Mother’s Day in Australia. Can We Hurry the Port Arthur Case?
By Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

Oh to be in Oz, now that Mother’s Day’s there. Probably not, though, if you are the Mum of the Tasmanian “convict” Martin Bryant. He has just “celebrated” his 20th anniversary of imprisonment, with no end in sight. This has to do with the Port Arthur massacre in which the intellectually impaired Bryant was the patsy.

I won’t attempt to tell the full story but in an article today at Gumshoe News, Dee McLachlan sheds new light. She compares it to Norman Minetta’s testimony at the 9-11 Commission (roughly: Biggus Dickus saw a plane headed towards the Pentagon and told an unidentified young man to not press any buttons that would interfere with the rest of the journey).

Capture the Baddy - NOT

There was a similar “stand-down” at Port Arthur in 1996. Cops wanted to shoot the gunman but were told to hold off for about 16 hours. We think the man inside the Seascape cottage was someone other than Bryant, and it would have just ruined everything, wouldn’t it, if police had gone in and captured Mr X by mistake.

(There’s no shortage of guesses as to who Mr X is. If this happened in the United States you’d say it was SWAT, FBI, DEA, something like that.)

An Australian citizen who has been fighting the injustice for years, Stewart Beattie, author of “A Gunsmith’s Notebook for Port Arthur,” chose today (which also happens to be Martin Bryant’s 49th birthday) to come forward with a very telling recollection.

It took place in a cemetery. Are you ready for this? Get out the Wuthering Heights music. A man who was an insider in 1996 (Tony Catlin, God bless him) had a friend in the Australian Police Force who admitted what several of the locals already knew. Please realize that the lower part of Tasmania was still pretty rural, and the fire service is run even now by volunteers.

(The choice of the cemetery as the location for a chat had to do with privacy, I assume.)

Listening to CB Radio

The present generation may not recognize the term “CB radio,” but it was the iPhone of its day. Citizen-band radio allowed one party to talk to another and anyone in the vicinity could listen in. During the siege of Seascape, two cops, now identified as Pat Allen and Garry Whittles, called in on the radio “We have the gunman in sight. Permission to shoot.”

The rumor has always been that the locals were listening -- indeed the local firefighters and SES folks (“Special Emergency Service”) are tasked with listening in. They said the reply to the cops from the boss was “Permission denied. This must happen.”

Hello? WHAT must happen? Thirty-five people were murdered at Port Arthur that day. All part of a script? So to get back to Tony Catlin in the cemetery, that is where he passed the goss to Beattie -- but with the added info that persons in Canberra had clarified the “Permission Denied” bit.

This led two members of AFP – Australian Federal Police -- to hand in their resignation. I would like to send them a medal.

ABC Radio on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Massacre

Moreover, and this news is up to the minute: one of the two cops who was ordered to stay his hand at Seascape – Pat Allen -- went on ABC radio, in country New South Wales, on April 28, 2016. He said he was prevented even from helping hostages. (A “hostage situation” allows for federal police involvement, BTW.)

The host of the Anne Delaney Breakfast Show let the cop speak. He said:

“We followed what we were supposed to do. But it doesn’t make you feel any better about yourself. It does make you wonder if ahh, especially in particular the last hostage was executed while we were cowering in the ditch. That’s a big thing to live with.”

ABC: So that is the way it happened? Allen: "Yes. Absolutely."

ABC: Pat Allen took six (6) months off The Job after the massacre.

Allen: "I just turned into a different person. Shocking. Just angry ...all the time."

The Larry Silverstein Comparison

As every man, woman, and child in the world now knows, the leaseholder of the WTC, Larry Silverstein, said, in regard to Building 7:

"I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."

In Tasmania, the unlucky Martin Bryant was still in the cottage on Monday morning April 29 when it inexplicably burned down. He came staggering out with his clothes on fire. The judge found him guilty of arson but that is preposterous. We figure a well-trained person threw a phosphorus grenade in.

In Port Arthur, the police superintendent, Bob Fielding, spoke directly into the news camera on the day, or shortly after, and he has been viewed a kazillion times on Youtube. Fielding’s words about the arrest of suspect Bryant:

“At the end of the day, I’m satisfied that we made the right decision in fact waiting and forcing him to come to us as opposed to vice versa.”

Personally, I think that requires no analysis.

Gumshoe News’s Involvement

I am the assistant editor at a Melbourne news shop (alternative, of course). We have become a clearinghouse in the Port Arthur mystery. One of our writers, Cherri Bonney has a petition at Change.org with 2290 signatures so far. If you care about this case, please add your John Hancock.

Our new book, “Port Arthur: Enough Is Enough,” is a free download at GumshoeNews.com. At the bottom of this page is a link to an article about Re-Opening the Bryant case on the basis of fresh evidence of innocence. It got 108 comments, none from trolls!

Chapter 22 of the book contains my original contribution “The Independent DPP: You Could Knock Me Over with a Feather!” Quite by chance I came to notice – surely I can’t be the only person who has noticed – that the role of Director of Public Prosecution is…um… privatized.

Unlike in the US, this prosecutor does not answer to the Attorney General – or anyone. He is not obliged to go along with a nolle prosequi (“Stop prosecuting that poor bugger”) from the state premier or anyone else.

This led to my trying out the idea on a Youtube video. I named my quarry as Damian Bugg, but that proved inaccurate on two counts. One, he is no longer DPP of Tassie, and Two, there was legislation back in ’24 to abolish the Writ of Outlawry.

Nonetheless, in 1996, Damian Bugg did a prosecution of Martin Bryant for the Port Arthur killings that can at least hold its own with what Carmen Ortiz was able to do in the Marathon bombing trial of Jahar Tsarnaev in 2015. And that is saying something.

(Note: On the GumshoeNews website, a click of the Boston button will bring you high quality court-watch articles about the Marathon by Josée Lépine and Cheryl Dean.)

Here is the Law-of-Outlawry vid:

-- Mary W Maxwell can be reached at her website maryWmaxwell dot com.