Love for Life

What’s Going On?:

A Critical Study of the Port Arthur Massacre
By Carl Wernerhoff

Text © 2006 by Carl Wernerhoff
Email: cwernerhoff @ yahoo.com

What’s Going On? is to be regarded as a draft version of a book project which is being made available
privately by the author for the purpose of encouraging a wider knowledge of the case. In no sense is the text to be regarded as ‘published’ simply because a draft has been made available by means of a link placed on the Internet. There is no way that I would formally publish a work that contains as much speculation as this one and which remains incompletely documented. It may be downloaded and shared freely, so long as any original ideas contained in it are not attributed to any other author.

This work-in-progress is dedicated to
Joe Vialls
Ian McNiven
Andrew MacGregor
Noel McDonald
Wendy Scurr
and the handful of other Australians interested in knowing the truth about what happened at Port Arthur

Contents

Preface …… viii

Introduction …… 1

PART I:

THERE IS NO CASE AGAINST MARTIN BRYANT

1. Reasons to question the official story …… 12
2. The police interrogation transcript …… 30
3. The ‘Jamie’ conversations …… 44
4. Guns and ammo …… 59
5. Zilch: the evidence against Martin Bryant …… 70
APPENDIX I: Bryant’s affair with a pig …… 86
APPENDIX II: What does Martin Bryant actually look
like? …… 88
APPENDIX III: See no evil, hear no evil: Petra
Wilmott …… 93
APPENDIX IV: Aileen and Ian Kingston …… 98
APPENDIX V: Wasps and Japs …… 106

PART II:

RETHINKING THE PORT ARTHUR MASSACRE

6. Smoking guns …… 111
7. The wonderful world of psyops …… 118
8. Towards an alternative account of the Port Arthur
massacre …… 125
9. A provisional, alternative account of the Port Arthur
massacre ……
10. Aftermath ……
11. Conclusion ……

Preface

Like most Australians, this author was deeply affected– and to some extent, emotionally scarred – by the tragedy at Port Arthur in 1996. Like most Australians, moreover, I accepted the word of the government, the police and the mass media that Martin Bryant of New Town, Hobart, Tasmania, had
perpetrated the massacre. My willingness to accept what I now know to have been a bundle of lies was bound up with my ability to effortlessly incorporate the incident into my mental framework.

It seemed to me then that what had happened was really very simple: a generation of young people which had grown up in the shadow of that machine-gun toting icon of the 1980s, Rambo, had produced a couple of young men who craved nothing less than using high-powered weapons to inflict as much carnage as possible. Since there was no Vietnam war and therefore no Vietnamese peasants for them to destroy, the best alternative for these suburban Rambos was to go beserk in their own
backyards. This they did at locations like Hoddle Street, Melbourne, where Julian Knight killed seven people in 1987, Queen Street, Melbourne, where Frank Vitkovic killed eight people four months later, Aramoana, New Zealand, where David Gray killed thirteen in 1990, and Strathfield Shopping Centre, Sydney, where Wade Frankum killed seven in 1991.

Now, to prolong this series of young Antipodean Rambos, was the Broad Arrow Café, Port Arthur, Tasmania, with Martin Bryant playing the lead role.

My understanding of the massacre was naïve, to be sure, but it was consistent with a popular view according to which episodes of mass violence are triggered by images diffused throughout the mainstream culture. Whenever a figure like Rambo emerges as a culture hero, I reasoned, there would inexorably follow Julian Knights, Wade Frankums and Martin Bryants. The meaning for the massacre for me was simply that society is biting off far more than it can chew when it sets up lethal
characters like Rambo as its heroes and role models.

In another fit of naïvete that I now regret, I was also favourably impressed when John Howard of the Liberal party, Australia’s newly-elected prime minister, acted decisively after the massacre to ram through stringent new gun laws of the sort I had long supported. To me, strict gun laws was a Labor party policy – and it was almost unthinkable to me that a Liberal leader would move on the issue. I was pleasantly surprised to see a Liberal party stalwart like Howard champion one of my pet causes. I really didn’t think a conservative had it in him to do something that, in my opinion, was manifestly in the country’s best interests.1

Yet, for all my naïvete, I cannot say that I was entirely satisfied by what I read in the newspapers and saw on television about the massacre. At the subconscious level, I felt uneasy about the fact that it had taken place only seven short weeks after Howard had become prime minister. I sensed that there had to be a connection somewhere. I was also disturbed by the fact that no satisfactory explanation was ever offered for the fact that the locking mechanism for a rear exit from the Broad Arrow Café
had been damaged so as to render it unusable, thus preventing escape by that route. It seemed to me then, as it still seems to me now, that anyone who thinks that this defect was not connected to the massacre – as if it was a minor problem that had occurred but simply not been noticed before April 28 – has to be a complete fool.

[1 Non-Australian readers should understand that the Liberal party is, despite its name, an
arch-conservative party. Apart from its stand on the issue of guns in 1996, its policies are virtually identical to and as inimical to the public good as those of the American Republican party.]

It is perhaps because a vein of suspicion lingered inside me that, as the years went by and the massacre wholly vanished from public discourse, I only found myself asking more questions about what had happened, not less.

What made me suspicious about the case was principally the fact that no sooner had Bryant been installed in Risdon prison than it vanished – and vanished completely - from public discourse. I could not understand why there never were interviews with key witnesses and participants. With the
exception of Nubeena pharmacist Walter Mikacs, who was not himself a victim but rather the husband and father of three victims (his wife and two young daughters), no one associated with the events of April 28-29, 1996, maintained any sort of a public profile in the years that followed. Carleen Bryant –
Martin’s mother – was the only other individual in any way connected to the massacre who impinged on my consciousness.

(I read in The Sydney Morning Herald that the grief-stricken woman spent her days travelling around Australia in campervan.) Where were people like Bryant’s girlfriend, Petra Wilmott, who should have been able to shed light on Bryant’s mental processes in the lead up to the massacre? Why did no one ever interview actual eyewitnesses of the shooting? It was almost as though all these people had fallen down a rabbit hole.

Their absence from my newspapers, magazines and televisions violated my sense of decorum. As one of the most traumatic events in Australian history, the sudden shutdown of discourse about Port Arthur presented an obscene challenge to my concept of closure, a fashionable term which, however glibly it is often used, implies a full and objective reckoning with the past. The Port Arthur massacre disappeared from the Australian media at precisely the time when the public should have found itself plumbing the darkest depths of Martin Bryant’s mind, the world which had created him, and the precise circumstances that had enabled him to acquire his lethal weapons. Port Arthur, it seemed to me, had slipped into a memory hole well before its time, and Bryant himself had become a non-person in the Orwellian sense. In a society devoted to smug self-adulation, I seemed to be the only person to preserve a live curiosity about the distressing events of 1996 – events which, presumably, had no place in Howard’s new, ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia.

Those unsatisfied feelings began to find an outlet in about 2001 when, thanks to the Internet, I came across writings about Port Arthur by independent researcher Joe Vialls. Vialls presented, at least in nuce, a more persuasive account of what had happened at Port Arthur than that which I had picked up from the Australian mass media.2 But at this stage, the abundance of materials on bizarre events in recent American history like the political assassinations of the 1960s and the Oklahoma City bombing to which the Internet gave me access gripped my attention more. Then there was 9-11, an event which for several years preoccupied me nearly as much as the assassinations of my heroes the Kennedy brothers.

But finally, in 2004, I discovered on my computer a version of one of Vialls’ writings about Port Arthur.
This time, the subject stuck with me. I was in it for the long haul – anxious to discover whether, unsuspected by the mass public, a dark and disturbing event of the American kind had intruded into the history of a remote and hitherto peaceful continent. My ability to research this topic objectively was enhanced by the fact that, by 2004, I no longer held any illusions about John Howard. I had fully
come to recognize that he was probably the dirtiest player in Australian political history. Like all thinking Australians, I

[2 Many of the writings to which I am referring are now hosted at the following location:
http://members.fortunecity.com/able_j/portarthur.html]

realized by 2004 that he and lied about the Tampa affair for short-term political advantage, while his decision to commit Australian troops to the neoconservatives’ war in Iraq demonstrated beyond all doubt that his ultimate loyalties were to the American military-industrial complex, not the citizens of
the country that had elected him its leader. I realized that there was probably nothing that Howard would not do to stay in power long enough to fasten a conservative straitjacket on the country the way the Republicans had done in the United States.

If Howard supported gun control in 1996, I decided, there very probably had to be a sinister reason.
What I learned, as I studied the details of the Port Arthur massacre, was that there was no evidence that Martin Bryant – alone and to the exclusion of all other young men with long blonde hair – had perpetrated the massacre. And, as my knowledge of the case deepened, I realized that Bryant could
not have done it. The book you are about to read captures the key moments of my independent investigation, the stages by which I groped my way to a fuller understanding of that disturbing event.

A word about the Seascape siege is in order. Bryant was apprehended by police the day after the massacre while fleeing a burning building, Seascape Cottage, which was located about four kilometres north of Port Arthur. The public was led to believe that Bryant had been the man calling himself ‘Jamie’
who had kept police at bay during an overnight siege that lasted over 18 hours. By various means, the public was led to accept that the Seascape affair was connected with the massacre, and that the protagonist of the siege was the same individual as the Port Arthur shooter.

That Bryant was somehow implicated in the siege is incontrovertible. He admits arriving at Seascape, we know that his girlfriend (Petra Wilmott) was present there with him, while, as is well known to most Australians, he was captured while fleeing from the burning building on the morning of April 29. Recognition of the fact that Bryant was involved does not mean that he was responsible for killing anyone, let alone that he was the main known only as ‘Jamie,’ who seems to have been in charge of the Seascape operation. In fact, Bryant was probably one of Jamie’s hostages.

While I believe that Bryant was the person Jamie referred to as Sgt. Terry McCarthy’s ‘main man’ – the reason why McCarthy could not allow the Seascape siege to get ‘blown’ – we have no means of establishing exactly what happened or why. While Bryant languishes in jail, effectively forbidden from discussing the case, the other inviduals involved are either dead or unlikely to ever to re-emerge to discuss the affair (‘Jamie,’ Petra Wilmott). There are no independent witnesses to events, leaving us wholly dependent upon the mostly uninformative statements of police and Special Operations Group (SOG) personnel attending the siege.

I do not try to ascertain the truth about the bizarre Seascape siege, therefore. Whatever Bryant’s (and Wilmott’s) true role in the Seascape affair or the extent of our sympathy for its other victims (Noelene Martin, David Martin and Glenn Pears), what happened there is a relatively tame matter compared to the nightmarish scenes that transpired in the PAHS on April 28. 3

While it is always possible that Bryant deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison for his role in what happened at Seascape, we have no means of reconstructing a likely narrative of events, incriminating or otherwise. We are much better informed about what happened at Port Arthur – sufficiently

[3 According to the charges against him, Bryant was accused of the murder of Noelene Joyce Martin. However, she is normally referred to as Sally, and this will be the practice throughout this book.]

well-informed that it is possible to state with absolute certainty that Bryant was not involved.

Although I deal with several aspects of the Seascape siege in this book, therefore, I do so only when doing so sheds light on what happened at Port Arthur and the question of whether Bryant was the Port Arthur gunman. This book is about what happened at Port Arthur in one of the darkest episodes in Australian history. For all its sophistication and its numerous unexplained dimensions, the Seascape siege was at bottom a charade whose purpose was to make it look as though Martin Bryant had been the Port Arthur gunman. It was the Australian analogue of the murder of Officer Tippit in Dallas in 1963, which by a convoluted kind of logic led to the conclusion that a man captured in a cinema with a gun had to be the man who killed Tippit and the man who killed Tippit had to have been the man who had assassinated President Kennedy.

This book therefore labours to exonerate Bryant from the allegation that he was involved in the Port Arthur massacre. It mounts no particular case about the nature of his involvement in the Seascape affair, although I lean towards the view that he was a captive rather than a co-conspirator.

A Critical Study of the Port Arthur Massacre

Introduction

Australians reacted with horror and outrage when, on a Sunday evening in 1996, they learned from their televisions that over 30 people had been murdered and many others injured in an orgy of violence in the Port Arthur Historical Site (PAHS), Tasmania, one the nation’s most venerable historical sites, and adjacent locations. They were told that the atrocities had been perpetrated by a young Caucasian man with pale skin and long white hair brandishing a military rifle – a kind of quasi-albino
Rambo – who apparently had a dislike of Japanese tourists.

In summary, the story delivered to the breathless world was that shortly before 1.30 p.m. that cloudless Sunday afternoon, the gunman had entered the Broad Arrow Café at the PAHS and picked off, with unfathomable callousness, one tourist after another. He killed a number of other individuals as he exited the PAHS and holed himself up in a nearby tourist guest house, the Seascape, in a siege that only ended when he burned the building down the following morning (an event that was seen
shortly afterwards on television).

What made the crime so repugnant was first, the coldly methodical way in which the shooter set to the task of killing as many people as possible, and second, the fact that his pitlilessness extended to even small children. To those deeply traumatized (like this writer) by the story of how the gunman had callously shot Walter and Nanette Mikac's two little daughters, three year-old Madeline and six year-old Alannah, whom he had hunted down from her hiding place behind a tree, no more sinister crime could be imagined.

The wave of revulsion unleashed across the country by the massacre - the second-largest body count in a single killing spree by one shooter anywhere in the world - can only be compared to that which swept the globe immediately after the 9-11 terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. It led just as
inevitably to the implementation of national legislation against semi-automatic weapons as the 9-11 attacks led in the United States to the passage of the Patriot Act. It was also so traumatizing an event that it left Australians entirely oblivious to the massive miscarriage of justice that followed when Martin Bryant, a 29 year-old man with an IQ of only 66 from Hobart, Tasmania, was declared guilty of the crime.4 All it took to convince Australians that Bryant had been the killer, effectively, was the say-so of Tasmania Police and the mass media.

The ‘evidence’ against Bryant that the police and media presented to the Australian public consisted of four things:

1) a shocking narrative of the events of April 28-29 in which Bryant was asserted over and over again to have been the central protagonist;

2) a photograph of Bryant showing strange, ‘psycho’ eyes that was published in the Hobart Mercury on the morning of April 30, then published across the country by the afternoon of the same day;

3) a biography of Bryant disclosing a history of mental problems, as well as several disturbing episodes, such as his friendship (and rumoured sexual relationship) with an eccentric old woman, Helen Hervey, who died in a car crash in 1992, bequeathing him $650,000; and

4) revelations that he owned numerous violent and pornographic videos, the most sensational item of which was Child's Play 2, a film in which an evil doll called Chucky has to kill a boy to become real.

[4 To be entirely accurate, Bryant was nine days short of his 29th birthday.]

Considered together, these four things left Australians in no doubt whatsoever that Bryant was guilty. (As I show in Appendix I below, Bryant was no psycho, the most incriminating episodes in his biography are either lies or unsubstantiated allegations, and his video collection contained entirely standard fare.)

The outrage against Bryant lasted so long that when, on September 30, 1996, he pleaded not guilty to any of the 72 charges against him, no one was prepared to entertain the possibility that he might have done so because he was actually not guilty. Australians ‘knew’ that he was guilty, whatever he
said to the contrary. The fact that he pleaded not guilty presented nothing for them to worry about, because his decision to plead not guilty for crimes the public thought he had ‘obviously’ committed was no more inexplicable than the crime itself, for which no real motive had ever been offered. The line
of reasoning most people followed was that someone who was perverse enough to commit a massacre for no apparent reason could be expected to prove just as perverse in the courtroom.

By November 7, 1996, when suddenly and inexplicably Bryant pleaded guilty to all 72 charges against him, the massacre was no longer of interest to most Australians. All that mattered to them was that the monster who had committed the murders was going to be locked away for the rest of his life. No one cared about such matters as how, within a period of a few weeks, Bryant had been induced to shift from a ‘not guilty’ to a ‘guilty’ plea – thereby sparing the government a trial that would prove his guilt - and most people just felt sad for his mother, Carleen Bryant, when they learned that she remained unconvinced that her son had been responsible for the killing spree.

Once the fit of base passions unleased by the massacre began to subside in about 1999, a few conscientious Australians began to express concerns that, during the process that led to Bryant’s sentencing on November 22, 1996, major violations of the Australian criminal justice system had occurred, as well as shocking legal improprieties without precedent in the country’s history. This is a shortlist of twelve of the violations and improprieties that were required to ensure that Martin Bryant was locked away for the rest of his life without ever being proven guilty:

1. The identity of the alleged offender was made public by the Hobart Mercury on the morning of April 29, 1996, when it was stated that he had been ‘a 29 yearl old schizophrenic from the Hobart suburb of New Town’ whose father had ‘committed suicide 3 years ago.’ The actual name of the alleged offender was made public by the same newspaper the following morning and by all major afternoon papers shortly afterwards - before his guilt had been proven in a court of law. Under Australian law, a person is considered innocent until proven guilty.

2. A photograph of the alleged offender was illegally published by the Hobart Mercury on the morning of April 30, 1996, and by all major afternoon papers shortly afterwards, including Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (which is where I first saw it myself).

NB: The reason why it is illegal to publish photographs of suspects is that it influences witness statements, often making it impossible for them to remember what they actually saw. The wide circulation of photos of Bryant was clearly a major obstacle to identification when one of the most widely published photos was used as photo #5 in the May 14, 1996 police photoboard. At least two
witnesses were honest enough to admit that their memories had been contaminated by their exposure to Bryant’s image in the media.

[‘I have today viewed a folder containing thirty photographs of male persons, and I immediately recognised photo #5 as the person I believe to be the gunman, but I must be honest here with this identification, and say that I have definitely been influenced by media coverage of his photo in relation to an identification.’ – Eyewitness Lindsay Richards (May 29, 1996) ‘I have read an article in Time Magazine, and have viewed a photograph of Martin Bryant within this article … so if I chose Bryant in a [police] photoboard, I would be very influenced by this article.’ – Eyewitness Brigid Cook (May 29, 1996)]

BELOW: Media frenzy: the first picture the nation saw of the alleged perpetrator of the massacre, Martin Bryant (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

3. A Coronial Inquiry, although required by Tasmanian law when a person has died ‘a violent, unnatural or unexpected death, or as a result of injury or accident,’ was waived on purely sentimental grounds by the Prime Minister, John Howard. Not only did Howard have no power to overrule a Tasmanian law, it cannot be overruled by a Tasmanian government official or legal representative. Yet every move made by relatives of the deceased in calling for a Coronial Inquest has been subsequently denied by the Tasmanian Coroner, Ian Matterson, as well as by Tasmania's Attorney General, Ray Groom. The explanation was that an inquiry would only inflict more pain upon the already sufficiently traumatized survivors.

4. Bryant was illegally held in solitary confinement until he finally pleaded guilty in November 1996, a period of nearly seven months. During this period, he was allowed no access to the media, be it radio, television or print, and was therefore kept in the dark as to what Australia was saying about the massacre and his presumed role in it. Although he received a handful of visits from his mother Carleen Bryant and one from his girlfriend Petra Wilmott, these visits seem to have taken place in closely supervised (i.e., severely constrained) circumstances in which the case itself was not allowed to be
discussed. As a result, Bryant was left in total ignorance for over two months of the fact that he was being held responsible for the Port Arthur massace. This is contrary to the fundamental principle that accused persons have the right to know the nature of the charges against them.

5. Bryant’s police interrogation of July 4, 1996, was illegally conducted without any legal counsel or guardian present. What’s more, what has been released of the interrogation transcript shows that until July 4, 1996, Bryant was under the misapprehension the only charge against him was a single
death. Again, this is contrary to the principle that accused persons have the right to know the nature of the charges against them.

6. Neither of Bryant’s defence lawyers - David Gunson QC and Hobart-based barrister and solicitor John Avery – made any effort to defend him. They seem to have understood their role to involve persuading Bryant to plead guilty in order to avoid a trial. The problem with taking such a position is that Bryant denied carrying out the massacre at the PAHS on April 28, 1996. Gunson and Avery therefore failed to fulfill their obligations to their client to mount a defence on his behalf.

7. Since the intellectually disadvantaged Bryant had been declared incompetent to manage his own affairs in a closed session of the Hobart Supreme Court on April 22, 1994, he was not legally able to enter a guilty plea.

8. The police have never properly verified Bryant’s guilty pleas using standard police procedures.
‘Standard procedure in these circumstances is to take the suspect out to the crime scene and ask for details of exactly how he committed the crime(s), i.e. where each victim was standing, what sex, how many bullets, where the weapon was reloaded, etc etc., all recorded on continuous (time-stamped) video,’ explains conspiracy researcher Joe Vialls. ‘The Victorian Police Service observed this standard procedure meticulously in the case of Julian Knight at Hoddle Street during 1987, as did the New South
Wales Police Service after a street shooting in Wollongong in 1998.’ Vialls adds the following, entirely appropriate conclusion: the ‘Tasmanian Police Service has still not verified his guilt using this standard procedure, and its continued refusal to do so can realistically be taken as proof of Martin Bryant's innocence.’5

9. Prime Minister Howard called for the demolition of the Broad Arrow Café, again on sentimental grounds. However, the Café was part of the evidence that would be required for any

[5 http://members.iinet.net/~jenks/carleen.html That this is what the police do in such cases can easily be verified by watching the episodes of the TV programme Forensic Investigators concerned with the 1998 Wollongong murders. They show abundant footage of the perpetrator, Mark Valera,
taking police through every stage of the killings.]

future court case or inquest and should therefore have been preserved indefinitely.

NB: The hasty demolition of a crime scene – as that of the Murrah Federal Building at Oklahome City and the World Trade Center in New York – is a classic feature of high-level cover ups.

10. Even today, no one outside Risdon prison - with the possible exception of his mother, although this remains unclear - is apparently allowed to speak with, or photograph, Martin Bryant. This is what the American constitution would define as ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ but is apparently legal in
Australia. However, it would certainly be illegal under various United Nations charters on human rights.

11. Bryant’s estate was sequestrated and his assets (which were estimated at $900,000) turned over to the state. Since Bryant has never been proven guilty, this amounts to larceny on the part of the Tasmanian government.

12. Since there existed no legislation which would have entitled the Tasmanian government to help itself to Bryant’s estate, special legislation had to be introduced into Parliament which applied retrospectively to the date at which it was introduced (which was on about November 15, 1996, a week before Bryant pled guilty). Retrospective legislation is always objectionable on moral grounds – in effect, it means entitling the state to penalize individuals for acts which were not illegal at the time
they were performed - but this example must rank among the most dangerous precedents in Australian legal history.

That it has proven so easy for the authorities to leave Bryant languishing in prison without ever being proven guilty is largely due to the apathy of millions. Despite their civilized veneer, the Australians of 1996 reverted to a lynch mob mentality when A Critical Study of the Port Arthur Massacre confronted by crimes that exceeded their understanding. Who can doubt that Bryant would have been lynched at any time in 1996, if the opportunity had presented itself? Royal Hobart Hospital staff even received death threats for the crime of tending to the third-degree burns Bryant sustained in the Seascape fire and one of the walls of the Hospital soon carried a message implying that an attempt would be made to kill him (see photo on page 10).

Even after ten years, I doubt whether many Australians would raise an eyebrow if, tomorrow, they
read in their newspapers that Bryant had been murdered in Risdon prison by a fellow prisoner or by a prison officer.

The fact that there has been total silence on the part of the Australian legal establishment about Bryant’s treatment amply demonstrates that it does not take such matters as the right to a fair trial at all seriously. The only high profile individual who has dared to express doubts as to Bryant’s guilt is independent conservative politician Pauline Hanson, who is not highly regarded in many circles. Sadly, it is likely that Bryant’s case will remain unexposed unless it is taken up by a more credible critic of the establishment like journalist David Marr or social commentator Richard Neville.

BELOW: Graffiti on the wall of the Hobart hospital in which Bryant was recovering from burn wounds
A Critical Study of the Port Arthur Massacre (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

PART I:

THERE IS NO CASE AGAINST MARTIN BRYANT

1 Reasons to question the official story

The unhappy fate of Martin Bryant is more than a matter of the flouting of the fundamental principles of the Australian criminal justice system. Since so many laws and legal norms were conspicuously ignored in the rush to lock Bryant away for good, the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that they were ignored precisely because they constituted an impediment to finding him guilty. Our first step, therefore, is to reexamine the case on the basis of a presumption of innocence. Our modus operandi consists of subjecting every incriminating aspect of the case to serious scrutiny: something that has scarcely ever been done before.

Bryant’s physical appearance

Most Australians remain unaware that there are good reasons to doubt that Bryant perpetrated the massacre. Of the twentyodd persons who survived the shootings inside the Broad Arrow Café, only a few provided physical descriptions of the gunman. In these, his estimated age is twenty or less. Karen Atkins of Sydney told The Australian (April 29, 1996) that, very soon after the shootings, she had spoken to a woman who had met the gunman in the Café. According to this woman, the gunman had been 'a young fellow, about 18 or 19, he looked like a surfie, he arrived in a Volkswagon and he walked into the cafeteria carrying a tennis bag.'

This description could be dismissed on the grounds that it is secondhand. However, it tallies with the description given by Carol Pearce. According to Pearce, the gunman, who she passed on her way into the Broad Arrow Café, was ‘between 18-20 years of age, he had really blonde hair which was collar length, it was fairly straight with a bit of a wave in it. He was clean shaven, he was average in height and build.’ Pearce’s description is invaluable, as it was given on April 28, 1996, the very day of the massacre. Like the woman to whom Atkins spoke, therefore, Pearce could not have been influenced by the media campaign of vilification against Martin Bryant. No picture of him had as yet been published.6

The same age range is mentioned by former RAF officer Graham Collyer, who was shot in the throat inside the Café. In his witness statement taken on May 7, 1996, Collyer described the gunman thus: 'He seemed somewhere about 20, he had long blonde bedraggled hair, about 3" - 4" below the shoulder. He looked like he might have had a lot of acne, a pitted face. He had scraggly trousers, I don't remember what colour.'7 On May 10, Jim Laycock told police that the man was in his ‘low
twenties.’ Betty Daviess described him as a ‘young male person.’8

Of the individuals who gave their statements to the police before the barrage of images of Martin Bryant appeared in the media, the oldest age estimates are given by Carmel Edwards, who held the door open for the gunman as he left the Café to eat his lunch on the balcony, and Justin Noble, a member of the New South Wales police force who says he saw the gunman

[6 Of course, Pearce could have been the woman Atkins spoke to. If so, this proves that Atkins related her description accurately enough. However, Pearce does not say that she spoke with the gunman, suggesting that we are talking about two different witnesses.]

[7 Noel McDonald, A Presentation on the Port Arthur Incident, 2001, p. 222. Collyer states that he had been ‘sedated or sleeping since the shooting,’ so had not yet had the opportunity to ‘see anything in the media about the person who shot me.’ Collyer’s statement can be read online at:
http://shootersnews.addr.com/snpacollyerfull.html]

[8 http://www.shootersnews.addr.com/snpadaviesstate.html]

exiting the Café after the shooting. Edwards described him as ’22-23 years old.’ Noble described him
'as 20-25 years of age.'

Another witness, Joyce Maloney, told the police he was 18-22.9 Thus no actual witness to the shootings at Port Arthur cites an age above 25. Most describe him as in his late teens or early twenties. (It also appears to be the case that the better look a witness got at the gunman, the younger the age he or she gave to the police.) Yet at the time of the massacre, Bryant was 29 and could not reasonably have been mistaken for anyone under 26 or 27.

This much is obvious from the photograph on the next page, which shows Bryant together with the woman we have been told was his girlfriend, Petra Wilmott. Since the pair reportedly only became romantically involved in February 1996, this photograph has to have been taken within three months of the massacre. Despite its poor quality, it shows Bryant’s face unframed by hair, and so gives a very good idea of what he looked like at the time of the massacre.

The only witnesses who estimated the gunman’s age in the upper 20s are witnesses like Yannis Kateros who only saw him from a considerable distance, most of whom gave statements to the police a week or more after the shooting when the matter of Bryant’s age was already established in the media.10

It is obvious that those who saw the gunman at close distance and who gave their descriptions before anything about Bryant’s appearance had been made public are to be considered by far the most reliable.

[9 http://www.shootersnews.addr.com/snpastatemaloney.html]

[10 Kateros, who estimated the shooter’s age as 28, gave his statement on May 10. See Noel McDonald, op. cit., p. 223.]

But there were more than years separating Bryant and the Port Arthur gunman. Only one witness, Rebecca McKenna, got a good look at the man’s face. (Most witnesses saw nothing on account of the long blonde hair.) Although there are problems with her statement (as well as those of her partner Michael Beekman), her description of his appearance – the only detailed description on record – makes disturbing reading for anyone who thinks that he could have been Bryant: I would describe the male as follows: - Approximately 173 cm tall. Slim build. Blonde hair, past his ears, wavy with a part in the middle. Unshaven dirty looking. His eyes appeared to be blue. …. He appeared to be German looking. His eyebrows appeared to be blonde and bushy.

He appeared “dopey” looking, his eyes appeared to be bloodshot. His facial skin appeared to be freckley and he was pale. His face seemed skinny and withdrawn. His ears were fairly large.11

It is interesting that while McKenna’s account of the man’s conversation was widely quoted – he talked about European wasps and Japanese tourists - her description of his face was

[11 http://www.shootersnews.addr.com/snpastatemckenna.html]

not. Perhaps this is because in no photo does Bryant seem to have bushy eyebrows or prominent ears (indeed, his ears seem on the small side). Bryant’s most memorable facial characteristic is, in fact, a wide and slightly bulbous nose – a feature never mentioned by witnesses. Although McKenna’s description is uniquely detailed, it is to some extent corroborated by that of Graham Collyer who, as we saw, states that his complexion was acne-scarred. However, Bryant's complexion is perfectly smooth, at least so far as the available photographs show, while the colour versions of the photos allegedly taken by Petra Wilmott on April 25, 1996, show a healthy, ruddy face.

The biggest problem with McKenna’s description is her statement that the man was unshaven. This conflicts with the statement of Carol Pearce, who described him as clean shaven. Some doubt remains as to the length of the gunman’s hair. Graham Collyer is one of a number of witnesses who reported
that his hair extended a few inches below the shoulder, while Bryant's hair barely touched the shoulder, as can be seen from the photograph on the following page, which was one of a number (at least allegedly) taken by Wilmott only three days before the shootings.

Another striking difference concerns the waviness of Bryant’s hair. This photo shows that it was wavy throughout, not ‘fairly straight with a bit of a wave in it,’ as Pearce states. Yet most witnesses state that the gunman’s hair was straight, with a wave only at the bottom.

BELOW: Martin Bryant photographed by Petra Wilmott at Richmond on April 25, 1996.12 (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

The most serious problem is raised by the statement of Jim Laycock. Laycock, who was the co-owner of the Port Arthur Motor Inn at the entrance to the PAHS, is of outstanding importance in this case as he was the one and only witness who observed the gunman in the act who actually knew Bryant. In
his police statement, Laycock said that ‘he did not recognise the

[12 According to the photo section of Bingham, op. cit.]

male as Martin Bryant.’ He states only that he saw ‘a person with blond hair’ shoot Zoe Hall and take Glenn Pears captive.13

BELOW: Jim Laycock Another witness, Yannis Kateros, says he had never seen the gunman before. (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

Yet Kateros had lived at Port Arthur since 1991, and Bryant had reportedly been an extremely regular visitor to the PAHS in 1991-92.

At least two other witnesses have also stated that Bryant was not the gunman. These are PAHS Information Centre employee Wendy Scurr, who, according to one report, saw him inside the Centre immediately prior to the attack, and Vietnam war veteran John Godfrey, who was waiting outside the Centre when the shooting commenced. Godfrey viewed the gunman twice. He saw him drive by and saw him put a bag into the boot

[13 We will see in Appendix II below that there are reasons to question whether Bryant even had blond hair.]

of his car. ‘In my opinion, the picture I saw in the newspapers, was not the same person,’ he stated in his police witness statement taken on June 7, 1996.14 Wendy Scurr has reportedly admitted changing her mind during the course of several public presentations she has given on the subject of the massacre. She no longer believes that Bryant was the man she saw.

Bryant has never been positively ID’d as the gunman

Most Australians, when confronted by the heretical idea that Bryant had not been the gunman, respond in brain-dead, kneejerk fashion: ‘Of course he did it!’ they say. ‘People saw him do it!’ In fact, it has never been proven that he was the man they saw do it. It was the police and the media, not the eyewitnesses, who identified Bryant as the gunman. Unfortunately, numerous witnesses, to whom one young man with long blonde hair is pretty much the same as another, have inadvertently helped prop up the official determination.

The only witnesses who positively identified Bryant as the gunman were Linda White and Michael Wanders, both persons whose statements were taken a full month after the shooting, after they had been exposed to plenty of media coverage about the case. On May 27, 1996, White viewed the police photoboard and decided that ‘Photograph no 5 in this folder [i.e., Bryant] is the male who shot us near Port Arthur.’ However, her reason for selecting photo #5 seems to have because of the fact that, in this photo, Bryant appeared to be wearing a top that was ‘very similar’ to that worn by the gunman. ‘It could even be the same top,’ she said. Unfortunately, White’s statement is of no value whatsoever. An identification can scarcely be based upon an item of clothing, which can obviously be worn by another person (indeed,

[14 McDonald, op. cit., p. 222.]

someone seeking to impersonate Bryant would have taken care to acquire an item of his clothing, or at least a very similar item). What’s more, no other witness recalled the gunman wearing the same top as that worn by Bryant in photo #5.

White was clearly basing her identification entirely upon a photo she had seen in the media.

As for Michael Wanders, in his statement taken the same day (May 27, 1996), Wanders picked Bryant out from the police photoboard as ‘the person who shot at Linda and I on 28/4/96.’ Unfortunately, Wanders’ identification is also of no value. On April 28, 1996, he had told the police ‘I would not be able to identify the person who shot at us.’ In his statement a month later, he admits that he hadn’t been able to ‘get a good enough look at the male to see how old he was or what he was wearing.’

His statement suggests that really all he had seen was a male with long blonde hair. Yet, somehow, this was enough for him to still pick Bryant out as the man who had shot at him. It is hard to credit the identification of a witness who on the day of the attack itself explicitly stated that he would not have been able to identify the gunman to someone who, a month later, felt able to oblige the police with a positive ID. White’s and Wanders’ statements prove one thing – that the laws prohibiting media organizations from publishing photos of accused persons are sensible ones which ought always to be
rigorously enforced.

In view of the fact that no serious efforts were ever made to prevent the media from publishing photos of Bryant, the question has to be asked whether the police ever wanted the gunman properly identified. Certainly, they seem to have done their best to avoid placing Bryant together with eyewitnesses in the same room. Graham Collyer, who was on the same floor as Bryant in the Royal Hobart Hospital on the day his witness statement was taken, was never given the opportunity to look at him. On this occasion, a positive ID could have been made in a matter of minutes.

If you look at the dates on which most witness statements were taken – a week or more after the events themselves – it looks as though the police were deliberately refraining from interviewing eyewitnesses until they had had time to absorb the disinformation about Bryant that predominated in the Australian media during the week after the massacre. In this regard, it is striking that none of the witnesses who showed a tendency not to identify Bryant as the gunman were given the opportunity to pick him out from the police identity board - not even N.S.W. police officer Justin Noble, who said
that he thought he could identify the man, if shown a photo of him taken from the appropriate angle.15

The fact that Noble was never asked to view the police photoboard implies that Tasmania Police anticipated a negative response.

It is only when one realizes that Bryant has never been positively identified as the PAHS shooter that one begins to understand why a court trial was never held. One of the problems that a trial presented to those seeking to incriminate him was that it would have placed actual witnesses in the same room with him. Under oath, they would have been required to identify Martin Bryant as the man they had seen shooting at the PAHS on April 28, 1996. That a trial was avoided means that no one was ever asked to identify him specifically as the killer.

Lack of Bryant’s fingerprints or DNA at Port Arthur

Martin Bryant is adamant that he never visited the PAHS on the day of the massacre. Most Australians – if they know of this denial at all - simply dismiss it as a lie. A fact that should deeply

[15 McDonald, op. cit., p. 223.]

unsettle them is that neither Bryant’s fingerprints nor his DNA have ever been found at the PAHS. This much has been admitted by Sergeant Gerard Dutton, officer in charge of the Ballistic Section of Tasmania Police, in an article he published about the case in the Australian Police Journal in December
1998.

There is no good reason why no evidence of this kind exists. An obvious source of fingerprints and DNA would have been the food tray (with a can of Solo soft drink, a plastic Schweppes cup and other food items, including eating utensils) that Rebecca McKenna saw the gunman eating from immediately prior to the shooting. We know that the tray was recovered by the police, because it is shown in a police training video that turned up in a secondhand shop in September 2004.16 Although the tray
would have contained fingerprints, thumb prints, palm prints, saliva, sweat, skin and possibly hair from the shooter, there is no evidence that it yielded anything that came from Martin Bryant. The only reason we have heard nothing about forensic evidence of this kind, surely, is that none of it incriminated him.17

The Balasko video hoax

A further reason to doubt that Bryant was the Port Arthur shooter concerns the (presumably not coincidental) fact that all the images of the shooter which have been made public entirely lack facial detail. The best quality image, that reproduced below, which comes from a video allegedly made by ‘American

[16 http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Australia/portarthur6.htm
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/28/1093518144586.html]

[17 The absence of evidence against Bryant is dealt with more systematically in Chapter 5 below.]

tourist’ James Balasko, looks strangely washed out in the facial area, as though it has been tampered with. If this image is authentic, the question have to be asked how the Prince sports bag the man is carrying towards his vehicle got back into the Café, where it is shown next to the food tray in the
footage from the police training video, and why the man is carrying it on his left shoulder when two witnesses, the Wilkinsons from Corio, Victoria, explicitly state that the gunman they watched leave the Café carried it on his right shoulder as he walked towards his vehicle. There is also no time
indicated on the frame, which raises the possibility that the video was not taken at around 1.30 p.m. on April 28, 1996.

The actual circumstances in which the video came to light are highly suspicious and militate against its authenticity. Balasko does not mention having made the video in his interview with Tasmanian police on the evening of April 29, 1996, and the footage itself, which would have been of immense value to both the police and the media immediately after the shootings, was not seen by the Australian public until it was shown on national television shortly before Bryant’s sentence hearing. It is, of course, highly implausible that Balasko would have videotaped the gunman when his priority would have been getting as far away from him as possible or that, if he had been so foolhardy, he would not have offered his historic recording to the police or the media at once.

Although other conclusions may be possible, my own is that the video was a fake. A possibility to be considered is that shortly the massacre the police performed and filmed (from Balasko’s position) a reconstruction of the crime. A short sequence from the film would have been released to the media on the eve of Bryant’s sentencing hearing as a means of reinforcing public belief in his guilt. The possibility that it depicts a recreation emerges clearly from a comparison of the Balasko frames with the Wilkinsons’ video, whose authenticity I see no reason to doubt. The two videos seem to show different vehicles in the parking area.

BELOW: An alleged image of the gunman returning to his vehicle immediately after the massacre (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

The mysterious Prince sports bag

Since several witnesses (including John Godfrey and Betty Daviess) saw the gunman put the sports bag in the boot of his car before driving off, its presence inside the Café after the shootings is a mystery that has yet to be solved. A distinct possibility is that there were two sports bags, one of which the shooter left inside the Café and the other which he took with him back to his car. (Daviess says it was green) Since the bag left behind in the Café allegedly contained a knife with the blood of Seascape owner David Martin on it, it is not hard to see in the mystery of the sports bag a complex intrigue for the purpose of framing Bryant by abandoning at the crime scene a
bag that Bryant had handled in the recent past, perhaps during the course of the bizarre events that had unfolded that morning at Seascape Cottage (see Chapter 3 below).

According to Mark Bingham's Suddenly One Sunday (1996), Petra Wilmott, who was Bryant's girlfriend for two months immediately prior to the massacre, was present when Bryant bought the bag ‘in a store.’ He told her it was for Tai Chi.18 However, when police showed Bryant the bag on July 4, 1996,
he denied having seen it before. Inspector Ross Paine told Bryant that he believed that Bryant had bought it ‘in Myers or Fitzgeralds or somewhere in town with a, a young woman earlier this year.’ Bryant denied it, Paine responded that he believed that he had. End of subject.

BELOW: Petra Wilmott, Bryant’s girlfriend in the two months prior to the massacre (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

This conversation shows that more than two months after the massacre the police still had not established where the bag came from - something that should have been easily done in a small town like Hobart (population 218,000) which has only a

[18 Bingham, op. cit., p. 54.]

handful of stores that would stock an item of this kind. Somehow the problem was solved between July 4 and November 19, 1996, when Damien Bugg QC told the Supreme Court that Bryant had bought the bag in Myer's on April 15, 1996.

But, to my knowledge, no proof of the transaction has ever been provided. What’s more, the name of the individual working in the store at the time – who claims to have had a whispered conversation with Bryant about the bag – has never been made public. Nor, so far as I am aware, has this unidentified individual ever furnished the police with a statement.

I suspect this individual does not even exist. If I am correct in drawing this conclusion, the case for Bryant's purchase of the bag rests entirely on the word of Petra Wilmott. However, there are reasons to deeply distrust Wilmott, a mysterious individual who

1) entered Bryant’s life shortly before the massacre;

2) was involved with Bryant during the period in which he procured a new rifle;

3) was present with Bryant during the siege at Seascape Cottage; and

4) seems to have vanished into history since (to my knowledge, she has never been interviewed about Bryant or the case since the year in which it happened).19

She could easily have had Bryant handle the bag in a store and then bought it herself afterwards. On the other hand, her story may be a complete fiction.

Bryant’s gunmanship

For many people, the most important reason to doubt that Bryant was the killer is on account on the latter’s impressive gunmanship. The Broad Arrow Cafe shooter managed to kill the

[19 I look forward to seeing whether she is trotted out by the media on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the massacre, which falls on April 28. 2006.]

first 19 out of 20 dead in the with single accurate shots to the head fired from his right hip. Some researchers maintain that Bryant, who was an amateur shooter with virtually no shooting experience whatsoever, would have entirely lacked the skills to carry out such a feat.

A powerful case has been made to this effect by Perth researcher Joe Vialls, who points out that amateur shooters generally achieve a much lower KIR (kill to injured ratio) than did the Broad Arrow Café shooter. In an enclosed space like the Broad Arrow Café, targets have to be shot in a careful sequence with split-second timing to maximise kill rates. Yet the Broad Arrow Café gunman managed a kill rate well above that required of a fully trained soldier, an impossible task for a man with Bryant's mid-sixties IQ and his total lack of military training. Vialls has concluded that the shooter was a military-trained marksman who would probably rank among the top ten or twenty shooters in the world. 20

Brigadier Ted Serong, former head of Australian forces in Vietnam, was just as impressed. In 1999, Serong – who explained that his eyes had first been opened by the ‘astonishing proportion of killed to wounded’ - told Melbourne newspaper The Age that ‘There was an almost satanic accuracy to that shooting performance. Whoever did it is better than I am, and there are not too many people around here better than I am.’ 21

Most members of the general public have a greatly exaggerated idea of what amateur gunmen are able to do. Not only do they tend to injure many more persons than they kill, they are usually overpowered before they have completed their sinister

[20 http://vialls.homestead.com/portarthur.html]

[21 McDonald, op. cit., p. 35.]

work. By contrast, the Port Arthur gunman was a thorough professional who was at all times in perfect control: The shooter in the Broad Arrow Café at Port Arthur demonstrated all of the qualities of a trained counterterrorist marksman but made no amateur mistakes.

Always in motion and point shooting from the right hip with devastating accuracy, he killed twenty of the occupants with single shots to the head and wounded twelve more, firing a total of only 29 rounds. Using known techniques reported by witnesses, he ensured his own safety from attack by turning on the spot and staying outside grappling range. It was an awesome display of expertise, even by special forces standards.22

However, we don’t have to take the word of people like Vialls and Serong who never saw the Port Arthur gunman shoot with their own eyes. According to eyewitness Neville Quin, ‘He [the gunman] appeared to be the best trained army guy I’ve ever seen, his stance was unbelievable.’

[22 http://members.fortunecity.com/able_j/springfield.html]

BELOW: Neville Quin (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

Also important to consider is that, according to most witness, the Café shooter shot from his right hip. Not only is Bryant lefthanded, he told police he had never fired a gun from his hip. It is doubtful that anyone except a highly-trained professional shooter could.

2 The police interrogation transcript

On July 4, 1996, two police detectives who had been appointed by Superintendent Jack Johnston to handle the Port Arthur investigation, Inspectors Ross Paine and John Warren, interviewed Bryant about the case at some length. The interview was most unprofessionally conducted, with the
equipment frequently malfunctioning. As a result, the conversation was constantly interrupted and the resulting quality of the videotape is said to be atrocious. Such adverse conditions had to have been deliberate. There was no necessity to conduct the interview on July 4 and it could have been - indeed, should have been - postponed to such a time as the equipment was working properly. After all, Port Arthur was the biggest murder case in Australian history.

On account of what seems to have been deliberately sloppy police work, it is not possible to be certain that anything attributed to Bryant in the printed record of the interrogation matches what he actually said. The transcript also omits a great deal of what he did say - at least a third of the conversation has been withheld. Even the transcription we do possess cannot be trusted in its entirety. Over and over again, Bryant's responses are rendered as ‘mmmm’ or ‘inaudible.’ Since there is a suspicious tendency for such responses to appear in the most crucial parts of the conversation, particularly those where Bryant's version of events contradicts that of his interrogators, we cannot be sure that he did not say something which has only been excised as a means of withholding important clues as to what really happened from the public.

Despite its great limitations, the police transcript is invaluable as a record of Martin Bryant’s side of the story. To my knowledge, this is the only public record of anything he has said about Port Arthur (or any subject) since his arrest on April 29, 1996. It is a great pity that Australians have condemned him
without ever having listened to what he had to say on the one occasion on which his words have been allowed to enter the public record.23

Most Australians will be amazed to discover that in this interview Bryant not only denied carrying out the massacre but also related an entirely different narrative of the events of April 28, 1996, than that presented to him by his police interrogators.

According to police, Bryant set his alarm clock for 6 a.m., left his house in Clare St., New Town, Hobart, at 9.47 a.m. precisely (they said that that was when he activated his house alarm), and drove to Seascape guest house, making stops at Midway Point (to buy a cigarette lighter), Sorell (to have a coffee), Forcett (to buy a bottle of tomato sauce), and Taranna (to buy petrol). When he arrived at Seascape, he murdered the owners, David Martin and his wife Sally, and loaded the building with
firearms and ammunition that he had presumably brought with him in his car from Hobart. After chatting for five or ten minutes with a neighbour of the Martins, Roger Larner, Bryant then proceeded to the PAHS - stopping to buy a small amount of marijuana on the way - and, as they say, the rest is history.

Bryant, on the other hand, says he did not set his clock alarm in the morning, and that he rose at 7 or 8 a.m., left his house around 11 a.m. (without turning on his house alarm), and drove to Roaring Beach on the western side of the Tasman Peninsula, making only one stop along the way - at Sorell, where he had a cappuccino. (Even this minor episode does not conform to the police version of events. Bryant said he got his coffee from the Sorell Bakery, not the service station, although he admitted that

[23 The transcript can be read at http://home.overflow.net.au/~nedwood/transcript.html or
http://members.fortunecity.com/able_j/transcript.html]

he had bought coffee from the service station on earlier occasions.)

At Roaring Beach, he surfed for about twenty minutes, and noticed two other people bodysurfing in short wetsuits at the other end of the beach. After drying off in the sun, he went to Nubeena, where he stopped for coffee and a toasted sandwich. After this, he drove past the PAHS to visit the Martins at Seascape. He does not recall having spoken to Larner at all that day, while the likelihood that he bought marijuana is drastically reduced by the fact that he smoked neither cigarettes nor marijuana.

BELOW: Map of the area between Hobart and the Tasman Peninsula (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

What the rest of Bryant's story proves beyond the shadow of a doubt is that as late as July 4, 1996, he still had not the faintest clue as to the extent of the atrocities he is supposed to have committed nine weeks earlier. He had obviously been told so little about the case that he had no alternative but to put the pieces together all by himself. The result is a sorry tale about stealing a car to take a joyride (and taking a hostage to prevent the incident from being reported to the police) that seems to
have been the best that this man of extremely limited intellectual capacity could come up with to explain how it was that he found himself in prison on a murder charge.

Before we examine his responses to the charges against him, we need to explain how the police were able to place Bryant in a position from which only a much more intelligent individual would have been able to extricate himself. As we learned in the previous chapter, the case against Bryant suffers from a marked dearth of evidence. The key to the case against him is essentially the distinctiveness of his personal appearance and of his yellow Volvo. The police framing of Bryant therefore began by
obtaining from him concessions as to the distinctiveness of his appearance and that of his Volvo. The matter of his appearance was raised spontaneously by Bryant himself, but was at once capitalized upon by Inspector Warren, who deviously connected it to ‘Port Arthur’:

Warren: Martin, getting back to that point about the hostage, you taking the hostage because you didn't want him telling the police. What didn't you want him telling the police?

Bryant: That I took his umm, car.

Warren: But I mean, if you'd have left him on the side of the road, he wouldn't have known where you could've driven.

Bryant: Yeah but he could've let them know that there was a chap with blonde hair, took me car, stole me car. So I sort of put him in the boot to be safe.

Warren: So you thought your looks that day were distinctive and if someone said they saw a chap with blonde hair.

Bryant: Mmm.

Warren: At Port Arthur on that particular day?

Second, the Volvo:

Warren: We have lots of people who are telling us that they saw you at Port Arthur and your car.

Bryant: Well it must've been another, there's other Volvos ...

Warren: With surfboards on the top? With someone with long blonde hair driving them or getting out of them?

Bryant: There's not many with surfboards on top.

As we will see below, these concessions left Bryant little wiggle room when police confronted him with a photograph of his vehicle at Port Arthur. Where Bryant's account and that of the police converge is in the matter of a hijacked BMW. At the Fortescue Bay turnoff on the way to Seascape, his narrative takes a bizarre twist:

'unfortunately I held up a car, I took ahh, I saw this car I liked and got umm, held up the person in the car and kidnapped him.' The car was a BMW occupied by three people, a male, a female and a child. Bryant ordered the man inside the boot of the car and made the female and the child get inside his Volvo.

Why did he take the man hostage?

'I was a bit worried that if he didn't go, he'd go off in my car.' After commandeering the BMW solely because he 'liked' it (he states that his intention was only to take it for a drive), Bryant sped off towards Seascape at 140 km.

What is striking about this story is that it combines elements from two different events, the PAHS gunman's hijacking of a gold-coloured BMW sedan belonging to Sidney and Mary Nixon and the subsequent taking of a hostage, Glenn Pears, who had been the driver of a different vehicle (a white Corolla). It is not hard to see that Bryant's version of the story, which is effectively the only point at which his account of his doings on April 28 intersects with that of the police, is a classic case of the
mentally deficient person confessing to a crime that he believes he must have committed, even if he doesn’t actually remember doing so or know why he would have done such a thing. (For two examples of this syndrome, that of Timothy Evans, who confessed to killing his wife, and that of Margaret Livesey, who confessed to the murder of her son, see Bob Woffinden’s 1987 book Miscarriages of Justice.)

It is possible to reconstruct the laborious mental process that led the hapless Bryant to effectively connect his harmless activities with the police narrative of the PAHS gunman. When the interview began, Bryant knew no more than that he was being detained on a single charge of murder. But he had no idea what had happened, who had died or why he was being held responsible. Building an explanation on the basis of certain facts that must have been leaked to him about the case, presumably by one of the prison guards, he admitted to commandeering a BMW at gunpoint and forcing the male driver into the boot.

Although Bryant knew that the man had died, he did not admit having killed him intentionally. He stated that, as he was knocking at the door of Seascape, he heard the vehicle explode. His conclusion was that his hostage had died in the explosion.

‘How do you feel about that Martin?’ asks Inspector Warren.

‘Pretty awful,’ Bryant replied (a statement which in itself proves that Bryant is capable of remorse when it came to someone whose death he genuinely believed he had caused, however inadvertently).

Although Bryant did not recall having set the vehicle on fire and had certainly not intended to do so, he realized that the explosion had to have started somehow. After concluding that only he could have started the fire, he tried to imagine what he would have done to have caused it. He decided that he must have transferred ‘two or three’ plastic drums of petrol from the Volvo to the BMW, tipped the petrol all over the car, and then lit it using a match (or a lighter) that he must have found inside his jacket pocket. Having decided that this is how he had set fire to the car, Bryant seized upon the fire as an explanation for his burns:

‘I must've been in the car when it went up ‘cos I got burnt.’ He reasoned that the whole mess that had landed him in gaol had been the result of ‘a bad thing,’ by which he meant ‘playing with fire,’ as he had done when he was ten years old.24

Having worked out a rough scenario that would explain why he was being detained on a murder charge and why he had suffered serious burns to his body, Inspector Warren turned the tables on Bryant by suddenly revealing that the person he had been charged with murdering was not the male hostage but a female, Kate Scott. This information obviously came as a great shock to him. Not knowing that Scott had died inside the Broad Arrow Café (he still knew nothing about the massacre), Bryant drew the erroneous conclusion that she had been the woman in the BMW. Unable to understand how he could have been responsible for her death, he protested, ‘I let the lady go into
the Volvo, I didn’t hurt her or anything. No, I don’t register, it doesn’t register.’ Presumably because he did not yet want to discuss with Bryant what had happened in the Café, at this point Inspector Paine abruptly and pointlessly changed the subject to whether he had any favourite restaurants in Port Arthur.

[24 When Bryant was a child, he badly burned himself while playing with matches. Afterwards, he was seen by a Tavistock Institute psychiatrist, Dr Eric Cunningham-Dax, who some researchers suspect programmed Bryant as a patsy for future use. On the Tavistock Institute, see
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~noelmcd/lostlink/Martin-Bryant.htm]

‘Ohh Kelly’s is pretty good, that’s at, out, just it’s not quite into Port Arthur. You turn off, that’s actually in Stewart’s Bay,’ Bryant replied. Clearly, Inspector Paine did not want Bryant to say anything further about the matter.

As the above discussion shows, when his police interrogation began on July 4, 1996, Martin Bryant was still wholly in the dark as to his alleged involvement in the Port Arthur massacre. All that he knew by that stage of the game was that he was being detained on a single count of murder. Between his arrest on April 29 and his interrogation July 4, he seems to have performed mental gyrations to devise a scenario that would explain how this had come about. What is clear is that the scenario Bryant thought up is wholly imaginary, although the key elements (the BMW, the hostage, the explosion) had to have been suggested him by someone. But the idea that Bryant was responsible for setting the BMW alight can be dismissed entirely. For what Bryant did not know, but which we know now, is that the BMW was actually set on fire by Andrew Fogarty of the Special Operations Group (SOG), who was
apparently the first police officer to arrive at Seascape.

If Bryant was capable of inventing for himself a scenario in which he had set the BMW alight, he was therefore also capable of imagining the situation in which he commandeered the BMW in the first place. What confirms this conclusion is that the scenario he describes only bears superficial similarities to the gunman’s actual capture of Sidney and Mary Nixon’s BMW, an event that was viewed by several witnesses, including Jim Laycock (who, as we have already seen, did not recognize the man as Bryant). Although the real gunman seized the vehicle near the PAHS toll booth, Bryant vacillated when asked to state where he had hijacked the BMW. His confession to having captured the vehicle and taken a hostage has to be dismissed as sheer fantasy.

Apart from a few garbled facts about the hijacking of the Nixons’ BMW, the only other significant thing that Bryant knew about the events of April 28 by the time his police interrogation began is that Seascape guest house had been burned down and that a number of people had perished in the fire.

He had obtained the information not from Inspectors Paine and Warren (who seem to have been surprised to learn that he knew this), but from the prison guards. What few Australians know is that Bryant was saddened to hear about Seascape's destruction and that he felt sorry for the Martins’ loss. ‘Worked hard all their lives, renovating, took them years to build it, renovate it and to start it all up and it’s just so sad to see, apparently it's burnt down, it’s so sad to see it burnt down.’

Before confronting Bryant with accusations as to his responsibility for the murders at the PAHS, Inspectors Paine and Warren had to convince Bryant that he had been there that day. To do so, they drew upon the unreliable testimony of Aileen Kingston and her husband, Ian Kingston, the two persons who claim to have seen Bryant entering the PAHS between 1.10 and 1.25 p.m. Without supplying the names of any of the individuals who made the claims, Warren confronted Bryant with generalized references to eyewitness sightings of himself which he was ill-placed to contest, having already conceded the distinctiveness of his appearance and of his Volvo:

Warren: Well what would you say if I told you that you were seen going into Port Arthur and in fact you were at the toll gate?

Bryant: I couldn’t’ve been.

Warren: And more than that, that you did complain about the price of admission.

Bryant: Umm, I don’t remember going in, into Port Arthur or going through the toll gate at all.

Warren: Well as you said a minute ago, you, your description of the long blonde hair does make you umm, stand out from the crowd.

Bryant: Mmm, exactly.

Warren: What about your yellow Volvo?

Bryant: That would, wouldn’t it? That would stand out.

Later in the interview, Warren showed him a photograph of a vehicle that Bryant conceded looked like his own Volvo:

Warren: Martin, I want you to have a look at this photo. It’s photo number zero one one two. In it is a car I believe to be yours and it’s depicted adjacent to the toll booth.

Bryant: Couldn’t be mine, where’d you get that. I don’t remember being stationary [inaudible].

Warren: Do you agree that that could be a surfboard on the top?

Bryant: Yes I think it probably is.

Warren: And it’s certainly similar to your ahh, your car.

Bryant: Mmm.

Warren: The registration number of this vehicle I think is CG two eight three five.

Bryant: I don’t remember the registration.

Warren: Well that’s your car. So that certainly suggests it because that’s the exit road at the toll booth, that your car had been.

Bryant: How could the car be there when I didn’t go, go there in the first place [inaudible].

Warren: As I said, sorry, as I’ve said, we have, there are lots of people saying that they saw you in the Port Arthur site and your car in the Port Arthur site.

Bryant: Mmm, I can’t recall that.

BELOW: The yellow Volvo abandoned by the gunman at the tollbooth as he exited the PAHS (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

Finally, towards the end of the interrogation, Inspectors Warren and Paine broached the subject of the Port Arthur massacre itself. After again denying that he had been at Port Arthur on April 28, Bryant reacted as any reasonable person would when charged with the Broad Arrow Café shootings:

Warren: We believe you went into Port Arthur. Had a slight argument with the toll gate person about the price on entry. We believe you then went to park you car and an attendant or someone ...

Bryant: Park the car.

Warren: said you couldn’t park in a certain spot, so you didn’t and sometime later you did move your car to that spot. We believe you went to the Broad Arrow Café with that bag over there, containing some guns and your video camera. You purchased a meal, you went outside, sat down, and then went
back into the Café. Took one.

Bryant: But you might’ve. That’s like me saying to you, that you were down there.

Warren: But the difference is Martin, my car wasn’t down there and I haven’t been identified as being down there and I wasn't down there. And then you took one of the guns out of your bag and opened fire in the cafe.

Bryant: Why would I do that? I mean.

Warren: I don’t know, you tell me.

Bryant: Why, why would anyone do a thing like that, what?

Warren: Well, you tell us.

Bryant: [inaudible]

Warren: That's what we want to know Martin, why.

Bryant: What, what, would, I wouldn’t hurt a person in my life.

Inspector Warren then reminded Bryant that he had already admitted having done someone some harm that day:

Warren: Well you’ve already said you'd put the man in your boot of the car.

Bryant: Only, yes, yes.

Warren: Then you’ve set fire to the car and you thought that he was in the boot.

Bryant: [inaudible]

Warren: So how do you explain that?

Bryant: It was a bad thing. ... Well, I shouldn’t’ve gone and kidnapped him and the BMW. It’s the wrong thing. That and, that and in the, being caught with not having a driver’s licence. So they’re the two things I’ve done wrong. I don’t know why I stole the BMW in the first place. I wish I’d [inaudible].

Bryant has been checkmated. By having him admit that he had done one bad deed that day, Inspector Warren effectively deprived him of a case for asserting that he would not be the kind of person who would murder 35 people! Although the taking of a hostage is clearly not a crime of the same magnitude as mass murder, most readers will feel that Bryant has been caught up in his own lies, and that the truth will unravel, inch by inch.

The problem with the case Inspectors Paine and Warren presented to Bryant, however, is that it relied entirely upon assertions, not evidence. Bryant was shown no evidence of a forensic kind, nor any photographs, not even stills from the Balasko video, with the exception only of a single image of his Volvo at Port Arthur. In other words, when it came to convincing Bryant that he had to have been responsible for the atrocity, the police had nothing to fall back on except his distinctive appearance and the presence of his car at the scene.

However, these are both things that could easily have been imitated by someone involved in a plot to set him up. Unfortunately, Bryant’s intellectual limitations were such that he was unable to graduate to the complex idea that someone actually had set him up. His low IQ, in a nutshell, is the real reason why Bryant may very well spend the rest of his life in prison.

3 The ‘Jamie’ conversations

The shooting inside the Broad Arrow Café ceased between 1.32 and 1.34 p.m. It had lasted at least five, and possibly as many as seven minutes, and had taken the lives of 20 people. By 1.43 p.m. the gunman had ditched the yellow Volvo in which he had arrived at the PAHS and departed the location in a goldcoloured BMW sedan which he had commandeered after shooting all the occupants dead. Then, between 1.43 and 1.45 p.m., he took a hostage, Glenn Pears, the driver of a white Corolla that was parked outside the Port Arthur General Store.

After handcuffing Pears and ordering him into the boot of the stolen BMW, the gunman shot dead Pears's passenger, Zoe Hall, and drove off in the direction of Seascape guest house. A few minutes later, at approximately 1.48 p.m., Constable Chris Iles of Sorrel Police Station arrived at the Port Arthur
General Store in a marked police vehicle. He spoke briefly to two eyewitnesses of the Zoe Hall slaying - Jim Laycock and Kyle Spruce - and then sped off in hot pursuit of the gunman’s BMW.

At approximately 1.52 p.m. eyewitness John Rooke saw the BMW park about a hundred metres short of the entrance to Seascape. The gunman then paused to shoot at passing traffic. He fired at six different vehicles. Two persons were wounded, Linda White and Carol Williams, while others received lesser injuries, mainly from broken glass.

The shootings outside Seascape inaugurated by far the most sensitive phase of the Port Arthur conspiracy. The events of the next hour or so are, in fact, impossible to reconstruct in clear chronological order. In particular, the period between 1.50 and 4 p.m. is cloaked in mystery.

Interestingly, the Hobart Mercury (April 29, 1996) told a different story than that which is now generally accepted, according to which the gunman went straight to Seascape. According to a map of the dramatic events of the previous day published on p. 5, at 1.50 p.m. the gunman fired on vehicles 250 metres north of the Fox and Hounds Hotel and then disappeared ‘into thick bush.’ The gunman (and the assumption is, of course, that he is the same man as that who disppeared into the bush) resurfaced around 4 p.m. ‘holed up with hostage’ at Seascape.

Of course, the mystery is entirely intentional. As will gradually become clear to most readers, this period is difficult to make sense of precisely because it is here, where the narratives of the Port Arthur massacre and the Seascape siege are awkwardly stitched together, that we find first, the possibility that the gunman vanished forever at around 1.50 p.m., and, second, the clearest intimations of police complicity in the unfolding drama.

BELOW: Seascape Cottage (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

By the time the gunman arrived at Seascape, Constable Andrew Mark Fogarty of the Bellerive Police Station on Hobart's eastern shore – an SOG team leader - was already on the scene.

Fogarty’s early presence at Seascape should definitely raise eyebrows and is probably sufficient in itself to justify an official investigation. Only by means of a helicopter could Fogarty have reached the entrance to Seascape just 20 minutes after the first report of the PAHS massacre had been phoned in to Hobart police headquarters. Even if he had left Bellerive Police Station the instant the call was received, there is simply no way that he could have driven from Hobart to Seascape in just 20 minutes.
(In his own account, Fogarty states that his journey took 43 minutes. But as he was already at Seascape by 1.55 p.m. at the very latest, he would have to have left Hobart by about 1.10 p.m. or 17 minutes before the massacre in the Broad Arrow Café began, to really have gotten there by road.)

Very shortly after the gunman vacated the BMW, Fogarty fired a phosphorous grenade that caused it to erupt into flames. The first report that the vehicle was on fire came at 1.57 p.m., which means that Fogarty must have fired the grenade at around 1.55 p.m or so.

BELOW: The burned out BMW (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

According to the official narrative of the Seascape drama, after the gunman exited the BMW, he dragged the hostage out of the boot and the pair entered the guest house together. However, there is no evidence that the gunman actually entered Seascape. It is entirely possible that, after alighting from the BMW, he made his escape into the bush. This would probably have been done with the assistance of one of the four policemen who had reached Seascape by this time. For in addition to Fogarty, three other policemen had arrived at Seascape by 2 p.m. These were Constable Chris Iles of Sorrel Police Station, Constable Paul Hyland of Nubeena Police Station and Constable Gary Whittle
of Dunally Police Station. Any one of these individuals could have facilitated the gunman's escape and driven the BMW down to Seascape.

Although Constable Whittle's movements are the best accounted for - he was apparently holed up in a roadside ditch until rescued after dark - it cannot be taken for granted that he entered the ditch as soon as he arrived. As for Constable Iles, nothing is known about his activities after he set off from the
Port Arthur General Store in pursuit of the fleeing gunman.

Presumably, he tailed the BMW as far as the entrance to Seascape, but what he did after that (and for the rest of the day) remains a complete mystery.

Finally, Constable Hyland is not mentioned in Mark Bingham's narrative of the drama in Suddenly One Sunday, even though he is supposed to have arrived at Seascape not much later than Whittle.25 If Hyland was holed up in the ditch together with Whittle, as most accounts maintain, it is suspicious that
Bingham replaced Hyland's name with that of Constable Paul Allen, even though this is immediately contradicted. (In his next few lines, we learn from Bingham that Constable Allen,

[25 Mike Bingham, Suddenly One Sunday, 2001, pp. 106-7.]

who arrived from Hobart with Constable Perry Caulfield in the same vehicle, spoke to an SOG member [i.e., Fogarty] as soon as he arrived. Fogarty promptly diverted Allen and Caulfield to the Fox and Hounds Hotel.) There has to be a reason why Bingham does not want to place Hyland at the Seascape guest house at the same time as Whittle.

BELOW: The Fox and Hounds Hotel, 800 metres from Seascape (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

Unfortunately, we aren’t told what time Constables Allen and Caulfield arrived at Seascape, so it is impossible to establish whether they left Hobart after news of the massacre arrived or whether, like Fogarty, they arrived so shortly afterwards that they must certainly have left Hobart before. The possibility that Allen and Caulfield were on the scene as early as 2 p.m. therefore increases the number of police who may have been involved in shenanigans at Seascape to no fewer than six.
(Readers should bear in mind that not one police officer arrived at the PAHS until 4.26 p.m., when Detective Peter Hesman stayed just four minutes at the tollbooth.)

According to the official narrative of the Seascape drama, the siege at Seascape was the logical sequel to the horrendous tragedy at Port Arthur. But there is, in fact, no necessary continuity between the massacre and the drama that unfolded at Seascape. The case being laid out in this book, in fact, is that there was no continuity and that, after abandoning the BMW outside Seascape, the gunman was escorted to safety by one of our six policemen. A possibility is that he was helicoptered out by the same helicopter that brought Fogarty in.

The protagonist of the Seascape drama was a completely different individual, a man who only ever identified himself as ‘Jamie.’ It is not possible to say exactly how or when Jamie arrived at Seascape, for his existence was not signalled until he initiated a series of phone calls shortly after 3 p.m Since we
have no way of knowing for sure what went on at Seascape between 1.50 and 3 p.m., it is possible that Jamie was one of the policemen who vanishes from the official narrative around this time (i.e., Constable Iles or Constable Hyland). However, the fact that Jamie apparently knew nothing about the shootings at Port Arthur - this matter is discussed below – suggests the possibility that Jamie had arrived inside Seascape several hours before. He was presumably part of the terrorist team that had
taken over the house between 10.30 and 11 a.m., when David Martin was murdered. He could have been in the dark about everything that had happened a few kilometres down the road.

Between 3 and approximately 9.30 p.m. Jamie made a number of phone calls whose content makes no sense at all, if one assumes that he is the Port Arthur gunman. He initiated most of the calls, the known exception being the one that was initiated by ABC reporter Alison Smith. What emerges clearly enough from a serious analysis of the calls - that is to say, an analysis that does not prejudge their content by assuming that Jamie is the Port Arthur gunman - is that Jamie was the central protagonist in a police counter-terrorist exercise. Jamie's role was to pose as a terrorist. But Jamie was not necessarily the only 'terrorist' at Seascape that day. Since a shot can be heard on the phone call tapes at a time when Jamie was in midsentence, we know that he had at least one accomplice. The
shooter was apparently the person Jamie referred to as Rick.

But since there were moments when two men were shooting, we can be sure that both fired at least some shots. The tapes of the Jamie conversations make abundantly clear one thing and that is that Jamie was NOT the Port Arthur gunman. If Jamie WAS the Port Arthur gunman, it made no sense for him to initiate and maintain contact with the police.

Are we to believe that he seriously thought that he could negotiate his safe release? That the police would allow the greatest mass murderer in Australian history to get away to save the life of a single hostage? If Jamie was the Port Arthur gunman, the best he could hope for would be to die in a shootout. And if Jamie really had been the gunman, and the police had not been involved in a conspiracy together with the gunman, then that is certainly what would have happened, and the loss of Glenn Pears's life would have been discounted afterwards as unavoidable 'collateral damage.'

As the following exchange shows, Jamie actually knew nothing about the PAHS shootings until they were mentioned to him by his interlocutor, police negotiator Sergeant Terry McCarthy of the SOG. Momentarily abandoning his conduct of the Seascape counter-terrorist exercise, he was concerned enough to ask whether anyone had been killed:

Jamie: Yeah what what went on at Port Arthur?
McCarthy: Well I was hoping that you might be able to tell me a little bit about what happened at Port Arthur you being down there.

Jamie: Was there anyone hurt?

McCarthy: Well, I understand there’s been er er a number of people hurt at Port Arthur.

Jamie: Oh they weren’t killed?

McCarthy: Well, I don’t know what, I don’t know the full details I know that er er somebody’s been shooting at people down at Port Arthur and er in the mean time ah we’ve also encountered the problem that we have with you, you sort of er want a helicopter and all these things and we’re trying to establish whether ...

Jamie: Em

McCarthy: that’s er you know the same incidents are related in any way.

Jamie: No, no, they’re not at all.

McCarthy: They’re not.

If Jamie was the Port Arthur gunman, his questions would have been entirely superfluous. Furthermore, when asked by McCarthy whether the two incidents - i.e., the shootings at Port Arthur and the siege at Seascape - were ‘related in any way,’ Jamie averred that they were not. There is no reason for Jamie to have lied about such a matter. After all, if Jamie was not the fleeing gunman, who did he expect the police to think he was?

Yet he does nothing to clarify to Sgt. McCarthy what he is doing at Seascape and why he has taken hostages - which surely suggests that McCarthy knew perfectly well who Jamie was and why he was there. The explanation that makes most sense, therefore, is that the Seascape siege was a police counter-terrorist exercise organized around a hostage taking scenario. That Jamie knew nothing
about the PAHS massacre suggests that the exercise was kept largely compartmentalized from the Port Arthur massacre. We are therefore looking at two different plots which intersected at only two points.

First of all, Seascape served, between about 11.30 a.m. and 12.30 p.m., as the location at which the Port Arthur gunman made his preparations for the subsequent massacre. During this period, he would have used a knife that at some stage had been touched by Martin Bryant – it could, for example, have been provided by Petra Wilmott – to stab David Martin. The knife was then wrapped in a towel and taken inside a duplicate Prince sports bag with the gunman to the PAHS.

Second, a counter-terrorism exercise began at Seascape sometime between 1.50 and 3 p.m. whose purpose was to provide a pretext for the capture of Martin Bryant, or even his death. Bryant was almost certainly already inside Seascape by no later than 2pm; if he had been abducted at Nubeena shortly before (as I suspect), he would have been delivered to Seascape around this time, quite probably in an unconscious or heavily drugged condition.

One of the coups of the Jamie/McCarthy conversations is McCarthy’s impressive ability to avoid asking pertinent questions. Why did he not ask Jamie the obvious question, which is, why has he holed himself up in Seascape, if he had had nothing to do with the PAHS shootings? Why on earth did he occupy the guest house, take three hostages, and start firing at police? It is by refraining from asking such obvious questions that a gaping hole was left that subsequently allowed police to make the Seascape siege appear to be the logical conclusion of the massacre.

McCarthy’s failure to press the gunman for his motives after he denied having had anything to do with the PAHS shootings is evidence that McCarthy knew exactly what the game plan was and was extremely clued in as to the questions he could afford to ask. And, in fact, there was no point pressing Jamie for his motives: both Jamie and McCarthy knew full well, I conjecture, that the Seascape siege was an SOG counter-terrorism exercise which would subsequently be presented to the public as a genuine terrorist operation executed by bored, mentally unstable rich kid Martin Bryant. But only McCarthy would have known that the siege was going to be connected to the 'incident' at the PAHS.

BELOW: Sgt. Terry McCarthy (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

The first known conversation with Jamie allegedly began at around 3.08 p.m., when he rang the Nubeena Police Station residence. Constable Hyland’s girlfriend, Merrin Craig, answered the phone. Since the call was not recorded we don’t know what was said. Craig’s notes of the conversation suggest that the call contained thinly-veiled threats against Constable Hyland; indeed, Craig is supposed to have drawn the conclusion that Jamie may have been holding her boyfriend hostage.

However, the conversation could have been faked or it may never have taken place at all. Its sole purpose seems to have been to create suspicion that Jamie was conducting a vendetta against Hyland. This suggests that the original rationale for the Seascape siege was conflict between Jamie and Hyland, perhaps a love triangle scenario involving Hyland’s girfriend. This otherwise baffling phone call may therefore provide important insight to the original pretext for the Seascape counter-terrorist exercise, before it suddenly ceased being a mere exercise and became related to what had happened at Port Arthur.

Shortly after this conversation, ABC reporter Alison Smith, who was at Copping, en route to Port Arthur, called the Seascape number in the hope of obtaining information about the shootings. Based on Smith’s account, the conversation went something like this:

Smith: Hullo, hullo.

Jamie: [laughs hysterically]

Smith: Hullo. Is this the right number for Seascape?

Jamie: [laughs] Yes.

Smith: Who am I talking to?

Jamie: [laughs] Well, you can call me Jamie.

Smith: It's the ABC calling. What's happening?

Jamie: What’s happening? What’s happening is I’m having lots of fun. ... But I really need a shower. ... If you try to call me again I’ll shoot the hostage.

Then, at around 3.30 p.m., Jamie initiated contact with Terry McCarthy (one wonders how he knew which number to call). Over the next six hours, Jamie and McCarthy engaged in conversations totalling about two hours. Only fragments of the conversations have been allowed to enter the public record,
suggesting that the rest would place a completely different complexion upon the nature of what had happened at Seascape.

One of the first myths about the Seascape siege that needs to be laid to rest is that Jamie was Martin Bryant. In these conversations, Jamie was strikingly different in demeanor, and even in voice, from Martin Bryant. According to one report, Bryant has ‘a squeaky high pitched monotone voice,’ which is
certainly not an appropriate description of Jamie’s voice. From the point of view of identifying Jamie, the biggest problem is that although Bryant's mother Carleen was taken to Hobart police headquarters between 8 and 8.30 p.m., she was never asked to listen to Jamie’s voice or, if she recognized it as the voice of her son, to use her maternal influence to reason with him. The curious decision not to involve Carleen in the negotations with the man police claim they believed was her
son can only be interpreted one way: the police knew very well that Jamie was not Bryant.

Curiously, Jamie’s voice has only ever positively identified as that of Martin Bryant by an individual whose name has not been made public but who, according to Carleen Bryant, ‘hadn't spoken to Martin since he was twelve years old and would not know what his voice sounded like anyway.’ It certainly seems suspicious that someone other than Carleen Bryant was chosen to identify Jamie’s voice, and doubly suspicious that this person was someone who hadn’t even spoken to Martin Bryant for 17 years!

The Jamie conversations offer a very strong clue that Jamie had been instructed to identify himself as a particular individual, although probably without knowing the actual reason. In one of the most bizarre exchanges, McCarthy tries to get Jamie to tell him his name:

McCarthy: Now if you don’t want to tell me your name that's fine but how about giving me your passport number and we can do a check on that?

Jamie: I think it’s H02 4967 if I can remember it cause I travelled quite a lot overseas an most an um travel agencies know me around town ma around Hobart I should say so.

This is absolutely extraordinary! Not only does McCarthy seem to think that Jamie carries his passport number around with him inside his head - since most people use their passports only infrequently, this is not normally a number people are able to recall on the spur of the moment - he also thinks Jamie will be stupid enough to tell him exactly what it is! And lo and behold Jamie does remember his passport number and is perfectly willing to volunteer it. It is hard to see why Jamie didn’t spare McCarthy the effort of running a check by just telling him straight out that he was Martin Bryant.

What is crystal clear from the above exchange is that Jamie had been instructed to give McCarthy Bryant’s passport number - and to throw in allusions to Bryant’s frequent overseas travels to cement the identification. Anyone who smells a rat will not be surprised to learn that a single form of ID was found inside a certain yellow Volvo when police searched it at the PAHS. Since Bryant did not have a driving license, there will be no prizes for readers who have guessed correctly what this document was.

But anyone who correctly divines that it was his passport - as indeed it was - should ask themselves the question how often people drive around with their passports in their cars. 26 Tasmanians do not require a passport to go to Roaring Beach. Nor, for that matter, is an identity document required for entry to the PAHS. Yet Jamie obligingly connected himself with a passport that would subsequently be found in a car that either belonged to Bryant or was a near-perfect replica thereof.

[26 We know this because ‘on the afternoon of Sunday the 28th April 1996’ Aileen Kingston was shown Martin Bryant’s passport by Detective Peter Hesman. Hesman was the detective who searched the Volvo at 4.26 p.m. See McDonald, op. cit., pp. 225-26.]

To conclude our review of the Jamie conversations, we need to look at perhaps the most revealing of them all, one which took place at night:

McCarthy: Jamie?

Jamie: Yes. Hello. How are you?

McCarthy: I’m very well thanks Jamie. Yourself?

Jamie: Well, I’m well up to now. The past few 20 seconds. What I’ve actually found out man, is that one of your boys is right outside, northeast I’d say, with an infrared scope.27 Would you just ask him to move on?

McCarthy: Right, we’ll do that, we’ll do that now.

Jamie: Cause he’s going to shoot, he’s trying to shoot, he’s going to shoot your main man.

McCarthy: No, I can guarantee.

Jamie: I’ll blow this, umm this, you know, you know what’s going to happen.

McCarthy: I don’t want to see anyone hurt, alright?

Jamie: You just move him on.

McCarthy: Okay, I’m organising that now. I can also assure you that it’s not our intention to hurt you or see anybody else hurt, okay.

Jamie: Really.

Anyone who still thinks Bryant was Jamie and that Bryant was a lone psycho killer needs to ask him- or herself the following questions. Why does Jamie used the term ‘northeast’ to state the location of the SOG man? (This is police jargon.) Who was the ‘main man’? Why was the man McCarthy’s ‘main man’ rather than Jamie’s ‘main man’? Why did Jamie threaten to ‘blow’ the operation unless the one of McCarthy’s ‘boys’ moves on? Why does Jamie imply that he and McCarthy are working together in an operation that McCarthy wouldn’t want blown?

[27 This was presumably an SOG officer.]

What did McCarthy ‘know’ was going to happen if the man with the infrared scope did not move on? And why, if Jamie was the gunman who had already killed over 30 people that day, was he so solicitous about the life of the SOG man with the infrared device? Why did he not just shoot him? Are we seriously expected to believe that this monster who had already killed upwards of 30 people that day, including the little Mikac sisters, drew the line at shooting police officers?

4 Guns and ammo

A major problem with the case against Martin Bryant is that his ownership of the weapons used to perpetrate the Port Arthur massacre has never been proven. In a way this is not all that surprising, for a fact of which relatively few Australians are aware is that we do not know which weapons were used in the massacre. Graham Collyer, who was a veteran of the RAF with some firearms experience, was one of the few eyewitnesses to the massacre inside the Broad Arrow Café who noted which
weapon the gunman was using. To Collyer, it ‘looked like a standard SLR service semi automatic.’ The day after the massacre, the Examiner reported that police had found a .223mm Armalite M16 at Port Arthur. Then, on May 1, 1996, the West Australian told the public that the two weapons used had
been a 5.56 mm Armalite AR-15 and a Chinese-made SKS .762mm assault rifle.

BELOW: The Colt AR-15 as found in the ruins of Seascape guest house (Note: See link at bottom of page to see photos & original pdf file.)

In contradiction to early reports and to eyewitness testimony, therefore, the prosecution case finally settled on the only two weapons which survived the Seascape fire relatively intact, a .223 mm Colt AR-15 and a Belgian .308 mm FN-FAL assault rifle. The possibility has to be considered that these two guns were settled on only because they were found largely intact in the ruins of Seascape guest house, thereby providing the needed link to patsy Martin Bryant. Indeed, Stewart Beattie, former
gunsmith and author of A Gunsmith's Notebook on Port Arthur, c