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.

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:

‘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.

Quote:

Aussie wrote on Apr 27^th, 2016 at 9:58pm:


many blessings master aussie ,

the thread stands as a testimony to the saga of this port arthur incident ..

many facts are within these pages to illuminate truth

research and be gifted with these facts ,or carry on regardless,  yet

either way be at peace

namaste

Aussie wrote on Apr 27^th, 2016 at 10:07pm:


what does it matter what another thinks ..

you seem inadequate in your knowledge upon this case

and refuse to look at the evidence provided ..

there is no greater ignorance and ye are worthy of that stature

forgiven

namaste

HI ALL

Port Aurther stank at many levels , as to who did what.

make your own decision but at least try to keep an open mind. all a closed one will get you is a headache

To many things just do not jell. However it was twenty years ago today sorry kids the world has changed? not necessarily for the better.
we need to rethink a few things.