PSYCHIATRIC REPORT
Part Three
The Offences
Mr Bryant in the early parts of the interview referred to the tragic events at Port
Arthur as "the accident". He claimed to have no memory of these events nor to have
any memory for what may have led up to the shootings. The only account he provided
was of waylaying the occupants of a BMW and then claiming to have driven this car at
high speed. Later in the interview, perhaps as a result of becoming more trustful, he
provided an account which at least in part may be relevant to the events. This account
provided to me on the 4 May has later been confirmed and expanded in Mr Bryants
statements.
Mr Bryant began by acknowledging "since I lost Miss Harvey things have slipped back
on me, I just felt more people were against me. When I tried to be friendly toward
them, they just walked away". He also became more caught up in ruminating on
memories of slights and insults from the past. He said he began to think about these
things a great deal and began to go over in his mind how he could get even. Initially he
said he said he thought about strangling someone who was unfriendly to him, but then
his thoughts turned to "shooting them". Mr Bryant said "I thought guns would be
better, the more power, the better". Mr Bryant at this point began to talk about his
various guns, in particular, a machine gun which he took to be repaired in March or
February. I asked him whether he had intended to use this weapon, but he informed me
that this type of gun is "too unstable". He happily discussed the virtues of various
semi-automatic versus fully automatic guns.
He stated that about a year ago he decided he had "had enough". He was unsure
exactly when the plan came to him for the massacre at Port Arthur. He said that he
thought the plan first occurred to him a few weeks prior to the tragic events. When
pressed he thought it might be either 4 or as long as 12 weeks ago that this first
occurred. When asked why he selected Port Arthur he responded "a lot of violence has
happened there, it must be the most violent place in Australia; it seemed the right
place".
Mr Bryant spoke of this longstanding resentment against Mr and Mrs Martin. He
described them as "very mean people" and as " the worse people in my life". The basis
for this antipathy appears to be Mr Bryant's belief that Mr Martin bought the property
which they occupied at their death with the expressed intention of preventing his father
from buying the same property. Mr Bryant appears to believe that this event broke his
father's heart and led to the downfall of this family. It appears that this was indeed a
family myth about their misfortunes and according to Mrs Bryant her late husband
would often complain to Martin Bryant of the damage to the family inflicted by what
was viewed as the double dealing of the Martin family.
Mr Bryant assumed that when he began shooting at Port Arthur he would himself be
shot down. He stated in one interview "my power, so powerful and the guns and these
magazines filled with bullets, I could just go bang, bang, bang". This plan to kill Mr
and Mrs Martin and then proceed to Port Arthur appears initially to have been
elaborated following the break up of Mr Bryant's relationship with Ms Hoani at a time
when he was particularly despondent about his situation and his future. Although with
the initiation of the relationship with Ms Willmot his mood improved and his suicidal
preoccupations disappeared, nonetheless this dreadful plan appears to have been
persisted with and eventually to have been put into awful practice.
I did not pursue with Mr Bryant any account of the actual killings as these can sadly be
all too readily reconstructed from eyewitnesses and police investigations.
OPINION
Mr Bryant is of limited intellectual ability, his measured IQ lying in the borderline
intellectually disabled range. He does however function reasonably well in the
community and has a degree of charm and of guile which enables him to perform in
many areas at a far higher level than might be expected from his performance on IQ
tests. The level of Mr Bryant's intellectual difficulties do raise at least a question about
his fitness to plead. I discussed with Mr Bryant the nature of a trial and the various
roles of the members of the court. He had a clear idea of the role of his legal
representative, explaining it was someone to help him and speak for him. He had a
rough idea of the function of a Judge. He knew what a Jury was, but was uncertain
about its exact role. He could however easily understand when this was explained to
him and when asked about it, an hour or so later, was able to give a reasonable
account of the nature and function of a Jury. Mr Bryant knew what it meant to be
guilty and to be not guilty. He was aware that there were things called crimes and
those who are found guilty might be liable to punishment. He had a clear notion that
there are rights and wrongs. In my opinion therefore this man is fit to plead, though he
may require a little more assistance and a little more time in coping with the legal
process than would a more intellectually able accused.
Mr Bryant has been a socially isolated and odd man throughout his childhood and later
life. He has had considerable difficulty forming normal relationships with those of his
own age. The social ostracism he suffered at school, and social rejection that has been
his lot in adult life, have left him lonely, distressed and deeply resentful. He became so
unhappy in the last year or so as to begin contemplating suicide. There must be some
question when someone reaches this level of despair about whether a depressive illness
has intervened. This possibility in Mr Bryant'sa case must be taken particularly
seriously given the family history of such disorders. The description that Mr Bryant
provides, however, of his state of mind and of his behavior does not support a
depressive illness. His appetite and libido were not disturbed. He was constantly
despondent but only intermittently unhappy. There were no thoughts of guilt and
worthlessness, but rather the reverse, thoughts of how illused he had been and how
unfair the world had been to him. In my opinion this was an angry, lonely and
despondent man who came to contemplate suicide not one suffering from a depressive
illness.
Mr Bryant describes some odd experiences and beliefs with regard to the house he
lives in being haunted. These, in my opinion, are the produce of a simple man who
copes poorly with being left alone in a large, empty house. In my opinion though there
were probably occasionally brief hallucinatory experiences, these taken in context are
not indicative of serious mental illness.
Mr Bryant was an oversensitive individual who attributed aggression and malevolence
to many of those around him. This in my opinion is not as a result of persecutory
delusions or of morbid experiences, but a product of the very real rejection and disdain
which Mr Bryant has experienced through much of his life, largely as a result of his
intellectual limitation and his peculiarities of personality. Mr Bryant is a self-absorbed
individual, with a markedly egocentric view of the world. He has high expectations of
others and a sense of entitlement which are both constantly being disappointed. The
disappointment of his hopes is usually explained by Mr Bryant in terms of the
insensitivity and illwill of others.
In my opinion though Mr Bryant was clearly a distressed and disturbed young man he
was not mentally ill. There is no evidence to support the notion that this man has a
schizophrenic illness. The use of this diagnostic term in association with Mr Bryant by
Dr Mather and Dr McCartney was based on the report of Mrs Bryant who had clearly
misunderstood the opinion of Dr Cunninham-Dax. She had come to the conclusion
that her son had been diagnosed with this condition. Neither Dr Sale, Dr Lucas nor
myself found evidence in Mr Bryant of his ever having had schizophrenia. Similarly, in
my opinion, he does not have evidence for a major depressive disorder. There was
nothing in his history to suggest that he has ever been manic.
Dr Sale, in his report of the 6 August 1996, indicates that in his opinion Mr Bryant
manifested severe developmental problems during childhood and that he could be
regarded as having shown a mixture of conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity
and a rare condition known as Asperger's Syndrome. I am in agreement with Dr Sale
that the records indicate that Mr Bryant was grossly disturbed from early childhood.
He can certainly be fitted within the criteria for conduct disorder, but all this amounts
to in the diagnostic manual is a list of a range of aggressive destructive and deceitful
behaviors during childhood and as such does not advance understanding to any degree.
Asperger's Syndrome is a condition which could explain some of the abnormalities in
Mr Bryant and in noting this possibility Dr Sale raises a potentially important question.
The section from the text on Forensic Psychiatry convering Asperger's Syndrome
appended to his report by Dr Sale though providing a good account of the forensic
implications does not adequately describe the critical clinical features (as one of the
authors of the chapter I can perhaps be allowed this criticism). Mr Bryant craves the
attention of others. He desires relationships but fails to effectively communicate with
others unlike the patients with Asperger's who are blandly indifferent to others. Mr
Bryant also lacks, in my opinion, the central features of this condition which are
repetitive activities, unusual skills with all absorbing obsessive interests and problems
with motor coordination. He also showed marked delay in the acquisition of language
skills and required remedial therapy for this language deficit which is contrary to the
picture found in those with Asperger's Syndrome.
The enormity of Mr Bryant's crimes call out for some explanation equally dramatic and
extraordinary. It is not to be wondered at that the media have either attempted to
portray Mr Bryant as afflicted by a dramatic mental illness, such as schizophrenia, or to
be some kind of evil genius. In my opinion the origins of this terrible tragedy are not to
be found in a single dramatic and sufficient cause, but in the interaction and
combination of a range of influences and events. We may never know fully the
intentions and state of mind which led to the killings, but a number of the contributions
are apparent.
Mr Bryant is an intellectually limited man who from early childhood showed marked
impairment in his capacity to cope with interpersonal and social relationships, He
responded to frustrations with aggression toward others and towards property. From
an early age his behavior was characterised by an unfortunate tendency to take delight
in the discomfort of others and in the tormenting of people and creatures weaker than
himself. This probably reflected in part the struggles of a child who felt buffeted and
helpless in the face of the demands of the world and who sought to gain some sense of
power, and restore some sense of self-esteem, through ridiculing and hurting others.
Mr Bryant received considerable support from his father and there are indications in
the record during his later adolescence that a degree of stability and more effective
social integration was beginning to emerge in this young man. The relationship with
Ms Harvey for all its eccentric features probably added to Mr Bryant's increasing sense
of having some place in the world. The death first of Ms Harvey and then the suicide
of his father stripped away from Mr Bryant the two main sources of support and
stability in his life. The acquisition of a level of wealth, which even with the
intercession of the Public Trustees was beyond Mr Bryant's capacity to comprehend,
let alone manage, may will have contributed to the subsequent increasing
disorganisation in his existence, rather than forming a basis for stability as presumably
had been hoped by Ms Harvey and his father when they bequeathed him this wealth.
One troubling characteristic of Mr Bryant which was apparent in our interview, and is
attested by a number of the statements, is his capacity to entertain grudges and to keep
alive resentments about real or imagines injuries over long periods of time. The family
myth about how Mr and Mrs Martin had blighted the hopes of his father appears to
have become a central element in Mr Bryant's understanding of the world and of his
resentment against others. Mr Joblin, in his interviews with Mr Bryant, uncovered a
number of childhood memories of being, in Mr Bryant's eyes, humiliated by staff at
Port Arthur. These trivial events in combination with the longstanding resentment
against the world. The specific plan to kill the Martins and then proceed to port Arthur
to engage in a general slaughter appears to have emerged some months prior to its
terrible realization. At the time Mr Bryant was isolated and despairing. The
improvement in his life situation and the establishing of the new relationship with Ms
Willmot, one would have expected to have deflected him from this dreadful plan. In
the event it appears that it is the rigidity in Mr Bryant's character which led to the
activating of his plans hatched when despairing but carried out when his actual
circumstances had greatly improved. Mr Bryant stated in one of his interviews that" it
was set in my mind, it was just set that Sunday....I wasn't worried about loosing my
property or never seeing my girlfriend again, it was just in my mind to go down and kill
the Martins and kill a lot of people".
Mr Bryant's limited intellectual capacities and equally importantly his limited capacity
for empathy or imaging the feelings and responses of others left a terrible gap in his
sensibilities which enabled him not only to contemplate mass destruction, but to carry
it through, There also has to be acknowledged that Mr Bryant took delight and gained
excitement from tormenting others. This reaction of the frightened child to their own
sense of powerlessness emerged in the adult as the desire to assert himself through the
killing and maiming of others. He was an individual capable of taking delight not only
in the fantasies of such destruction but, in the event, to delight in acting out these
dreadful daydreams, There is in Mr Bryant an apparent sense of guilt, albeit truncated
about his actions, but equally, on occasion, he almost revels in the memories of his
awful acts.
Mr Bryant often experiences fear and a sense of inadequacy when confronted by other
people. In part he compensated for this sense of weakness through a fascination with
weapons and through the possession of weapons. With his ready money came access
to weapons of enormous potential power for destruction. The obsessive concern with
weapons and the exhilaration he attained from handling and using guns added yet
another element to the tragic mix.
It would be more satisfactory if one could point to some simple and direct cause of the
tragedy at Port Arthur. This would not only help all of us in our attempts to make
sense of this national disaster, it might at least raise the hopes of preventing a
recurrence. Understanding of these tragic events in terms of a complex interaction
between a number of abnormalities of mental state, personality deviations and a series
of chance events, all finding a dreadful expression thanks to the availability of powerful
weapons for killing, is less satisfactory and perhaps less useful, but in my opinion
comes closer to describing the elements that went into making this tragedy.
Mr Bryant currently does not have the signs and symptoms of a mental illness. He is,
however, by virtue of his personality and intellectual limitations, both of reduced
coping ability and of increased psychological vulnerability. It is possible that under the
combined stress of lengthy incarceration and of having to live with the memories and
consequences of his awful acts that he may, in the future, break down into frank mental
illness. It will be necessary to continually monitor his state of mind during his future
containment and initiate appropriate treatment if, and when, it is required.
[signed]
Paul E. Mullen
Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, Monash University.
Director of Victorian Forensic Psychiatry Services.
PORT ARTHUR INDEX