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Fresh Blood, Old Wounds: Tasmania and Guns
An essay
Fresh Blood, Old Wounds: Tasmania and Guns was first published in Meanjin Volume 55 No. 3 1996 pp 389-394.
Copyright © Carmel Bird 1997.
All rights reserved
ONE MAN SHOT AND KILLED thirty-five people at Port Arthur in Tasmania on Sunday, 28 April
1996.
First news of this grisly event came to me, a Tasmanian, in Melbourne
as I was watching the arts programme on ABC television. By the
convention reserved for very bad or very good news, or for Tattslotto
results, a strip of words ran across the bottom of the screen
every few minutes, repeating the brief facts of the massacre,
gradually adding to the number of corpses. If the name 'Port Arthur'
had not been there; if there had been the name of some other place,
some other state, some other country, the news would have been
horrifying, shocking, wounding. But for Australians, and perhaps
for Tasmanians in particular, the very name of Port Arthur chills,
and it resonates evil; the place is saturated with a dark and
purgatorial past. Even before any details were available, the
thought of the murders themselves, coupled with their occurrence
at Port Arthur in 1996, stirred in my heart and soul a deep dread
which gripped me with a terror akin to the emotions felt during
a recurring nightmare. My blood was chilled, but I was not entirely
surprised. Many of the ugly chapters of Australia's past have
been effectively erased, but torture, suffering, cruelty and death
have always clung to the name 'Port Arthur'.
If that is the case, an innocent stranger might ask, how was it
that so many people were visiting Port Arthur that Sunday? Do
people go there as people visit, for instance, Dachau? Do people
come to pay their respects to the dead of the distant past and
to wonder at the human capacity for evil, suffering and courage?
To remember? To be sure the true past is not forgotten? Not really.
Port Arthur today is a kind of theme park where tourists go to
forget and to enjoy. That is really why it was worth a killer's
while, because innocent visitors were gathered there, eating,
drinking, enjoying the weather and the view, prepared to shudder
on the 'ghost walk', take pictures of each other outside the penitentiary,
to buy post cards and cheap souvenirs.
I do not believe there is any real connection between the historic
horrors of Port Arthur and the killings on 28 April; I think there
is of course a striking conjunction of inhumanity, a dreadful
coincidence, a running together of past and present crimes. All
over the 'civilized' world, acts of similar violence and bloodshed
erupt in sleepy hamlets, shopping malls, universties, skyscrapers
- anywhere that takes a gunman's fancy. However there is a poetic
and thematic link between the events of 1996 and the events of
last century that will forever cause the blood of the modern massacre
to run back into the past, bringing events of the past momentarily
to the fore, and etching the horrors of the present in indelible
images.
Tasmania, formerly Van Diemen's Land, is a small island about
the size of Ireland or Sri Lanka at the south eastern tip of the
continent of Australia.
It's shape, some say, is like a heart; others call it a cunt.
It is, in any case, the butt of many an Australian joke, known
in legend for incest, bestiality, birth defects and freaks. I
recently saw a report of a young Tasmanian woman who has a thriving
business making and selling two-headed Tasmanian dolls. The most
violent and unrestrained prisoners in the penal settlement at
Port Jackson on the Australian mainland were transferred to Van
Diemen's Land in 1803. The commander was John Bowen who was only
twenty-three, and he pitched the first camp in the colony on the
banks of the Derwent River at Risdon. Risdon is now the site of
the Hobart jail where the man accused of shooting the thirty-five
people is being held. Eventually, in 1830, Port Arthur was established
as a prison settlement with thirty-four prisoners and fifteen
soldiers. This company arrived by sea, as the place was then inaccessible
by land. The ocean is treacherous, and tall cliffs of dark stone,
marked by vertical breaks to resemble monstrous organ pipes, provide
the first grim sight of Port Arthur.
I saw those cliffs from a boat when I was a child. I was with
my father and uncle and cousins, and we were fishing for barracuda.
It was cold , rough and misty, and I remember feeling very, very
small and lonely and sad, out on the water, beneath the cliffs.
Last century, convicts constructed solid, handsome buildings from
golden sandstone, and the remains of these, some of them in ruins,
stand today. They stand in tranquillity among green lawns and
soft foliage; roses ramble over crumbling walls. In 1893, forty
years after transportation of British prisoners to Van Diemen's
Land had stopped, and the island's shameful name had been re-written
as 'Tasmania', the Tasmanian Tourist Association was formed. The
aim was to advertise Tasmania as a health resort and pleasure
island, and by 1912, 40,000 visitors were coming to Tasmania each
year to see the beautiful rivers, mountains, forests and beaches.
The buildings at Port Arthur were sold and converted into residences,
hotels, council chambers, but a public demand to retain the historic
penal character of the place persisted, and a curious sensitivity
and ambivalence about the past evolved. On the one hand there
was an urge to wipe out the shame and evil; on the other there
was a desire to sentimentalize, to trivialize, to give, for example,
a cafe the name 'Broad Arrow' in joking reference to the brand
on the convicts' clothing. The Minister for Education ordered
convict records to be burnt in 1914; and yet visitors to Port
Arthur could not resist taking romantic pictures of the prison
walls.
By 1996 Port Arthur was a highly developed tourist facility sixty
kilometres by road from Hobart, with all the comforts of a modern
theme park in a most beautiful sea-side setting, spiced by the
frisson of the convict past.
Enter, the gunman.
This word 'gunman' is actually quite old, from 1624. A lawless
man who uses fire-arms. Whenever I see 'gunman' used in the press,
it looks so blunt, so correct, so very much up to the minute that
I think it must be a modern, made-up word, but it isn't. Perhaps
we use it more often than we used to. It certainly fits the mood
of the times. Lone gunman.
In the Broad Arrow Cafe a young, blonde, lone gunman took a military
assault rifle from his large tennis bag and shot and killed twenty
people. He had two assault rifles, the kind of guns that blow
off limbs, blow large sections of people away. He left the cafe
and killed four people in the car park. He drove to the toll gate
and shot a woman and her small daughter. Her other daughter he
hunted down, and he shot her where she was hiding, behind a gum
tree. He shot four people in a car, took the car and drove to
a gas station where he killed a woman and took a man hostage.
He drove to a guesthouse where he remained throughout the night
with his hostage and the two owners of the guesthouse. All the
dead bodies were guarded where they lay, by police, during the
long, cold night until they could be officially examined and removed
in the light of day. Port Arthur must have been drenched with
blood and reeking; Tasmanian devils are carnivorous. Two months
later, and I often find my imagination flickers with the vision
of the dead child behind the tree, watched over all night like
a sleeping baby. I try to imagine being the watcher. The next
morning the gunman ran burning from the burning house, leaving
the three other people to die, and was captured.
Ambulances, police, camera crews, paramedics, helicopters, relatives,
friends, reporters, politicians, doctors converged on Port Arthur.
The world was able to watch as events unfolded, on television.
We saw over and over again the silent, helpless face of the man
whose wife and little daughters had died; we saw the policeman
who stated, with unbearable, loving simplicity and grief, that
the child had died behind the tree; we saw a body on a gurney
being wheeled again and again towards a helicopter. I began to
imagine I knew the people - their faces, their actions had become
so familiar, like figures in a favourite home movie. The smoking
chimneys at the Seascape guesthouse; the approach to the Fox and
Hounds Hotel where injured people hid from danger.
Then I watched the funerals, over and over, the same ones; many
times I saw the children's coffins, heard their father speak of
the uncertainty of life and happiness. The terrible and touching
memorial services; the silence that fell over most of the country.
There was a service in the open air at Port Arthur, on the grass
with the pinky-golden ruins of the penitentiary in the background.
There was prayer, and the singing of children. I sensed a great,
overarching helplessness, and a heartbreaking fragility that was
masquerading as strength. Everybody knew that, having been so
close to sudden and violent evil, hatred and destruction, they
would never be the same as they had been before. It was as though
some terrible truth had been explained.
And there were two responses -- there was bitter, bitter anger,
with Biblical graffiti: 'An eye for an eye', and there was a powerful
wave of love, goodness and courage. People spoke very quietly
for a time. The sound, at the end of the open air memorial service,
was the wail of the lone piper, a mournful celtic lament.
I saw the strange, brief, televised television hook-up between
the man accused and the court of law. I read a lot of reportage
and speculation about the man's life and state of mind and motives.
Did he really share his bed with a pig? Perhaps. Some newspaper
stories said he did. In any case, the story of the man and his
pig chimes perfectly with the legendary Tasmania where brothers
and sisters are lovers, and where strange creatures are born from
the union of man and beast. Alongside the historical dramas of
Tasmania runs a colourful theme of sexual repression and violence.
One of the most telling modern debates in Tasmania rages around
the laws forbidding homosexuality.
In the vigorous national debate about gun control which has developed
from the massacre at Port Arthur, there has been little mention,
at least in the press, of the sexual meanings of guns. Perhaps
it is so obvious nobody needs to say it; perhaps we are weary
of the clear and inescapable nexus between sex and violence, and
are keen to place sex in the background for a time. The man with
the gun at Port Arthur killed thirty-five people and he effectively
raped the collective imagination of Australia.
As the story unreeled on television, people (helpless, gasping,
clutching for a hold on something they knew they had lost) people
spoke of 'Tasmania's loss of innocence'. If Tasmania was ever
innocent, it was innocent a long, long time ago. Let us never
forget that the people who lived in Tasmania, when John Bowen
and company first camped at Risdon in 1803, were Tasmanian Aborigines,
a unique and distinct race, separate from any of the native people
who lived on mainland Australia. By 1876 there were so very few
of them left alive that it became possible for the official history
to say they had completely died out. Plenty of Tasmanian Aborigines
are living to this day, and yet they must still fight to be recognized
for who they are. Last century they were hunted down, humiliated,
gunned down, massacred. The official history betrays a kind of
pride that a bunch of white men with guns were able to exterminate
a whole race of black people.
And never far from Tasmanian consciousness is the Thylacine, the
Tasmanian Tiger, a small, unique species, last seen in the Hobart
zoo in 1937. The thylacine was effectively hunted into extinction,
but some Tasmanians passionatley believe it is breeding in secret,
believe they have seen it. It is a kind of emblem of a collective
guilt about the past. For the Aborigines we have the myth of extinction;
for the Thylacine we have the myth of survival. Must we be so
perverse? One of my uncles used to call my brother 'Tige', short
for Tasmanian Tiger. And if you go to a grog shop and ask for
six Tigers you will get six bottles of Tasmanian beer.
The image of the hunt runs through the story of Tasmania, and
it is no accident that a hotel should be called the Fox and Hounds.
It was Governor Arthur who organized a series of 'solutions' to
the problems of the relationship between the Aborigines and the
settlers. He is perhaps best known for ordering a military expedition
to round up all the Aborigines and put them in a reserve. It is
cruelly ironic and fitting that the place where the recent massacre
of innocent people occurred was named after Governor Arthur. In
a spurt, a spree of proud and narcissistic cackling violence,
the man with the Armalite AR-15 and the Simonov SKS-46 opened
the way to many old, old wounds which have been suppurating beneath
the surface of Tasmania for years, concealed, but active. There
are far deeper issues than those involved in convicting the killer
and arriving at a penalty -- as if there could ever be one. Even
his extermination would seem, on a scale of things, light retribution.
Guns, violence, sex, racism, secrecy, lies. If the aftermath of
28 April 1996 is to provide a path to healing and sanity, then
those are some of the issues that must be addressed.
--Melbourne, 16 June, 1996
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