One spur-of-the-moment hug after a mass shooting brought gun bans and changed our history

IT is 18 years since 35 people died in a mass shooting at Port Arthur. PATRICK CARLYON interviews former PM John Howard on how that day changed a nation.

John Howard now describes this as his one mistake in the gun debate. He wore a bulletproo

JOHN Howard laid a wreath at the cafe where 12 diners died in 15 seconds. He passed a teddy bear and three bunches of flowers — this was the spot where a mother and her daughters fell because they ran the wrong way.

Howard felt the loneliness of the place, this piece of Tasmanian Gothic and its distant legacies of misery. He had carried a nation’s disbelief since Sunday afternoon, three days earlier, when his press secretary Tony O’Leary rang at his brand new lodgings at Kirribilli House and told him to “flick on your TV”.

Yet an idea was forming, a notion that skirted the “why” of 35 deaths (even now, on the 18th anniversary, no one can answer this question) and instead sought to tackle the “how”.

The “sheer, windy, grim desolation” of Port Arthur opened a sad day. Later, the nation watched, paused and gulped at images beamed from a memorial service at St David’s Cathedral in Hobart.

There, Howard met Dr Bryan Walpole on the steps.

Walpole and his medical team had identified Nanette Mikac and her daughters Alannah, 6, and Madeline, 3.

He had patched up tourists torn open in close-range horrors from two semiautomatic weapons, an Armalite rifle and an SKS assault weapon.

Walpole was spent.

As Howard approached, Walpole glimpsed Walter Mikac in the gathering. Mikac held a rose. He teetered with grief, and it was catching. The sight set Walpole wobbling.

The next few moments would reveal a side Howard had kept hidden for 22 years of public life, an instinct beyond the scope of spin doctors.

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