing Me", from their album Tasmania.

  The 2021 film Nitram, directed by Justin Kurzel, is based on Bryant's life. Caleb Landry Jones played the title role and won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for it.

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