The Port Arthur Massacre

Martin Bryant was twenty-eight and lived alone in a Hobart mansion, on a fortune left to him by a reclusive heiress he had befriended at nineteen. On April 28, 1996, he drove a yellow Volvo down the Tasman Peninsula with two semi-automatic rifles in a sports bag, a Colt AR-15 and an L1A1.

He began at the Seascape guesthouse, killing owners David and Noelene Martin. He drove on to the Port Arthur Historic Site and opened fire inside the Broad Arrow Café, killing twelve people in roughly fifteen seconds, then kept shooting in the gift shop and the coach park. On Jetty Road he killed Nanette Mikac and her daughters Alannah and Madeline. At a service station he took Glenn Pears hostage and drove back to Seascape. Thirty-five people were dead and twenty-three wounded.

Police surrounded the guesthouse overnight. It caught fire the next morning and Bryant ran out with severe burns. He pleaded guilty in November 1996 to all seventy-two charges and received thirty-five life sentences without parole. Within two weeks of the massacre Australia’s governments agreed the National Firearms Agreement, which restricted semi-automatic firearms and funded a buyback of some 640,000 guns. A memorial service marked thirty years on April 28, 2026.