Behind the lines: Former SOG officer will never forget Martin Bryant’s ‘crazy, lifeless eyes’
Former Victorian SOG officer Don Stokes will never forget the moment he stared into mass murderer Martin Bryant’s “crazy, lifeless eyes” as they took him down for the Port Arthur massacre, with the cold-blooded killer screaming revenge.
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Don Stokes saw “a lot of crazy people” during his 14 years in the crack Special Operations Group. But none compare to Martin Bryant.
“We sent the assault teams forward and called the ambulance in, and I remember looking at him as he lay on his back on the stretcher,” he recalls nearly 25 years after Bryant’s murderous rampage at Port Arthur.
“I looked into his two vivid cobalt blue eyes, and I’ve never looked into two more crazy, lifeless eyes in all my life. And he was screaming hysterically ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’.
“Thankfully, that was the last I’ve ever seen of Martin Bryant”.
Seventeen hours earlier, Stokes had been happily mowing the lawns at his home in Melbourne’s northern suburbs on a perfect autumn Sunday afternoon. Then a telephone call from Tasmania changed his plans.
A cry for help from another state police force, and the need for almost instant deployment, was hardly routine. But Stokes, the on-call Officer for the SOG that weekend, had things organised in the time it takes to make a dozen phone calls.
“We took two teams – about 12 blokes – and got two charter flights from Essendon. We landed in Hobart in the late afternoon, but we were held up for a while there because a senior TasPol officer insisted on having us all sworn in individually,” he says.
“It turned into a bit of a fiasco really, because we’re at a police station waiting to get down there and give the locals a hand and this officer is saying we have to be formally sworn into the local force while we’re there, but he can’t find a bible!
“He finished up instructing his driver to go to the Tasmania Police Academy and bring back a bible, which took about 40 minutes, and then he swore us in.
“It was quite late at night when we actually got down to the siege situation and were able to get in and relieve the beleaguered Tasmanian guys, who were very thin on the ground.
Bryant had shot dead 35 men, women and children during the afternoon in one of the world’s worst shooting rampages. At least 20 others were wounded as the man with the cobalt eyes and a bag full of guns roamed the Port Arthur penal colony tourist precinct, shooting at random.
About 2pm, he returned to Seascape, a guesthouse by the water on the Tasman Peninsula, with a hostage in the boot of a car he had commandeered. The massacre had started at the guesthouse just before midday, when he shot dead the owners and headed for Port Arthur.
Bryant was armed with two semiautomatic rifles, a 12-gauge shotgun, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, handcuffs, rope, a hunting knife and cans of petrol.
“ When we got to Seascape he was up on the second floor, with 500 metres of flat ground and a clear view in every direction. He could see the highway from the upper level and he’d shot out the lights. He was just firing shots all over the place, and he had the police pinned down in the stormwater drain.
“He was clearly highly vigilant and had weapons propped up against every window, and he was going from one to another and firing at anything that moved.
“We considered the potential of a drive-up assault, but we assessed there would definitely be multiple casualties, given the clear, flat approach in every direction.
Another complication was the fact that police could not be sure whether the couple who owned the guesthouse, and the hostage, were dead or alive inside.
But that dilemma, and the decision on their next move to end the siege, was taken out of their hands in spectacular fashion when Seascape suddenly started to burn.
“If the fire hadn’t started we would have had to resolve the situation. We had access to a number of assault vehicle and we’d sourced a bulldozer from a local farmer. That was our plan … a drive -up assault, potentially using the dozer for cover.
“The fire quickly turned into an absolute inferno. We had downlink footage and were watching on a full colour screen in our command post.
“I remember saying to Hank Timmerman, who was my counterpart charge of the Tasmanian troops, there was no way anyone could be inside and still be alive, and as soon as I said it Bryant burst out of the cottage – naked and on fire!
“It was quite a chilly morning and he ran about 50 metres into a grass paddock, then started to roll around in the wet grass to put the fire out.
“Hank said he’d send the assault teams forward, and I gave him a wink and said Bryant could have a gun concealed in the grass somewhere, so maybe we should wait until the fire goes out.”
They moved in, and for the first and only time Stokes came eye-to-eye with the most crazed killer he’d encountered.
Within two weeks of the shootings, Australia had stricter new gun laws and a buyback scheme aimed at reducing the number of firearms in the community. Almost 650,000 newly banned guns were handed in nationally.
Stokes spent a total of 14 years in two stints with the SOG, which was formed in 1977. He regards it as the best trained and equipped paramilitary group in the country.
He performed hundreds of high-risk operations, including the arrests of four armed Pentridge prison escapees, the hunt for the Russell Street bombers, a six-month operation to protect supergrass Gianfranco Tizzoni and the rescue of four children taken hostage at a Hawthorn kindergarten in 1989 and held for seven hours by a man who doused them in petrol and threatened to set them alight. Stokes, widely known in police circles as “Coach”, was commended for his role in Project Beacon, which introduced major changes to police operational training and tactics in the mid-90s.
Every operational member of the force was compelled to complete a five-day retraining course in defensive tactics, firearms use and conflict resolution in response to police and community concerns about the increased use of force.
He joined the SOG in mid-1982 as a team leader. At the age of 36, he was at that time the oldest recruit to complete the incredibly gruelling SOG entry course.
Stokes, was raised in Broken Hill and worked underground in the mines before joining Victoria Police when he was 26. He retired in 2006 and is now 74, but still looks fit enough to give aspiring SOG members a run for their money …. whatever their gender.
He treads carefully when asked his view on recent suggestions that it’s only a matter of time before women are welcomed into the elite counter-terrorism squad.
“I don’t care about their race, creed or gender, as long as they are up to the required standard and they pass the required tests and they’re an effective team member.”
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