The Port Arthur massacre: the media coverup continues
One of the biggest mysteries in Australian history - especially if you believe the official story and can't see what anyone would have to hide - is why the Australian media pays virtually no attention to the Port Arthur massacre whatsoever. This is a subject of endless bafflement to me, given that the tragedy represents the biggest murder case in the annals of modern Australian crime: 35 deaths and 22 injured. Yet the only episodes the media in this country deems to be of public interest are those serving to illustrate the narrative that has been imposed upon the event: the story of collective recovery from trauma and return to normality. Corny as it is, this is the story, the one story, the one and only story. Everything else has slipped down a memory hole.
After the case vanished from the headlines, it lingered on in the public's attention only insofar as it was synonymous with the suffering of just one person: Walter Mikac, a photogenic young pharmacist from the nearby town of Nubeena, whose wife and two young daughters numbered among the casualties. The media strategy from the first was to focus on a person who had been affected by the tragedy in a way that most people could relate to instantly - he had lost his entire family in a few minutes, something most of us dread happening to ourselves - but who conveniently knew nothing about what had happened, because he hadn't been there at the time. He had been playing golf with friends nearby to celebrate his 34th birthday.
BELOW: Walter Mikac with his murdered wife and children:
From the standpoint of the media's obligation to the government to help cover up the crime, Mikac was an ideal personality around whom to orchestrate public sympathy. Since he had not been a witness to the actual shootings, there was little risk of him saying anything that could trigger doubts about the official story. Instantly 'tabloidized' and elevated to the status of one of the best known people in the country, he became the subject of a media-directed psychodrama that succeeded in identifying the nation with his personal recovery process to the exclusion of almost everything else about the case that actually mattered. It would not be an exaggeration to observe that the better part of everything that has appeared in print or on television relating to the massacre over the last ten years has been about how Mikac was coping. When he remarried in 2000 and started a new family, therefore, it symbolized an Australia which had at last put the massacre behind it and embraced normality again.
But whether or not you regard Mikac's tragedy and subsequent remarriage as a legitimate human interest story, the attention the media devoted to his recovery was entirely tactical: it was part of a cunning strategy to divert attention from the actual victims of the carnage and from those who had watched the tragedy unfold. While the media is always happy to focus on Mikac - who 1) wasn't a victim himself and 2) shows no tendencies to ask uncomfortable questions - it has no interest in anyone who might actually know something about the case. After an initial wave of attention, most of these people have vanished into thin air. Some of them, no doubt, were planted witnesses using false identities, but others would have been genuine victims. Among the latter group, there are, no doubt, many who would only welcome the opportunity to put their experiences on the public record. But it is not hard to see why the media is not interested in giving them a forum: they might raise questions as to what had really happened that day, while others might go so far as to denounce the official story. (At least one of the eyewitnesses, Wendy Scurr has done so publicly. As a volunteer emergency services worker, she was of some interest to the media up until the point at which she announced her conviction that there had been a government coverup.)
Another striking absence over the last ten years is the young woman who was allegedly Martin Bryant's girlfriend at the time of the massacre, Petra Wilmott. You'd think that sooner or later 'the girlfriend' would talk - that she'd unburden herself of such matters as her impressions of Bryant, the complex emotions she must have felt when she first learned that he had been declared responsible for the massacre and how the ordeal has changed her life. Yet although the tabloids would be able to offer considerable financial inducement to this woman if they actually wanted to interview her, she made no media appearances after the first anniversary of the tragedy in 1997 and did not resurface for its tenth anniversary a few days ago (when, to tell you the truth, I was almost certain she would reappear). Nothing could be more suspicious - or suggestive of the possibility that she was part of the conspiracy to set Bryant up as a patsy - than her enigmatic non-existence since 1997. It seems the media is not interested in finding her.
Above all, the media is firmly resolved to suppress information about the alleged perpetrator, 29 year-old Martin Bryant. The official line is that people shouldn't talk about Bryant because it's not good to give him any more 'publicity.' (The reasoning seems to be that mass murderers kill because they crave attention, and if we so delve into their backgrounds and their motives, we are helping them win by giving them what they want.)
The public's intelligence is clearly insulted by this preposterous idea. As Gary Linnell, editor of the magazine The Bulletin, stated in an Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) interview, 'Here is someone who killed 35 people, here is someone who transformed the gun laws in this country, who had a major effect on the Prime Ministership of John Howard, and to simply ignore him and walk away from him and pretend that he never existed and that it never happened, is to me, it just staggers me. It absolutely staggers me. And I just wonder what sort of society we're living in, if people are [I assume he means 'aren't'] asking those sort of questions.' (SOURCE)
The striking fact Linnell seems to have overlooked is that Australians have actually been living in a society in which it has been deemed unfit to ask such questions for some ten years now. The mystery is whether the Australian government has implemented this almost total blackout on discussion of the Port Arthur tragedy by means of the carrot or the stick.
Back in 2000, a critic of the official narrative of the massacre, retired policeman Andrew S. MacGregor, related having been informed that Port Arthur was subject to a D-notice (short for Defence Notice), that is to say, an official government request not to discuss a particular subject. For those who don't know anything about D-notices, they were created by the English government in 1912 as a means of deterring the press from publishing information that might have been of value to England's then enemy, Germany. It is generally stated that they are voluntary, but this is a total fiction; they are in fact perceived by newspaper editors as direct orders from the government. The Guardian, for example, has several times pulled items from its website the instant a D-notice was served. (Example here)
The D-Notice system was introduced into Australia in 1952 by the conservative prime minister Robert Menzies and is administered by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). In 1977, under the Fraser government - the government in which the present prime minister John Howard was treasurer - a D-Notice was issued on matters relating to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). (SOURCE) 'The overseas spy service has always been the most secretive member of the Australian intelligence establishment. Its existence wasn't officially acknowledged until 1977, and it was placed on a legislative footing only in 2001.' (SOURCE)
Although some members of the Australian public are under the misapprehension that the D-Notice system is defunct, this is not the case. The DSD may be defunct (it has not met since 1982), but all pre-existing D-Notices, including that on ASIS, remain in force. If the Port Arthur massacre was orchestrated by ASIS, then the Australian media is prohibited by means of the 1977 D-Notice from discussing the case.
A brief digression is required to consider the question of whether ASIS could have carried out such a monstrous crime as the Port Arthur massacre. The very fact that ASIS operations are exempt from media scrutiny (or they were at least until 2001) makes it the first organization that should be suspected of involvement. It would certainly make a great deal of sense for this blackest of black ops to have been organized and executed by the only instrument of the Australian government whose activities the media are not allowed to talk about. However, there is a second reason why ASIS looks like a prime candidate: from the inception of the organization in 1952 until 2001, it appears to have been subject to no legal restrictions whatever.
Let's assemble a few relevant facts about ASIS. Although its priority is the collection of foreign intelligence, its operations are not confined to intelligence gathering and it is not barred from conducting operations inside Australia. In fact, ASIS is known to have conducted training exercises in Australia: in 1983, it carried out 'a bungled training exercise at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne ... during which ASIS recruits bailed up hotel management with machine guns. In the resulting uproar, ASIS was ordered to stop paramilitary activities and to drop the use of firearms.' (SOURCE)
The million dollar question is whether ASIS genuinely ceased such operations after the Sheraton Hotel debacle, or whether it simply got better at concealing them. It may be no accident that the mass shootings that took place in Australia all took place shortly afterwards, the first two occurring in Melbourne in 1987. A theory I would certainly consider plausible, therefore, is that the Port Arthur massacre was an ASIS counter-terrorist exercise whose eventual mutation into a real massacre was brought about by through the machinations of its top officers (presumably in response to instructions that originated elsewhere).
Astonishingly, ASIS may even have been authorized to commit such horrendous acts in 1996, or at least was not expressly prohibited from committing them. According to an ABC report, it was not until the Intelligence Services Act of 2001 that legislation existed that actually prohibited ASIS from planning or undertaking 'paramilitary activities or activities involving violence against the person or the use of weapons.' (SOURCE) If no such restrictions on ASIS existed in 1996, there would seem no reason why it could not have conducted 'paramilitary activities' and 'activities involving violence against the person' and 'the use of weapons' at Port Arthur. After all, if such restrictions had constrained the organization in 1996, what was the point of the 2001 legislation?
But whether or not a D-Notice on ASIS operations has been responsible for the media's silence about the Port Arthur massacre, it is in any case clearly not the only censorship weapon in the government's arsenal. The media coverage of the massacre implies that a shift to the more sophisticated (and probably much more expensive) methods used by the United States government to control and manipulate public opinion has taken place and are in use here as well. The ABC article that discusses the decision by the editor of the Bulletin to publish an article on Martin Bryant yields a number of insights into the nature of the strategies that have been employed to suppress discussion of the massacre.
What this article reveals is that in addition to the asinine and insulting argument that talking about Bryant only gives him extra publicity, there is the idea that nothing should be written that might injure the sensitivities of the victims. Such rhetoric is disingenuous, because it's not always clear who the victims actually are and whether any particular individual (such as Walter Mikac) can legitimately be presented to the public as a spokesperson for the victims. It also presumes to speak on behalf of the victims, even though there is no evidence to suggest that there are not among the survivors many who are suspicious of the official story and would like to see it scrutinized more carefully.
In this case, the article actually suggests that priority should go to respecting the sensitivities of the 'Port Arthur community,' whose alleged spokesperson is Peter Roche, owner and operator of the Port Arthur Historical Site ferry service. Gerald Tooth, the ABC journalist interviewing Gary Linnell of The Bulletin, goes so far as to imply that anything being published about the case ought to possess the express sanction of the 'Port Arthur community.' Like any serious journalist, Linnell seems puzzled by the suggestion:
Gerald Tooth: How much consultation with the community did you engage in before you did this story, and were you aware of a forum that was held recently in Hobart, discussing this very topic of reporting the anniversary? ... how did you go about consulting with the community there before publishing this story?
Garry Linnell: Well I don't understand what you mean by consulting - with which community?
Gerald Tooth: The Port Arthur community.(SOURCE)
The ABC report - which misleadingly implies that the 'Port Arthur community' was the chief victim of the massacre (most of the casualties were in fact not locals but tourists from all over the world) - seems to be nothing more than an attempted public shaming of Linnell for having had the audacity to deal with the question of Martin Bryant's background without allowing this nebulous creation the 'Port Arthur community' to decide whether he may do so. (Since Peter Roche is the sole representative of the Port Arthur community interviewed in this report, are we to assume that Linnell is obliged to not publish anything that Roche would not want to see published?)
This kind of media coverage is typical of that which has appeared over the last ten years in that it panders to - and thereby helps perpetuate - a host of taboos that were erected in place within a few months of the massacre that cumulatively inhibit the objective discussion of the case. These include 'don't give Bryant publicity,' 'spare the sensitivities of the local people,' 'don't add to the burden of the suffering of the victims' 'we have to put the tragedy behind us' etc. etc.
If there is one reason why the Australian media has been successful in suppressing discussion of the most heinous crime in modern Australian history, it is because examination of what happened is blocked by a wall of bogus hypersensitivity. No matter which aspect of the case one looks into, one encounters the idea that it is insensitive or even sacrilegious to pry there. Don't ask question about Bryant, don't interview any witnesses - this would only upset them by forcing them to relive their dreadful experiences - and, above all, don't get into the forensics of the case. The only legitimate subject for discussion is, of course, how Walter Mikac is getting on.
FURTHER READING: Moyra Grant, "The D Notice."
Ned Wood, "The Port Arthur Massacre 10 Years On: The Secrecy Continues."
After the case vanished from the headlines, it lingered on in the public's attention only insofar as it was synonymous with the suffering of just one person: Walter Mikac, a photogenic young pharmacist from the nearby town of Nubeena, whose wife and two young daughters numbered among the casualties. The media strategy from the first was to focus on a person who had been affected by the tragedy in a way that most people could relate to instantly - he had lost his entire family in a few minutes, something most of us dread happening to ourselves - but who conveniently knew nothing about what had happened, because he hadn't been there at the time. He had been playing golf with friends nearby to celebrate his 34th birthday.
BELOW: Walter Mikac with his murdered wife and children:
From the standpoint of the media's obligation to the government to help cover up the crime, Mikac was an ideal personality around whom to orchestrate public sympathy. Since he had not been a witness to the actual shootings, there was little risk of him saying anything that could trigger doubts about the official story. Instantly 'tabloidized' and elevated to the status of one of the best known people in the country, he became the subject of a media-directed psychodrama that succeeded in identifying the nation with his personal recovery process to the exclusion of almost everything else about the case that actually mattered. It would not be an exaggeration to observe that the better part of everything that has appeared in print or on television relating to the massacre over the last ten years has been about how Mikac was coping. When he remarried in 2000 and started a new family, therefore, it symbolized an Australia which had at last put the massacre behind it and embraced normality again.
But whether or not you regard Mikac's tragedy and subsequent remarriage as a legitimate human interest story, the attention the media devoted to his recovery was entirely tactical: it was part of a cunning strategy to divert attention from the actual victims of the carnage and from those who had watched the tragedy unfold. While the media is always happy to focus on Mikac - who 1) wasn't a victim himself and 2) shows no tendencies to ask uncomfortable questions - it has no interest in anyone who might actually know something about the case. After an initial wave of attention, most of these people have vanished into thin air. Some of them, no doubt, were planted witnesses using false identities, but others would have been genuine victims. Among the latter group, there are, no doubt, many who would only welcome the opportunity to put their experiences on the public record. But it is not hard to see why the media is not interested in giving them a forum: they might raise questions as to what had really happened that day, while others might go so far as to denounce the official story. (At least one of the eyewitnesses, Wendy Scurr has done so publicly. As a volunteer emergency services worker, she was of some interest to the media up until the point at which she announced her conviction that there had been a government coverup.)
Another striking absence over the last ten years is the young woman who was allegedly Martin Bryant's girlfriend at the time of the massacre, Petra Wilmott. You'd think that sooner or later 'the girlfriend' would talk - that she'd unburden herself of such matters as her impressions of Bryant, the complex emotions she must have felt when she first learned that he had been declared responsible for the massacre and how the ordeal has changed her life. Yet although the tabloids would be able to offer considerable financial inducement to this woman if they actually wanted to interview her, she made no media appearances after the first anniversary of the tragedy in 1997 and did not resurface for its tenth anniversary a few days ago (when, to tell you the truth, I was almost certain she would reappear). Nothing could be more suspicious - or suggestive of the possibility that she was part of the conspiracy to set Bryant up as a patsy - than her enigmatic non-existence since 1997. It seems the media is not interested in finding her.
Above all, the media is firmly resolved to suppress information about the alleged perpetrator, 29 year-old Martin Bryant. The official line is that people shouldn't talk about Bryant because it's not good to give him any more 'publicity.' (The reasoning seems to be that mass murderers kill because they crave attention, and if we so delve into their backgrounds and their motives, we are helping them win by giving them what they want.)
The public's intelligence is clearly insulted by this preposterous idea. As Gary Linnell, editor of the magazine The Bulletin, stated in an Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) interview, 'Here is someone who killed 35 people, here is someone who transformed the gun laws in this country, who had a major effect on the Prime Ministership of John Howard, and to simply ignore him and walk away from him and pretend that he never existed and that it never happened, is to me, it just staggers me. It absolutely staggers me. And I just wonder what sort of society we're living in, if people are [I assume he means 'aren't'] asking those sort of questions.' (SOURCE)
The striking fact Linnell seems to have overlooked is that Australians have actually been living in a society in which it has been deemed unfit to ask such questions for some ten years now. The mystery is whether the Australian government has implemented this almost total blackout on discussion of the Port Arthur tragedy by means of the carrot or the stick.
Back in 2000, a critic of the official narrative of the massacre, retired policeman Andrew S. MacGregor, related having been informed that Port Arthur was subject to a D-notice (short for Defence Notice), that is to say, an official government request not to discuss a particular subject. For those who don't know anything about D-notices, they were created by the English government in 1912 as a means of deterring the press from publishing information that might have been of value to England's then enemy, Germany. It is generally stated that they are voluntary, but this is a total fiction; they are in fact perceived by newspaper editors as direct orders from the government. The Guardian, for example, has several times pulled items from its website the instant a D-notice was served. (Example here)
The D-Notice system was introduced into Australia in 1952 by the conservative prime minister Robert Menzies and is administered by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). In 1977, under the Fraser government - the government in which the present prime minister John Howard was treasurer - a D-Notice was issued on matters relating to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). (SOURCE) 'The overseas spy service has always been the most secretive member of the Australian intelligence establishment. Its existence wasn't officially acknowledged until 1977, and it was placed on a legislative footing only in 2001.' (SOURCE)
Although some members of the Australian public are under the misapprehension that the D-Notice system is defunct, this is not the case. The DSD may be defunct (it has not met since 1982), but all pre-existing D-Notices, including that on ASIS, remain in force. If the Port Arthur massacre was orchestrated by ASIS, then the Australian media is prohibited by means of the 1977 D-Notice from discussing the case.
A brief digression is required to consider the question of whether ASIS could have carried out such a monstrous crime as the Port Arthur massacre. The very fact that ASIS operations are exempt from media scrutiny (or they were at least until 2001) makes it the first organization that should be suspected of involvement. It would certainly make a great deal of sense for this blackest of black ops to have been organized and executed by the only instrument of the Australian government whose activities the media are not allowed to talk about. However, there is a second reason why ASIS looks like a prime candidate: from the inception of the organization in 1952 until 2001, it appears to have been subject to no legal restrictions whatever.
Let's assemble a few relevant facts about ASIS. Although its priority is the collection of foreign intelligence, its operations are not confined to intelligence gathering and it is not barred from conducting operations inside Australia. In fact, ASIS is known to have conducted training exercises in Australia: in 1983, it carried out 'a bungled training exercise at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne ... during which ASIS recruits bailed up hotel management with machine guns. In the resulting uproar, ASIS was ordered to stop paramilitary activities and to drop the use of firearms.' (SOURCE)
The million dollar question is whether ASIS genuinely ceased such operations after the Sheraton Hotel debacle, or whether it simply got better at concealing them. It may be no accident that the mass shootings that took place in Australia all took place shortly afterwards, the first two occurring in Melbourne in 1987. A theory I would certainly consider plausible, therefore, is that the Port Arthur massacre was an ASIS counter-terrorist exercise whose eventual mutation into a real massacre was brought about by through the machinations of its top officers (presumably in response to instructions that originated elsewhere).
Astonishingly, ASIS may even have been authorized to commit such horrendous acts in 1996, or at least was not expressly prohibited from committing them. According to an ABC report, it was not until the Intelligence Services Act of 2001 that legislation existed that actually prohibited ASIS from planning or undertaking 'paramilitary activities or activities involving violence against the person or the use of weapons.' (SOURCE) If no such restrictions on ASIS existed in 1996, there would seem no reason why it could not have conducted 'paramilitary activities' and 'activities involving violence against the person' and 'the use of weapons' at Port Arthur. After all, if such restrictions had constrained the organization in 1996, what was the point of the 2001 legislation?
But whether or not a D-Notice on ASIS operations has been responsible for the media's silence about the Port Arthur massacre, it is in any case clearly not the only censorship weapon in the government's arsenal. The media coverage of the massacre implies that a shift to the more sophisticated (and probably much more expensive) methods used by the United States government to control and manipulate public opinion has taken place and are in use here as well. The ABC article that discusses the decision by the editor of the Bulletin to publish an article on Martin Bryant yields a number of insights into the nature of the strategies that have been employed to suppress discussion of the massacre.
What this article reveals is that in addition to the asinine and insulting argument that talking about Bryant only gives him extra publicity, there is the idea that nothing should be written that might injure the sensitivities of the victims. Such rhetoric is disingenuous, because it's not always clear who the victims actually are and whether any particular individual (such as Walter Mikac) can legitimately be presented to the public as a spokesperson for the victims. It also presumes to speak on behalf of the victims, even though there is no evidence to suggest that there are not among the survivors many who are suspicious of the official story and would like to see it scrutinized more carefully.
In this case, the article actually suggests that priority should go to respecting the sensitivities of the 'Port Arthur community,' whose alleged spokesperson is Peter Roche, owner and operator of the Port Arthur Historical Site ferry service. Gerald Tooth, the ABC journalist interviewing Gary Linnell of The Bulletin, goes so far as to imply that anything being published about the case ought to possess the express sanction of the 'Port Arthur community.' Like any serious journalist, Linnell seems puzzled by the suggestion:
Gerald Tooth: How much consultation with the community did you engage in before you did this story, and were you aware of a forum that was held recently in Hobart, discussing this very topic of reporting the anniversary? ... how did you go about consulting with the community there before publishing this story?
Garry Linnell: Well I don't understand what you mean by consulting - with which community?
Gerald Tooth: The Port Arthur community.(SOURCE)
The ABC report - which misleadingly implies that the 'Port Arthur community' was the chief victim of the massacre (most of the casualties were in fact not locals but tourists from all over the world) - seems to be nothing more than an attempted public shaming of Linnell for having had the audacity to deal with the question of Martin Bryant's background without allowing this nebulous creation the 'Port Arthur community' to decide whether he may do so. (Since Peter Roche is the sole representative of the Port Arthur community interviewed in this report, are we to assume that Linnell is obliged to not publish anything that Roche would not want to see published?)
This kind of media coverage is typical of that which has appeared over the last ten years in that it panders to - and thereby helps perpetuate - a host of taboos that were erected in place within a few months of the massacre that cumulatively inhibit the objective discussion of the case. These include 'don't give Bryant publicity,' 'spare the sensitivities of the local people,' 'don't add to the burden of the suffering of the victims' 'we have to put the tragedy behind us' etc. etc.
If there is one reason why the Australian media has been successful in suppressing discussion of the most heinous crime in modern Australian history, it is because examination of what happened is blocked by a wall of bogus hypersensitivity. No matter which aspect of the case one looks into, one encounters the idea that it is insensitive or even sacrilegious to pry there. Don't ask question about Bryant, don't interview any witnesses - this would only upset them by forcing them to relive their dreadful experiences - and, above all, don't get into the forensics of the case. The only legitimate subject for discussion is, of course, how Walter Mikac is getting on.
FURTHER READING: Moyra Grant, "The D Notice."
Ned Wood, "The Port Arthur Massacre 10 Years On: The Secrecy Continues."
