It doesn’t seem possible that such a thing has happened here in Australia, but it has. I feel a sadness, which is not my own, as I write these words. It is centuries, millennia old. Death! You think it is elsewhere, but it is suddenly all around you, like a mist, rivulets of blood running like a spring. It was blatant murder and the impact is doubly horrifying. People of all ages, small children, youth, the middle aged and the old shot. What a waste, what a terrible waste of life.

A person can become in an instant an evil thing. It’s beyond belief - in the warmth of an innocent Australian Autumn day a grown man, Martin Bryant, became something that we little understand. He became a demon. A man who has consumed and destroyed himself by erecting a monument to his undying memory. He’s imprisoned himself forever. He’ll live the rest of his life with the burden of those deaths and forgiveness will be forever beyond reach. The remainder of his life will be a slow hell, painful, ugly.

Will his roots reveal an abused, unhappy, turbulent childhood and a youth that gave way to a child-like man? Known locally as someone different and unbalanced. He was loner who led a solitary life. Caught up within a web of dreams and thoughts - something remained stuck, struggling inside him which built into an irresistible scream. The subtle changes, the initial manifestations, the irresistible urges, the love of weapons - favoured collected toys to be stroked and handled - his precious things. What fears persisted in his undermined world; waiting to collapse into the infernal darkness of his soul? What caused the repressed hatred, cold fury and icy calmness that came to end in death? Did he try and outwit mortality? Did he rush spontaneously to embrace death? Was it a cancellation of the self by the self? A pull of the trigger, then it won’t matter any more? Yet he ran from death rather than be consumed by fire. Was his fear of death greater than death itself? Is he not a coward? Calm as he’s ever been, his rampage was thoughtful, almost knowing - a man conscious of his actions as he stalked and chased his prey. Once started, he was unable to stop, as one death led to another. What did his eyes see? Was he filled with a sense of unsurpassed power? Did he do this thing because he wanted to be something other than he was? Did he want all the deathly, death defying recognition and renown? A road to fame, by causing death? .

To dip into someone’s life is heavy going. It’s hard to understand the mind of this man, to know what he was thinking or what led him along this path. He, who tore apart so many lives and who horrifies society. I wonder if we adapt to such horrors as yesterday’s cataclysm becomes today’s absorbed fact and I wonder if it is a reflection of the human condition. To remove the real source of all evils in this world, we need to heal ourselves.

Australia has received a shock which will take time to wear off, a traumatic shock more severe than most realise. In the minds of the young the incident will pass way and will be forgotten, they are too busy growing up to look back, but for many others the horror will always remain. Gone now is our complacency over the availability of automatic and semi automatic weapons. We are no longer talking in the abstract. The problem is with us here and now.

(In May 1996 Martin Bryant shot and killed over 30 people visiting a tourist facility in Tasmania - he was later committed to Life Imprisonment (and will never be released) and is currently held in solitary confinement in Tasmania - the above thoughts were written by myself a day after his atrocity)