Could Martin Bryant have been stopped before the Port Arthur massacre?

Sometimes it’s easier to forget the past, especially if it’s painful. But Denham Hitchcock argues we must listen to new evidence about Martin Bryant.

Opinion: What if I told you the 35 people killed at Port Arthur were not Martin Bryant’s first victims?

Upsetting, sure.

But if I added that Port Arthur would never have happened if people had been listened to …

Quite rightly, you would be furious.

It’s been 25 years since Martin Bryant went on his hate-filled rampage at Port Arthur, 25 years since Australia’s worst mass murder.

Thirty-five people killed, and a nation’s identity wounded along with it.

No longer was it “something that happened in America”, it was on our doorstep and in of all places, the Apple Isle.

“We don’t talk about that down here …” The rebuke was delivered with an icy stare and a firm indication that the conversation was over.

Welcome to Tasmania.

We had travelled down south because we heard a rumour.

Rumours that turned into half-truths that became fragments of stories.

Those accounts seemed to echo others we had read, or videos watched in the dusty vaults of the 7NEWS archives.

Martin Bryant as a younger man, before the Port Arthur massacre.

But we were getting nowhere on the phone, a story like this requires boots on the ground, and it seemed Tasmania was trying to forget that horrific event ever happened, so we packed our bags.

Martin Bryant had the kind of upbringing you would expect from a man who committed such crimes.

Cruel to animals. Prone to fits of rage. Socially awkward and, for good measure, add a love of guns.

But his friendship with Helen Harvey, a wealthy heiress to the Tattersalls lotto fortune would raise eyebrows in the local town.

Even more when he moved in with her, a woman 35 years his senior.

They would travel everywhere together in Helen’s car, and mostly she would drive.

Helen’s next-door neighbour was a tough, straight talking farmer by the name of Barry Featherstone.

She came to him one day asking for help – her car was stuck in a ditch down the road, and she was rattled: “That little bastard is going to kill me one day,” he says she told him. “That’s the third time he’s done that, grabbed the wheel while I was driving and ran me off the road.”

A few weeks later at the same spot, on the same road, Helen Harvey lost her life in a car accident.

Martin Bryant's Dark Secrets reporter Demham Hitchcock explains what they found. Picture: Channel 7

Her car had run off the road again and, yet again, Martin Bryant was in the passenger seat.

Barry went to the morgue to identify Ms Harvey’s body, he had lost his neighbour and a friend, and he was upset.

He went to the police and he gave a statement that was unequivocal – Martin Bryant killed Helen Harvey.

Barry Featherstone never heard from the police again.

One year later Bryant’s father Maurice Bryant died by drowning.

It happened in a small dam at Martin’s place.

We spoke to the police officers who found the body and their story is hard to believe, even for them.

Martin Bryant's Dark Secrets will air toinght. Picture: Channel 7

Martin laughing, hitting on female police officers, while they searched for his father’s body.

They found him eventually, waterlogged and decomposing at the bottom of the dam.

He had Martin’s diving weight belt around his neck.

Helen Harvey died in 1992. Maurice Bryant in 1993. The massacre at Port Arthur three years after that.

Long lost archives we found in a little-known library in Tasmania confirm Martin Bryant received well over half a million dollars and several properties, after the deaths of Helen Harvey and his very own father.

Money he used to purchase some of the weapons he carried to Port Arthur on that fateful day.

Money that gave him time and resources to brood, and to plan.

Sometimes it’s easier to forget the past, especially if it’s painful.

But censoring or hiding from the truth means we can never learn from it.

It may have taken 25 years, but this time the witnesses to Martin Bryant’s dark secrets finally decided to speak and I thank them for it.

They weren’t listened to at the time, but we will all hear them now.

7NEWS Spotlight: Martin Bryant’s Dark Secrets airs tonight at 7pm on Channel 7 and 7plus

Originally published as Could Martin Bryant have been stopped before the Port Arthur massacre?