The decisive political response to the killing of 35 people in Tasmania by a gunman 20 years ago changed Australia – and has lessons for the US today

On Sunday 28 April 1996 a security guard, Ian Kingston, stood in the doorway of the Broad Arrow cafe at the historic site of Port Arthur in southern Tasmania. He stared at the body of a man lying on the floor, then looked up into the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle. He dived back out the door as Martin Bryant pulled the trigger. Bryant killed 12 people in 15 seconds.

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On the gravel path outside the cafe Kingston tried to herd people who thought the gunshots were part of a historical re-enactment up the garden and out of range. He knew he couldn’t go back inside. “You don’t get a second chance with a gun like that,” Kingston says.

Bryant moved towards the gift shop in the next 75 seconds, killing another eight people. In little over half an hour the death toll would be 35, with 23 wounded. It became the worst single-person mass shooting in Australia’s history; and is still the third worst recorded worldwide.

The gun was an AR-15 rifle with a 30-shot magazine. Bryant exchanged it for a semi-automatic .308 FN rifle he had stowed in the boot of his car. Both were then legal in Tasmania, which, with Queensland, had the loosest gun regulation in Australia and felt the tightest grip of the gun lobby.

In 1987 a frustrated Barry Unsworth, then premier of New South Wales, stormed out of a national gun summit in which Tasmania had resisted changes proposed after two mass shootings in Melbourne that year, declaring: “It will take a massacre in Tasmania before we get gun reform in Australia.”

He was right.

Twelve days after the Port Arthur massacre, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, announced a sweeping package of gun reforms in a country where firearms had long been considered an essential prop in the national mythology of life in the bush.

“At that stage the gun lobby was the ruling lobby in Australia,” says Philip Alpers, associate professor at the University of Sydney. “What happened at Port Arthur is that they were outpaced, outflanked and outwitted by a man who had the power to move in 12 remarkable days.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gunman Martin Bryant is taken from an ambulance into Royal Hobart hospital after an 18-hour standoff with police after the shootings. Photograph: Andrew Freeman/AP

Tim Fischer was leader of the National party and Howard’s deputy prime minister in the Coalition government, charged with persuading sceptical country voters to support, or at least accept, reforms. “Port Arthur was our Sandy Hook,” he says. “Port Arthur we acted on. The USA is not prepared to act on their tragedies.”

Next month survivors and family members of the victims will gather on the lawn outside the Port Arthur site to mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre and the 20th anniversary of the gun reforms, which some worry are being chipped away as memory of the tragedy fades. Some restrictions have been relaxed and in many states, New South Wales in particular, shooters’ organisations are getting their voice heard by government. Commentators have warned against Australia getting too proud of itself on gun control. Nonetheless, there have been no mass shootings in the 20 years since Port Arthur; in the 20 years before it there were 13. The number of deaths by gunshot wound, which was already declining at a rate of 3% a year before the reforms, declined at a rate of 6% a year post-1996, according to a study co-written by Alpers and Simon Chapman.

Howard made gun control the focus of a nation in mourning. In his condolence motion to parliament on 30 April 1996, the first sitting day of his government, he said the tragedy forced the country to reflect upon “the vexed issue of gun control laws”. It was just six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, killings which led to a ban on handguns and tighter gun control in the UK.

“I will do all that I humanly can as leader of the government to bring about a significant improvement and to address some of the great deficiencies that exist,” Howard said.

He later described gun control as “one of the things of which I am most proud”. Even critics of the conservative leader cite it as one of the best examples of Australian political leadership in recent history.

‘It’s the last place in the world that you would imagine something happening’

Six weeks before the Port Arthur massacre, Tony Rundle was sworn in as the Liberal premier of Tasmania. Tasmanian politics, never the calmest of waters, was more than usually full of sharks at the scent of a vulnerable minority government. On the afternoon of 28 April, Rundle and his new police minister, John Beswick, were at distant points on the state’s north coast when they took calls saying there was a gunman on the loose. Within hours both were at police headquarters in Hobart listening as the death toll climbed.

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Beswick had already been briefed by the police department about a push for national firearm laws that had been scuppered by Tasmania and Queensland at a meeting of police ministers the previous year, and had a few days earlier instructed his department to begin drafting a cabinet submission to ban high-powered military-style weapons in response to a proposal from the gun control lobby.

“It’s the last place in the world that you would imagine something happening,” Beswick tells the Guardian. “It wasn’t a politically motivated thing, it wasn’t a terrorist. This was just a psychopath killing people with guns.

“I immediately began to think that this was going to mean that something was going to have to be done about tightening up the legislation, not just in Tasmania, but the uniform legislation that had been talked about nationally.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Firefighters at the Seascape bed and breakfast, which Bryant set alight, ending the siege. He had killed its owners before he began his rampage at the Port Arthur heritage site. Photograph: Rick Rycroft/AP

A gun control advocate, Roland Browne, was hosting a meeting at his Hobart house to prepare for the sit-down with Beswick. It was the furthest they had got with any police minister in years.

“At that point in time, Tasmania’s laws were the weakest, the poorest in the country,” Browne says. “We had a licensing system but it was a licensing system that really had no teeth … Although the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre didn’t have a gun licence, if he had of applied for one, he would unquestionably have got one.”

At Melbourne airport, the state Labor leader, Michael Field, saw a breaking news banner flash across the football broadcast while he was waiting for a connecting flight to Canberra to talk strategy with the national Labor leader, Kim Beazley. He immediately booked a return flight home.

“The death toll just went up when I was waiting for the plane … The tragedy just got bigger and bigger,” Field says.

Bryant, then 28, had chosen the heritage site, a former convict prison and asylum, for its brutal past, reportedly saying in his pre-sentence psychiatric assessment: “A lot of violence has happened there. It must be the most violent place in Australia. It seemed the right place.”

He killed 31 people there before driving in a stolen BMW back to a bed and breakfast called Seascape, where he had earlier killed the owners, David and Noelene Martin. At a service station on the way he killed Zoe Hall and took her boyfriend, Glenn Pears, hostage, forcing him into the boot of the BMW. The entire attack, from the time he fired his first shot at Port Arthur to the time he returned to Seascape, took 22 minutes. He would remain at Seascape in a standoff with police for more than 18 hours.

Should I have tried to tackle him? … It’s the kind of thing that you dwell on for years Ian Kingston, former security guard

At 2pm at Port Arthur, Kingston gathered a group of 60 people in the parsonage and used the landline to alert other buildings on the site, telling them to keep people inside. There was no one to tell them where Bryant had gone. He called police and the state emergency services and, after a few minutes, went back to the cafe to see if he could do anything to help. “It was like a slaughterhouse,” he says. “There was people and blood everywhere and people crying. Oh, it was shocking. Terrible.”

The carnage was such that everyone who had anything to do with the attack – all 490 police officers, scores of medical and ambulance personnel, Port Arthur staff, politicians, journalists and members of the public, visitors and staff alike – required counselling.

It was a scene that would later haunt Kingston. “Should I have waited until he came out? Should I have tried to tackle him? … It’s the kind of thing that you dwell on for years,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A coach parked at Port Arthur. Four people were killed in or around the bus. Photograph: Rick Rycroft/AP

“Did I do the right thing? Would I have saved more lives if I tried to tackle him rather than get people away from the front of the cafe?”

While Kingston was corralling survivors, a police constable, Pat Allen, was in a leech-filled ditch 2.5km away, watching bullets fired by Bryant bounce off the gravel road in front of Seascape and crack into the bush behind. Allen had dived into the ditch alongside a local Dunalley police officer, Gary Whittle – one of the first police on the scene – at 2.24pm, after reversing up to the driveway of Seascape to lessen his chances of being shot. The driveway was on a bend of the Arthur Highway about a kilometre from the Fox and Hound, a Tudor-style hotel which had been claimed as a sanctuary by people wounded when Bryant shot at their cars.

Allen and Whittle stayed in the ditch for eight hours, until police from the special operations group smuggled them out.

“It was very simple: I knew where he was, he was shooting at us,” Allen says. “So I had no concerns about where he was.

“We held the position for eight hours where we were and it didn’t seem like eight hours. It went really quickly. And the sound of choppers going back and forth and the shots going off, it was very surreal, very surreal the whole thing.”

At the time, Allen says, police didn’t know if anyone but Bryant was alive in the home. They later found out it was unlikely the final hostage, the only one alive when the siege started, was alive for long. “I certainly carried this around for a long time, will carry it around for the rest of my life: I was down there, but what good was I?” Allen says.

He came running out on fire … so we had to extinguish him as well as arrest him Hank Timmerman, former special operations group commander

“What good were we, what did we do? I know we did the best that we could with the resources we had, but at the end of the day all these people had already died and this thing [Bryant] is in the house and I had nothing but contempt and anger for him.

“I wish he had tried to break out … Not that police should ever be executioners, but if he was firing on us then we would have been forced to fire back and he might have just seen what it was like to be fired back at.”

Bryant, who was later sentenced to 35 counts of life imprisonment by a judge who branded him a “pathetic social misfit”, didn’t try to leave the house until 7.48am the next day.

“He set the place on fire and consequently set himself on fire as well,” says a former special operations group commander, Hank Timmerman. “His clothes as well were burning and he came running out on fire … so we had to extinguish him as well as arrest him.”

While Bryant was being taken to Royal Hobart hospital for burn treatment, Beswick met Rundle in his office. The federal attorney general, Daryl Williams, had already told the media the gun laws would change after the massacre but the next scheduled meeting of police ministers was not until July. Beswick said that wasn’t soon enough; he called Williams and the meeting was set for 10 May.

“My position was that action needed to be taken and it needed to be taken promptly to at least make sure that something positive took place out of this terrible event,” Beswick says. “By the time we got to the special meeting of police ministers, John Howard had announced what we were going to do.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police search the burnt-out remains of the guesthouse. Photograph: Steve Holland/AP

‘We discussed immediately the possibility of changing the law’

Howard was in Sydney when the massacre started. That night he returned to Canberra. “I remember having a meeting with people on my staff. I came to the Lodge [the prime minister’s residence] and we sat and talked about it for a couple of hours. We discussed immediately the possibility of changing the law,” he told the ABC last month.

“I decided this was big enough and important enough to use the authority I clearly had. At that time I’d only been prime minister for six weeks, I had a majority of 45 in a house of 150, we’d really annihilated the Labor party in the last election and the new leader, Kim Beazley, was a very reasonable man. I knew the Labor party would probably support any new measures we brought in and I thought, ‘For heavens sake, what’s the point of being in office when you can’t do something significant in relation to something that affects community safety?’ ”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Howard announced a sweeping package of gun reforms 12 days after the Port Arthur massacre. Photograph: Associated Press

Before Port Arthur most states had a weak licensing system and no requirement to register guns. Howard proposed each state and territory should introduce and enforce a firearm licensing and registration system requiring people to have a “genuine reason” for having a firearm, such as sport or target shooting, recreational hunting or being a farmer. “Personal protection” would not count as a genuine reason. All states would also ban automatic and semi-automatic long guns.



Howard also introduced a national gun buyback scheme for all weapons that did not comply, which ended up melting down more than 650,000 firearms at a cost of $350m.



He produced polling at the meeting that showed the ideas behind the reforms had up to 90% support. If the states did not fall into line, he and Williams warned, they would hold a referendum and seize power for firearm registration from the states. They fell into line, even Queensland, where some members of the conservative state government resisted – despite the public support of the premier, Rob Borbidge.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Destroyed firearms on the last day of Australia’s gun buyback scheme. More than 650,000 weapons were handed in. Photograph: Reuters

In some areas there was a lot of resistance, which is understandable. A lot of gun owners are decent, law-abiding people Tony Rundle, former premier of Tasmania

Research by a Wilfrid Laurier University academic and former economist with the Australian treasury, Christine Neill, and then Australian National University academic and now federal Labor MP, Andrew Leigh, published in the American Law and Economics Review in 2010, found the buyback cut the rate of firearm suicides by 74% in the first 10 years, saving 200 lives a year.

Alpers, who runs the website GunPolicy.org, says the success of the laws was due as much to “a sea change in public attitudes about gun violence” as it was to the restrictions.

He says a discernible portion of the guns in Australia in 1996 were neither registered nor destroyed, and there were widespread claims that people would bury their guns rather than give them up. But as there was no count on the number of guns in Australia before gun registration came in, the number unaccounted for is not known. (There are now more than 3.2m registered firearms in Australia, just shy of one for every eight people.)

“I recall things like a rush on a certain diameter of poly piping, that fit nicely into a post hole – though that could be apocryphal,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A pro-gun control demonstration in Sydney after the massacre. John Howard produced polling that showed the ideas behind his reforms had up to 90% support. Photograph: Megan Lewis/Reuters

Fischer’s task of selling the reforms was not straightforward. In Queensland particularly, where the gun lobby had considerable sway in rural electorates, opposition quickly reasserted after the massacre. “I was hanged in effigy at Gympie [a Queensland town] during the course of a shooting club rally,” Fischer tells the Guardian. “It was a big cultural change for Australia.”



While his deputy prime minister was symbolically lynched, Howard provoked a deeper anger among gun owners by wearing a bulletproof vest under his jacket to address a heated meeting in Sale, Victoria. Howard’s staff had been told of a death threat but the leader later acknowledged this was a mistake.

Fischer says he was repeatedly told the gun reforms would cost him his seat and cost the Howard government, the first conservative government in 13 years, the general election. They did neither. Fischer has since become a vocal advocate for gun control and frequent critic of the US for its failure to address the issue.

In Tasmania there was tripartisan support. Rundle stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Field and the then Tasmanian Greens leader, Christine Milne, at every press conference about Port Arthur and gun control, and the three parties ushered the reforms unanimously through parliament in August.

“No one really attempted to make any political gains out of this even though there was a lot of pressure on individual members of parliament, particularly those in rural areas,” Rundle says. “In some areas there was quite a lot of resistance, which is understandable. A lot of gun owners are decent, law-abiding people.”

Beswick says it took the “shock” of the Port Arthur massacre to create the necessary political will. The tragedy, he says, had to be politicised to make change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Three hundred people attend a memorial service in the convict-built church at Port Arthur on the first anniversary of the massacre. Photograph: Leigh Winburn/AP

“This was something that needed to be done and this was the time to do it, and if we hadn’t done it then we would have failed our duty,” he says.

Allen, now president of the Police Association of Tasmania, says gun control must not be allowed to slip as Port Arthur began to slide from people’s memory.

Since the 1996 national firearms agreement, four states have moved to wind back the mandatory 28 days “cooling-off” period between applying for and buying a gun, a trend Howard last year described as disturbing. One of those states was Tasmania, where the cooling-off period for buying a second or third gun was halved after being described by the police minister, Rene Hidding – who was a member of Rundle’s government – “as unnecessary and frustrating red tape”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ian Kingston in the demolished Broad Arrow cafe, where 20 people were killed. There will be a 20th anniversary commemoration service at the site on 28 April. Photograph: Rémi Chauvin

Last year Carolyn Loughton, who survived the Broad Arrow cafe but whose daughter, Sarah, did not, launched a public campaign against the importation of Adler A110 rapid-fire shot guns to Australia.

“Because of my experience I would be horrified and negligent if I didn’t speak up and witnessed other people in Australia going through this horror,” she told the ABC. “So I have to. I’m obliged to speak up.”

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The cafe has been turned into a ruin, tucked behind a hedge, forming a sombre memorial garden unnoticed by many visitors to the tourist site. A hardwood cross stands before the cliff face, where it was placed by locals a few days after the murders. It bears a long brass plaque listing 35 names. Every year on 28 April a small group lays a wreath before it and stands in silence at 1.35pm.



“We can’t let these weapons be let back into the country because some would-be bloody army person … decides that, ‘I need an automatic shotgun because I want to go and kill five ducks at once instead of one duck,’ ” Allen says. “How many ducks can you eat?

“Government can’t be tricked so we end up with another Port Arthur, we end up with another lunatic wandering around just killing all those people.”