10 minute read
Memories of Port Arthur
Editorial: Jesse Wray-McCann
Photography: Yuri Kouzmin and supplied
With darkness descending, Senior Sergeant Jim Morrison knows his snipers, assault teams and other Tasmanian Special Operations Group (SOG) police will be stretched too thin if the siege continues into the night.
It’s the afternoon of 28 April 1996 and Sen Sgt Morrison and his fellow tactical officers are positioned in the forest surrounding the Seascape guest house on the south east coast of Tasmania.
They have their firearms and focus firmly fixed on the Cape Cod-style house from which an offender is sporadically firing various semiautomatic weapons into the forest.
Three innocent hostages are also believed to be in the house and the entire Tasmania Police SOG is deployed at the scene.
Just hours earlier, 3.5 kilometres further down the Arthur Highway, the offender opened fire on tourists at the Port Arthur Historic Site, eventually murdering a total of 35 and injuring 23.
He then holed himself up at Seascape with a cache of weapons and ammunition placed around the house.
The now veteran, then senior sergeant Mr Morrison said his troops had the capability to handle the siege but also had to deploy some of the team as a ‘ready reaction force’ to respond to any other developments at or related to what occurred at Port Arthur.
As a priority, the SOG officers also rescued two general duties police who had been pinned down by the offender’s gunfire for several hours in a ditch at the Seascape property.
“Our capability to secure the area and manage the siege was only going to be for a limited time, and it was being whittled away by all the tasks we were required to do,” Mr Morrison said.
“I could foresee this was going to be a protracted incident.”
So Mr Morrison sent an unprecedented request up through his chain of command and across the Bass Strait to the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police.
For the first time in Australia’s history, a police tactical team was being called in to cross the border and assist another state’s police force.
As the team leaders for the Victoria Police SOG’s two on-call teams that night, Craig Harwood, then an acting sergeant, and Michael Hayes, then a sergeant, were at home when their pagers went off, telling them to get to Essendon Airport for immediate deployment to Tasmania.
In national training courses in the years prior, Mr Harwood had long been recognised as one of the best snipers in the country and Mr Hayes was a leader among Australian police in close quarters battle.
Craig Harwood and Michael Hayes had been awarded as the best sniper and best close quarters battle officer in Australia respectively in the years before the tragedy.
The national training sought to create uniformity and consistency across the various state’s tactical teams if they ever had to combine in response to emergencies such as terrorist attacks.
In asking for Victoria’s help, Mr Morrison knew the national training, and other interoperability exercises they had done together, had primed the two SOG units to work together in such a crisis.
“For Port Arthur, we just carried out what we had already been doing – we carried out the friendship, the training and the preparation we had built together,” Mr Morrison said.
Mr Harwood, Mr Hayes, their two teams and a Victorian SOG command contingent raced to Hobart via planes so loaded with equipment Mr Hayes said they “almost dragged their arses getting off the tarmac”.
Victorian Special Operations group police pack their gear following the arrest.
“I think the pilots pushed the limits for us,” he said.
In Hobart, they were sworn in as Tasmania Police special constables and then took a hair-raising car trip to the scene that left the vehicle’s brakes smoking.
When the Victorians arrived, Mr Morrison was not only relieved to see fellow SOG operators he called his “brothers”, but incredibly thankful to see his friend Mr Harwood, who he had worked closely with as a fellow instructor at national counter terrorism training courses.
“To see them turn up, in my state, in our time of need, it was very reassuring,” Mr Morrison said.
“I was in operational mode, so in one sense, they were just another team coming in, but it was deeply rooted in me that they were people I knew, and I knew how we were going to work together.
“It was like the two units had been working together for years.”
Jim Morrison helps take command of the Tasmanian Special Operations Group officers as they arrive at the scene.
At 2am, about 12 hours since the siege began, the joint leadership team paired Victorian SOG snipers with Tasmanian SOG operators and sent them out to bolster the hidden cordon they had around the house.
With the extra manpower now on scene, they could also bolster the emergency action (EA) and deliberate action (DA) plans already in place.
“The EA plan is if we get information that he’s killing hostages or something dynamic happens, that requires us to go in and resolve the issue by breaching the stronghold and arresting him,” Mr Harwood said.
“In this case, it was basically to drive up in a number of vehicles and hit the stronghold from various directions.”
Given the house had about 200 metres of clear land surrounding it, the officers predicted up to a third of their force could be shot by the offender as they sped towards it.
“If it’s to save a hostage, no problems, that’s our job,” Mr Harwood said.
“We risk our own existence for someone else’s we don’t even know.
“That’s what policing is all about.”
The DA is a proactive plan where police initiate the action to resolve the situation, and at Seascape, they left no stone unturned to make sure their DA was as successful as possible.
To protect the assault teams in any DA approach on the house, enquiries were made for any military tanks in Tasmania they could commandeer.
After no luck finding any armoured regiments or armoured museums with a tank, or even an armoured vehicle from a cash-in-transit company, they secured use of a nearby bulldozer with a large front blade.
For any breach of the house, they had elaborate methods of distracting the offender.
“We had an Air Force F-111 jet on its way down that we were going to use to fly over at sonic speeds to create a huge sonic boom above the house and basically blow out every window at the moment we entered,” Mr Harwood said.
As the night wore on, Mr Harwood switched roles, grabbing his rifle and donning his ghillie camouflage suit to deploy as a sniper at about 6am.
“I had started thinking maybe the best resolution to the incident was a sniper shot, and I thought I might be the best one to apply that due to my skillset,” he said.
At one point, Mr Harwood saw the offender come to the front flyscreen door and continue with his indiscriminate shooting.
It is thought the offender fired up to 300 rounds during the siege.
“I couldn’t take a shot because I couldn’t tell if he had a hostage in front of him,” he said.
But it wouldn’t be long before Mr Harwood would again have the offender in his sights.
Just before 8am, police noticed an unexplained fire break out in the house.
The flames quickly consumed the building and the offender ran out unarmed, naked and on fire.
“I was in my breathing cycle, I had my safety off and his head quartered, so I could have taken the shot,” Mr Harwood said.
“I did think about it.“But I was not justified to take the shot.
“If he came out firing a weapon, it’s a different situation.
“But the mission was to safely arrest the offender and put him before the court without a further loss of life, anyone’s life.”
Mr Harwood got on the radio and gave the codeword to launch the EA.
Mr Hayes and Mr Morrison led the drive-up assault to reach the offender.
With the house now fully ablaze next to them and the fire causing ammunition in the stronghold to cook off, Mr Hayes recalls a “surreal” moment when time seemed to stand still.
“The sound of the exploding rounds seemed to disappear, you couldn’t feel the intense heat anymore and it was like everything went silent,” Mr Hayes said.
“It would have only taken one of us to pull the trigger and I’m sure it would have been a maelstrom of fire.
“But that’s when our training came to the fore because none of us operated off emotion, none of us decided to be the judge, the jury or the executioner and, instead, we did the professional job the community entrusted us to do.
“In those milliseconds, the professionalism, restraint and the ethos of those operators showed why our training and our interoperability was so important.”
Many of the SOG operators standing over the offender had previously been involved in incidents when offenders had been justifiably shot and killed.
But on this occasion, their clinical professionalism, precision and integrity came in the form of restraint.
Although that day 25 years ago was one of Australia’s darkest, much good has been birthed from it.
It united politicians to bring about sweeping gun controls for automatic and semi-automatic weapons like those used in the tragedy.
And one of the most horrific moments on that day — the murder of Mikac sisters Alannah, 6, and Madeline, 3, and their mother Nanette at the Port Arthur Historic Site – was the catalyst for the Alannah and Madeline Foundation.
Established by their father Walter a year after the tragedy, the charity cares for children who have experienced or witnessed violence and runs programs to prevent violence in the lives of children.
“Port Arthur was a seminal moment for Australia,” Mr Hayes said.
“As a nation, we took the tragedy by the scruff of the neck and decided to use it to make meaningful, positive change.
Although the three friends had already played their part 25 years ago, Mr Hayes, Mr Harwood and Mr Morrison continue to be involved in the event’s legacy.
In April this year, Mr Hayes and Mr Harwood walked — with Mr Morrison driving a support car — 410 kilometres over 10 days to raise more than $100,000 for the foundation, to honour the work of all first responders and commemorate the 25th anniversary.
Craig Harwood, Jim Morrison, Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton, founder of the Alannah and Madeline Foundation and father and husband to three of the victims Walter Mikac, and Michael Hayes before embarking on the walk to support the foundation’s ‘Buddy Bag’ program for kids in crisis.
Mr Morrison knows they did all they could on that fateful day in 1996 – all 35 victims, including the three hostages at Seascape, had been shot before the SOG could arrive — but it still galls him that some of the most highly-trained police in the country simply weren’t able to do more.
“We had so much to offer, yet we didn’t get the chance to stop events occurring that day,” he said.
“At the very least, I wanted to have an impact, to save one life.”
But by supporting the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, Mr Morrison and his fellow former SOG brothers are helping the charity save the lives of countless children.
“I didn’t think I ever wanted to have anything to do with the events at Port Arthur again,” he said.
“I thought I had locked it away and thrown the key away. I didn’t want to reach for the key again.
“But for a cause like the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, it’s worth it.
“So I found the key, I opened the trunk and I’m back into this 100 per cent to highlight all the amazing good that has come from it.”
