Shane Madej

That hit series the characters.

Now, the slave labor was a pretty sweet deal for the British, so sentences at the Tasmanian penal colony could be extended for infractions large and minuscule. You could get your sentence extended for anything from talking in church to failing to turn your shirt in on laundry day. But once the prisoners finished their sentences, they were free to settle the lands around them.

And as it happened, Martin Bryant's great-great-grandfather and one of his great-great-grandmothers had both been English convicts who'd been sent to Tasmania as punishment.

I'm here with Trent Reznor's new best friend, Henry Zebrowski. It's me.

Oh, no, they didn't meet back in the day. They were like different branches of like. Criminal. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, they didn't. Again, they didn't date each other. They were different branches of the Bryant, not the Bryant family, the other his mother's side of the family.

Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. In prison. Yeah, just type that in. Families having sex with each other in prison. Guarantee you something's coming up.

Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, man. They sent everybody because that's always the question of like, well, you know, if Tasmania, you know, if Australia was a penal colony, like how were the chicks? Yeah. Where the women were also sent.

Yeah. Now, Martin Bryant's lineage didn't necessarily clean itself up as the years ticked by in Tasmania. Bryant's mother, Carlene, was raised by a man who often suffered from alcoholic psychosis. This man married Carlene's 19-year-old mother when he was 54 years old. Well, Carlene's life actually seems to be one of those cursed existences that we sometimes find in our research.

You know, these types of people whose lives are just marked by tragedy after tragedy, none of which are their own making. For example, when Carlene was a young woman working as a waitress in the small Tasmanian coastal town of Swansea, she met and fell in love with a man who left her for another woman.

The suitor soon reappeared to tell Carlene that she was the woman he really loved, but he then killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning almost immediately after telling her.

And some people have called him the perfect drug. His name is Ed Larson.

The brighter side here on Last Podcast Network. You can listen every week. Now, a few years after her ill-fated romance, Carlene met her future husband, Maurice Bryant. Maurice was an English immigrant from Newcastle who was one of thousands of Englishmen who migrated to Australia after World War II by paying just 10 pounds for a ticket to the continent. What an upgrade.

yeah right from newcastle to australia beautiful australia just so much fun and again with the volleyball and the fucking and the shrimp and yeah but we're looking at please yeah but we're looking at australia from like a modern perspective australia in 1951 when he went was fucking rough yeah like it was underdeveloped

I may be wrong on this decade, but I don't think Australia got color TV until, like, the 80s.

Maurice and Carlene met in Tasmania in 1965, almost 15 years after Maurice arrived. And after just one date, Maurice proposed. Carlene, believing she was running out of chances to get married at the age of 27, accepted. Very 1965. Maurice had just as much tragedy in his life as Carlene did. When Maurice was seven years old, he found his mother dead in the home pantry.

Nice. Yeah.

But since Maurice was so young, he didn't register that his mother was now a corpse. He thought she was playing a game. So he jumped on the body and asked for a horsey ride. It would have been even worse if she gave him the horsey ride. That would have been, well, it would have been a horror movie. Well, then her body might have been jerking back and forth because of the electricity.

No, she died from tuberculosis. That may have been the case if she had been murdered very suddenly, but no, it was tuberculosis and your body usually withers away. She crawled into a hole and died.

Maurice Bryant claimed that this experience, finding his mother dead, was deeply scarring. What? And as a result of that and other factors, Maurice struggled with depressive mood swings and deep alcoholism throughout his life.

Now, by 1967, Maurice and Carlene had settled in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart. This was just after the Black Tuesday bushfires of 1967, in which 52 people were killed and 1,300 homes were burnt to ashes. But Black Tuesday was a bit of an opportunity for Maurice.

See, while Maurice made money wherever he could by working at the docks, picking fruit seasonally, or flipping antiques he found in thrift stores, his passion was buying and selling real estate. and it was in one of the first homes he bought that he and Carlene welcomed their first child, Martin Bryant, in 1967. Now, Martin seemed to be an utterly broken soul from the very beginning.

I had to argue with, I don't know if you remember, but after we left the Nick Cave show in Detroit.

As a baby, it was said that he rejected any sort of affection, and his mother, Carlene, claimed that she found it impossible to bond with her new child. This is one of those things I think ladies do get...

I had to argue with you for a good two to three minutes in the Uber that the Warren Ellis that plays with Nick Cave is not the same that writes the comic books. You would not believe me. I still don't.

And now you think.

Yeah. All right. Last Podcast Merch dot com. It's the tits fault.

It's my mother's tits. Now, once Martin reached toddler age, he also became fiercely independent and uncontrollable, wandering out of their house at all hours. Eventually, Carlene had to fix Martin with a harness and tether him to something just to keep him inside. Sounds familiar. Did you also get a harness? We've talked about this.

Sometimes you got to tie them up.

So you don't turn around and the kid's rooting through your luggage.

Well, the neighbors looked down on Carlene Bryant for doing this, for tying up her son. They said that the Bryants were treating their child like a dog. But Carlene, in what would be the first of many exhausted explanations throughout her life, defended the practice by saying that she at least knew that little Martin was safe.

See, Carlene loved Martin, but she found it extremely difficult to actually like her child. Likewise, Maurice Bryant found Martin to be just plain weird, and therefore spent most of his energy trying to make his son quote-unquote normal. Martin, however, was anything but. Well, Martin was slower to learn how to talk, and his fine motor skills didn't really develop.

Yeah, he does look like Alan Moore, but Warren Ellis does not look like Warren Ellis.

Carlene would take Martin for hours-long walks every day to try to tire him out. But the feverish, unstoppable motor that seemed to power his every waking moment was impossible to control. For example, Carlene was getting her hair done at the salon one day when Martin fell off a balcony and split open his head.

After being taken to the hospital, Martin had to be given adult-strength sedatives so he could sit still long enough to get stitches. And even then, it took an hour for the sedatives to kick in.

extraordinarily annoying well i mean one of the things i really like i don't know if we've established yet so far like just how incredibly irritating martin bryant grew up to be no we haven't I mean, Martin Bryant, he was the type of guy that would book transatlantic flights so he would have someone who was forced to talk to him for 12 hours straight.

Oh, yeah. I love airports. No, he was an incredibly, and we'll get into it more.

But, like, not just irritating, but aggressive. You know, and we're going to get into that right now. I mean, one school could only stand to have him for less than a year before the staff decided they couldn't deal with him anymore. And they suggested that the Bryants instead have Martin examined by psychiatrists and eventually be medicated. Medication, however, did absolutely nothing for Martin.

And when he was sent to another school, a lifelong cycle of rejection, alienation and solitude began because the other kids didn't like Martin any more than his mother did. It was not, however, because Martin was just weird or because he had a speech impediment or because his learning abilities bordered on mentally challenged. All those things were true.

But as anyone who's worked in child care like I have can tell you, some kids are just dickheads and they're only made worse when the other kids volley back. And when Martin was examined in 1975 at the age of eight, he was determined to be a slow learner possessing fairly low base intelligence. But most of all, Martin was deemed to be an unusually aggressive child. Thank you.

Oh, James Tynion doesn't wear pewter rings. No, but it's in his heart. Today, on Last Podcast on the Left, we're starting a new true crime story, ladies and gentlemen. We're covering one of the biggest in history. Today, we're going to be covering the Port Arthur Massacre and its perpetrator, Martin Bryant.

I tried really hard to be. Martin was known to throw things at other kids, kick them, spit on them. Sometimes he'd urinate on other kids. But Martin was also fully aware that he was doing something wrong when he got aggressive with others. To mitigate punishment, Martin would suck up to his teachers and had a whole routine worked out for showing remorse when needed.

Like some of the pyromaniacs we talked about a few episodes ago, Martin would play up his disabilities when he got into trouble. Likewise, Martin also had a defense mechanism against the other kids. Since Martin was such a dick, the other kids would respond in kind and gang up on him.

But when the other kids gave chase, Martin would cry and squeal so pitifully that the other kids would just sort of give up because they felt sorry for him. Man, to break the heart of a larrikin. Ha!

Yeah, none of mine were turned off by that either.

Oh, yeah. The country without pity. Oh, yeah. That's America.

Well, as long as it's, I think, we're majority receivers on this podcast, we're okay. Because me and Henry were both receivers of the bullying rather than the perpetrators.

You see, you were big, and I was a tiny skinny boy, and Henry was a tiny fat boy.

Well, that was also that was kind of the part of the problem with Martin Bryant and the problem with a lot of kids like this is that like he starts off as extremely annoying, very aggressive, which causes kids to bully him. And the bullying throughout his life was extreme. It got really bad. But the problem is that the bullying makes the behavior worse.

And it's this like, you know, this vicious cycle that just keeps going, going and going. Now, as Martin grew older, his endless energy did not abate one bit. Martin disturbed every classroom he was a part of, and both of his parents had to work endlessly to keep him occupied, sometimes taking him for walks of up to eight miles long, where Martin would bounce relentlessly from beginning to end.

Martin's behavior actually got so chaotic that one of his fuck-ups made the local news. One day, he was playing with some fireworks he found in his father's garage and ended up lighting a rocket in the attic of his family's home. The rocket lit Martin's clothes on fire...

And the resulting burns resulted in skin grafts, a six-week stay at the hospital, and embarrassingly for the Bryants, an interview with the local news. When a reporter asked Martin from his hospital bed if he would still play with fireworks after being hurt so badly, Martin energetically and enthusiastically replied, Yes!

Now by 1980, Martin Bryant had reached high school, where his behavior and grades were just as bad as they'd always been. Teachers also noticed that Bryant was extremely manipulative, because while he was consistently a monster to kids his own age, he always made sure to be polite to adults, and as I said before, he knew when and how to act disabled in order to get out of trouble.

I was really fucking good at it.

Well, the whole thing about Martin Bryant being manipulative to adults, all that, this to me is partly what made Martin Bryant so incredibly dangerous. See, Martin was diagnosed as autistic after the massacre. And while I certainly agree with that diagnosis, I think what motivated Bryant's bad behavior more than anything was antisocial personality disorder.

Unlike many people on the spectrum who have a hard time understanding social cues, Martin Bryant proved over and over again that he had a keen understanding of what was acceptable and what wasn't. He knew what would provoke negative reactions from other people. He just didn't give a shit, and he lived his life accordingly.

Okay, people can't see you do the quote-unquote.

when you're born half annoying you don't mean it's just a part of your life and you have to either harness it or not yeah do you think you have like every disorder almost like he's nothing nothing good i mean it there i mean some people say that he was possibly schizophrenic you know there's you know the autism spectrum disorder any social personality disorder like it's he was uh clinically what you'd call all fucked up yeah he was all jack

But the paradox of Martin Bryant, at least when it comes to the average profile of the mass shooter, was that he was considered extremely handsome by the time he reached high school.

Definitely. Yeah. Well, I mean, the best way I could put it, he's like a more handsome version of Dave Mustaine. He does. The lead singer.

And for those of you who didn't understand that, it was Henry saying R worded in an Australian accent.

Martin's looks, however, did nothing for his social status. But the thing is, it is kind of a good point because he did not look like he was mentally challenged. He did have but he did have like learning disabilities. And I think he kind of got a pass. like a fair amount because of that, because he was a good looking guy.

No, he had learning, he had definite learning disabilities. Yeah. His looks, however, did nothing for his social status. And as he got older, his confrontational nature only led him to pull bizarre stunts that seemingly had no other purpose but to make other people feel weird. In one case, Martin showed up to a nighttime beach party that was being thrown by a group of teenagers.

These were the same kids who had called Martin names like Silly Martin, Bloody Simple Martin, or Rubber Lips. That last one, that was due to Martin's constant habit of tightly pursing his lips together as if he was always thinking about something he couldn't quite understand.

So Martin Bryant, a.k.a. the most irritating man in history, was the perpetrator of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre on the Australian island of Tasmania, in which 23 people were wounded and 35 were killed. Using an AR-15, a semi-automatic .308, and a shotgun, Martin killed with incredible speed and utter cruelty, murdering 12 people and wounding 10 in just the first 15 seconds of the massacre.

But on the night of the beach party, Martin showed up with a can of gasoline. And as the other kids watched, Martin doused himself with petrol and lit himself on fire.

The kids tackled Martin and rolled him in the sand before he suffered any serious burns. But Martin didn't seem to care at all about what he'd done to himself or how disturbed everyone at the party had become as a result of his actions.

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I think he just liked to disturb people. He liked to fuck with people. Martin Bryant loved to fuck up a day. He was very good at it. Now, Martin's father, to his slight credit, he did try to help his son as much as he could through his depression and alcoholism.

And in the process, Maurice Bryant introduced Martin to the only activity he seemed to really enjoy in life besides making other people miserable. Maurice took Martin snorkeling and taught him how to dive for crayfish. crawfish here in America. And Martin loved gathering buckets of mud bugs so much that he decided that this was going to be his career for the rest of his life.

Martin, however, did also have a habit of pulling other people's snorkels while they were underwater just because he thought it was funny.

But the massive mistake Maurice Bryant made was when he bought his son Martin an air rifle at the age of 14. It was at least powerful enough to kill birds. This is ostensibly so Maurice could teach Martin proper gun handling techniques.

A paintbrush? No. Oh, all water. All water hobbies.

The rifle seemed to inspire a change in Martin. As it turns out, handing a weapon to an aggressive, unstable teenager, even if it is just an air rifle, is usually a bad idea because all it really does is show them the power of a gun. Where before, Brian had been annoying but mostly harmless, the rifle allowed him to be more destructive.

He'd hide in a creek near the road and fire his air rifle at passing cars, and he was known to shoot birds out of trees before walking up to the corpses to fire several more shots in their heads.

Strangely enough.

And then, worse comes to worse, he just stays there.

Now, the change in Martin's behavior to something far darker was noticed by one of the few friends Martin made over the course of his life, a kid named Greg, who'd bonded with Martin over their shared love of diving for crayfish. You're the only one I know who likes slugs just as much as me, Martin.

According to Greg, Martin once caught a cat and tried to pull the animal apart with his bare hands before Greg stopped him. You can't pet him that way. You've got to leave the guts on the inside. Yeah. More dangerously, though, Greg saw Martin routinely grab the steering wheel when Martin was in the car with his parents.

Bryant even took a hostage, and the ordeal only ended when the bed and breakfast he'd barricaded himself inside began to burn down from a fire Bryant had set himself, and the cops arrested him in the B&B's front yard naked because his clothes had been burned away.

Martin, of course, laughing maniacally as he tried to pull the whole family off the road. Greg put up with Martin for years, but the friendship ended abruptly when Martin stabbed Greg in the head with a spear gun. No serious damage was done, but Greg punched Martin in the face in response and never spoke to him again.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not over a spear gun to the head.

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, you should know to not stab anyone else in the head with a spear gun. Yes, that's right. And what do you even need a spear gun for if you're just getting crawfish? I miss fun. The crocs. Yeah, but if you're in the ocean.

It's true. What would I do without you? Now, by the time Martin Bryant reached high school, his father had done pretty well for himself in the real estate business. But in 1982, Maurice Bryant would make a miscalculation that would inadvertently cause Martin to choose Port Arthur as the site of his massacre 14 years later. See, Maurice owned a good amount of property in the town of Port Arthur.

The Bryants actually owned a vacation cottage there. So Martin was certainly acquainted with the town growing up. In the early 80s, though, Martin Bryant tried buying a bed and breakfast in Port Arthur, a little business called Seascape. But due to circumstance, the property was instead scooped up by a couple named David and Sally Martin.

Maurice spent years complaining that David and Sally had stolen Seascape, and he would often say that the loss of the property was what prevented him from reaching the next level as a real estate investor. Martin would listen intently to his father's grievances, and in turn, he held a deep grudge against the people who bought the Bed and Breakfast, a grudge that matched his father's.

That grudge would one day make the Seascape Bed and Breakfast the centerpiece of the Port Arthur Massacre.

The subplot to What About Bob.

Yeah, because that is a very low subplot on the totem pole there.

I understand.

Now, when Martin turned 16, he was legally allowed to leave school and get a job on his own. But again, his behavior made it impossible to employ him. And as it turned out, one could not make a living exclusively by diving for crayfish.

Not enough for rent. Yeah. A couple more times. Got more than that. You have yourself a cut. It's also Forrest Gump. Yeah. So Martin's parents took him to a psychiatrist to have Martin examined for a disability pension. And the psychiatrist had no hesitation in granting it. He deemed Martin completely unemployable because at 16, Martin still couldn't read or write.

And the doctor almost diagnosed Martin as a schizophrenic before backing off.

Yeah.

We'll talk about her next episode.

He's an unreal person.

A totally unreal character.

Yeah.

Sure. I do that all the time.

But Maurice Bryant still figured that Martin needed some structure and some discipline. So Maurice forced his son to start a door-to-door business selling vegetables that the family grew on their hobby farm. And that, not surprisingly, also didn't work out as a career for Martin.

It's a real aggressive cell. By the time Martin was 20 years old, his father was still trying to find something for him to do. So Maurice set Martin up with a job mowing lawns for some of the older people in the neighborhood. This, however, was how Martin fell into an extraordinarily odd relationship with a woman 34 years his senior, a woman named Helen Harvey.

Now, Helen Harvey was heir to a prominent gambling company in Australia named Tattersall's Lottery. And when her father died in 1961 and left her everything, she began a decades-long existence as an eccentric hoarder who wanted for nothing and did nothing. She lived the dream of life. Yeah.

Well, I mean, wanted for nothing, meaning she got anything she wanted.

Yeah. Have you ever seen, like, really rich hoarders? Some of the best episodes of Hoarders are the guys that are, like, multi-millionaires that have, like, six warehouses full of, like, wacky shit. Oh, that is fun.

You are. Yeah, me and Trent Reznor. Hanging out. Yep. The two of you, I could not see a better duo out there having fun. Peas in a pod. Eating sliders. Batman and Robin.

Yeah. Well, Helen was also, like Martin Bryant, an extremely unpleasant person, an actual real-life crazy cat lady who lived with 40 cats, 13 dogs, and her ailing elderly mother. Yeah. Besides her mother, though, Helen had also been all but abandoned by most of her family by the time she and Martin crossed paths in 1987. So she was just as isolated as he was.

Well, no, they're really not. And it's also an almost entirely innocent relationship. It's strange. Throughout. Like for years. Like they're just buddies. Yeah.

Yes, it's very much like that.

Yeah. But in this story, they're just mostly like friends. Okay. He said they cuddle sometimes.

I know. We all do. Well, as far as how they met, Martin was in Helen's neighborhood one day to mow a neighbor's lawn, and he found the short and stout Helen Harvey aimlessly wandering the streets. Martin asked Helen if he could help her out. If he could help her out.

Help her out by mowing her lawn. Not like, can you help me? Well, Helen, I suppose attracted to this strange handsome boy, agreed. Soon enough, a sort of spark developed between Helen and Martin.

But contrary to what you'd expect when a relationship begins burgeoning between a 54-year-old eccentric and a borderline mentally challenged 20-year-old, Martin's parents thoroughly encouraged this relationship. Martin, they noticed, was calmer when Helen was around. And unlike everyone else on Earth, Helen found Martin entertaining rather than irritating.

As such, Martin's parents were so thrilled that their son had finally latched on to someone else that they supported the relationship in any way they could, to the point where they eventually began taking Helen on family vacations.

Yeah, but, you know, she liked to come along. Yeah, she was like his Teddy Ruxpin.

And I will admit that hoarding does age you. Like, if you were a hoarder, add 15 years to your age.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's not good for anybody.

But from what it seems like, the dynamic between Helen and Martin was that Helen basically treated him like a helpful but rambunctious child, barking orders at him that Martin would dutifully follow. And seemingly, Martin did what Helen said because Helen was the only person in the world that actually liked him.

Because, as authors Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro put it, Martin was the human equivalent of a stray dog that had wandered into Helen's yard.

He actually was. They said he was naturally athletic, but he actually looked pretty big.

Now, Martin never did much yard work for Helen, and as a result, her yard became so overgrown and filled with animals that the neighbors complained. The RSPCA intervened and rescued over 50 neglected animals from Helen's house, but they also noticed that both Helen and her 79-year-old mother were in terrible shape. See, Helen's home was filled with filth and trash because Helen was a hoarder.

Even worse, it was discovered during the animal rescue that Helen was sick with infected ulcers and her mother had an untreated broken hip. So both women were rushed to the hospital. Helen's mother died there a few weeks later, but Martin stayed at Helen's side and took care of her during her stay.

Additionally, Martin and his father cleaned out Helen's home while she was convalescing, and once she was released, Martin moved in with Helen permanently.

They had been friends for like three years at this point. Like he'd just go over there all the time, just hang out with her constantly. But yeah, at this point, yeah, it took about three years before he moved into their house.

turned off television they both love wandering the streets aimlessly they both love hoarding animals and honestly it's kind of nice now once howling got out of the hospital she and martin fell into a comfortable life by most accounts though the relationship was platonic although martin did say that there was a little kissing a little hugging a little cuddling sometimes she lets me kiss your bottom chins do you think he was impotent

No. No, I don't, unfortunately.

Because Helen also hoarded cars. That's awesome. By the time of her death, she had bought no less than 50. But Helen usually only kept these cars for a few weeks or a couple of months before trading them in or wrecking them. Because Helen was such a bad driver that she had to take her driver's exam 19 times before she passed it.

Here she comes again. And we're like, and then she comes coming back.

But while the Port Arthur Massacre was the deadliest mass shooting in world history at the time, mass shooting being defined as five or more people killed in a single incident, it has since been bumped down to number 11. Because of Australia's response to the massacre, however, there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia since Port Arthur.

Helen had such disregard for the value of a dollar that she'd often buy a car at the beginning of the month when the monthly payment from her inheritance trust came in. Then she'd sell the car at the end of the month when she needed cash for food. Oh, I think she's hustling.

The problem was that during that month, she and Martin would have spent weeks driving around aimlessly with a car full of filthy animals constantly urinating and defecating.

The stench would be so intense. A stench that would develop within weeks that any car Helen traded in had to be fumigated and thoroughly scrubbed.

No matter what, decomposition's going to be defecation every time. Every time. For a bad smell.

It's going to be a long grapestone. Marcus says decomposition beats defecation every time.

Dig him up. He actually got buried with a box full of shit so you could compare.

And someone comes and fills it up every week. That beautiful, strange woman.

Now Helen, of course, had begun rebuilding her menagerie of strays as soon as she got out of the hospital. And the smell and the noise were causing the neighbors to once again complain. So to avoid another visit from the RSPCA, Helen bought a farm outside of the Tasmanian town of Copping, not too far from Port Arthur.

Once Martin and Helen moved on to their new land, they soon acquired three donkeys, nine ponies, three dogs, and an untold number of cats, in addition to 30 canaries and quite a few budgies. What's a budgie? It's a boudregar. It's like a canary. It's a small bird.

But you remember, I think that bird, remember the bird whose head fell off in Dumb and Dumber? Yes.

But once Martin became, and man, this sounds like the dream. Three donkeys?

And three dogs and three donkeys? I mean, I can, you know, the cats, let's have like maybe four walking around.

Yeah, and nine ponies is too much.

For them it is. Yeah, just a couple, just one horse.

I have, yeah, several times. Once. Yeah, I ordered horse once. Yeah, of course you order horse. Like, you didn't go to the fucking supermarket and buy horse. Eat it. Eat it.

After the extremely unstable 29-year-old Martin Bryant purchased an arsenal of guns without licenses using money he inherited from an eccentric middle-aged gambling heir he was possibly banging, Australia as a whole decided that there really was no way of preventing people like Martin Bryant from obtaining weapons of mass death.

Once Martin became more isolated on the farm, the meager social skills that he developed over the years began to regress. He became more irritable, more erratic, and extremely quick to anger. But since the only person who saw him on a regular basis was Helen, nobody noticed that his behavior was getting darker.

But perhaps what was most harmful when it came to Martin's eventual actions was Helen's insistence that Martin be made the exclusive trustee of her estate.

She wrote up a new will explicitly forbidding any of her money from going to her blood relatives upon her death, which meant that when Helen died, Martin Bryant was all set to become a multimillionaire who could pretty much buy and do whatever he wanted.

Yeah. But concerning Martin's darkening moods, there were some red flags. A few weeks after Martin and Helen moved to their farm, a neighbor came by for tea. But before the neighbor finished her cuppa, Martin shooed her out the door and told her that if she ever came back, he'd shoot her.

Well, Martin also began skulking through his neighbor's properties at night, where he would use his trusty air rifle to shoot dogs. But for most of the people in the town of Copping, Martin and Helen were merely the local eccentric couple.

Every day, Martin and Helen would wake up late, then wander the local town aimlessly, shopping, eating long lunches, and driving around in a continuous stream of new cars filled with animals.

Well, actually, I mean, I don't know. They were happy, though. They were. I mean, they'd drive around with their dogs, their cats. Sometimes they'd stuff a pony in the backseat, which greatly disturbed the locals, as it should. Ponies don't belong in the backseat of a sedan.

It is true. Now, naturally, Helen would do all the driving, but Martin had never given up on his old habit of suddenly grabbing the steering wheel to try and make them crash because he thought it was funny. To avoid accidents, Helen started driving slower and slower, but Martin still caused three accidents by jerking the wheel.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before Martin's steering mill shenanigans would have real consequences. In October of 1992, Martin and Helen loaded three of their dogs into a brand new Mazda and drove north to do some shopping. Martin later told police that at one point during this drive, Helen had become distracted by the dogs, and she let the car drift into the other lane.

So instead of throwing up their hands and saying that mass shootings were just something we all had to deal with as a part of our everyday lives, Australia put strict gun control laws in place. And as a result, Australia has not had a mass shooting in exactly 29 years, as today is, coincidentally, as it always is, the anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre.

It's far more likely, however, that Martin reached over and jerked the wheel, because according to the person they hit that day, Helen's Mazda very suddenly swerved across the line and crashed into their sedan head-on. Helen's neck snapped upon impact, killing her instantly, in addition to two of the dogs.

Martin, meanwhile, suffered a fractured vertebrae, while the third dog survived, ran back to the farm.

Yeah. Martin's injuries necessitated a weeks-long stay at the hospital, and he had to wear a neck brace for months. But without Helen around to manage Martin anymore, his parents were forced to step back into his life in a primary role.

Well, they sort of vacillated between letting Helen have, like, complete control, but the other part of it was is that they found after spending, you know, 20 years taking care of him, there was this weird hole in their lives when they didn't have to take... when they had nothing to do anymore. So they actually started, like...

getting back into his life, a little like they'd go and have lunch with him and Helen. His father retired and wanted to spend more time with him. It's almost like they liked the punishment.

But after the car accident, Martin's demeanor suddenly changed, and this was almost certainly due to the head injury. Where Martin had previously been brooding and solitary, he was now extremely chatty at all times, which increased his annoyance factor tenfold. Martin also regressed intellectually and tried making friends with the neighborhood children by inviting them over to play Nintendo.

The kids, however, recognized that Bryant was a scary dude, and they instinctively understood that he was someone to avoid.

Yeah, and that's the thing. Against his father's wishes, Martin returned to the farm where he and Helen had lived so he could make a life by himself. And Martin soon found himself in trouble with the neighbors due to his increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior. In March of 1993, Martin got on a bus and put his hand up a girl's skirt, which got him kicked off by the driver.

Martin, however, ran to the next stop ahead of the bus and tried to get back on like nothing had happened.

Yeah. When the driver refused, Martin unleashed a tirade of verbal abuse before hailing a cab. And he then had the cab follow the bus while he hung out the window cursing and shaking his fist at the bus driver.

Yeah, man. Well, everything with Martin changed in mid 1993 when Helen Harvey's will finally paid out. Martin was now a multimillionaire, although his father made sure that Martin did not have access to all of it at once.

Yeah, and I do wonder how many of those are out there.

Well, using Australia's Mental Health Act, Maurice Bryant set up a perpetual trust for Martin, which ensured that Martin would receive a monthly stipend instead of a lump sum. This is to make sure that Martin didn't blow all of it immediately. But after Martin's father set up Martin's finances, Maurice Bryant's alcoholism and depression finally caught up to him.

Seemingly broken by life, Maurice became sullen and quiet, and in August of 1993, at the age of 64, Maurice buckled a diving belt filled with weights around his neck, took a mix of Valium and antidepressants, and threw himself into a body of water. He had left a note saying only, call the police, taped to the door of his home. And it took investigators two days to find the body.

Martin, however, showed no human emotions whatsoever when told of his father's suicide. Martin smiled and joked with the police officers investigating his father's death. And while some thought that Martin didn't understand what had happened, most believed that Martin was being intentionally cruel with his demeanor.

How many times?

No.

Well, yeah, he was also just very depressed.

And an alcoholic. Yeah, lifelong.

Yeah, he did have a reason to be sad.

Yeah. But in the end, what really mattered most here was that Martin Bryant had, within 10 months, lost the only two people who had ever been able to maintain any semblance of control over his actions. That, of course, would be Helen and his father.

See, Martin's mother, Carlene, had a habit of turning a blind eye to Martin's difficulties because she just kind of hoped they would resolve themselves. As such, after Maurice's death, Carlene basically abandoned Martin to the farm where Martin and Helen had once lived. Yeah, she peaced. Yeah.

Now totally isolated, Martin stopped trying to be accepted by people altogether, which was most evidenced by how he began to dress. Now flush with cash, Martin became partial to gray linen suits paired with lizard-skin shoes. Cool! Topped off with a, quote, rakish Panama hat.

Martin also began carrying around a briefcase, proudly telling strangers that he had a job that paid $400 a week. That's not that much money.

Yeah, that is true. No, it's like I'm totally trained to look at the exits at every place I enter.

Other times, Martin would wear an electric blue suit with flared pants and a ruffled shirt. Cool. It's just Austin Powers, isn't it?

Yeah, baby. In other words, his appearance was objectively amusing, and people began laughing at him almost everywhere he went. Martin's isolation and rage, therefore, began to build, and by the end of 1993, Martin Bryant began using Helen Harvey's money to buy an arsenal of guns and ammunition.

This, of course, was the first step towards the Port Arthur massacre, which we will cover in full devastating detail next week. So what happened? Because he dressed like shit? Yeah.

Yeah, he didn't know. But yeah, that's where we're at. At the end of this episode... What? No. Oh, you were just wagging his finger at me.

If you want to see a video of Henry wagging his finger at me, go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left where you can watch full video episodes of every episode we do. You can also watch side stories for free on YouTube. You can also follow us on all the socials at LP on the left. TikTok and Instagram is where you can find us. And of course, come see us on tour. That's right.

Isn't this going to be going out the day after the Funhouse? They can watch the replay.

Was he that bad?

Yeah.

You know what? How's about this? Hail donkeys. Donkeys are neutral.

But really, when it comes to the gun control issue, the key words here are people like Martin Bryant. Because as we're going to see over the course of this series, there really wasn't anything that anyone could have done to put Bryant on a non-sociopathic track. Because people did try again and again throughout his life.

See, this isn't the story of a kid slipping through the cracks who could have turned from the path of mass murder if only someone would have reached out. Rather, this story is proof that some people are just straight up bastards from birth. And there's very little that any of us can do about it.

Australia very much did not want information about Martin Bryant to be available, so as to deny him the satisfaction of being known. This is a lot like how New Zealand has tried to erase the 2019 Christchurch shooter from the pages of their history altogether.

Yeah. But we're of the opinion that telling these stories can be helpful because they might result in someone recognizing the signs of an upcoming mass shooting event. Because we all know we're years away from any meaningful legislation being passed here in America.

Yeah. And while I do understand Australia and New Zealand's motivation in wanting to forget people like Martin Bryant ever existed, or from even acknowledging they exist in the first place, I'm also of the opinion that whether it's one victim or 35 choosing to cover some true crime stories and not others, it's kind of hypocritical.

Plus, there's the fact that even though Martin Bryant is an annoying shithead on every level, his story is still utterly fascinating.

So for our two sources today, we used Port Arthur, a story of strength and courage by Margaret Scott. That's for information on Tasmania and the shooting itself. While Born or Bred by Robert Wainwright and Paolo Totaro, that's the only real source of information about Brian's life. We used that for his biography.

Now, before we get into Martin Bryant's life story, it might behoove us to talk a little bit about the history of Tasmania itself, because there is a fascinating connection between Martin Bryant and the island's past.

To wit, Bryant's history is directly related to Australia's history as a penal colony for the British, and Port Arthur itself, the site of Bryant's massacre, only existed as a tourist town whose main attraction was an historic British colonial penitentiary.

It's important for the historical context, and it's also fascinating stuff. I mean, to give a brief history of Australia's founding...

The British, prior to 1776, sent many of their convicted felons to their American colonies. Basically, crime had hit a high in England in the 18th century. And since they weren't executing people for petty crimes anymore, they didn't have enough prisons to hold all their criminals. So many British criminals were first sent here to America.

It's a little known fact about America that there's a lot of convicts who were our early sellers.

Yeah.

Yeah. And plenty of other convicts ended up in colonies like Canada, West Indies, and Madagascar. But in 1788, after America was no longer a British colony, their government decided to send the vast majority of their exiled prisoners to Australia.

That's why it's cool. Yeah, that's why it's great. They actually fucking did something about it. Now, British convicts were first sent to Botany Bay near Sydney, but within a few years, the British government began pouring criminals specifically into the island of Tasmania. By 1832, the island was home to over 12,000 British convicts who were used mostly for slave labor.

They produced timber and wheat, they worked in the coal mines, and they processed the meat and blubber from whales and seals. Prisoners would work at least 12 hours a day in chains and quite a few died either during labor or as a result of the brutal punishments enacted by their jailers.

The most common punishment in the penal colonies was flogging with a cat a nine tails where the prisoner would be tied to a triangle shaped wooden frame and flogged while the guards and the other prisoners verbally roasted them.

They were frozen in time by suicide. But according to the prisoners, the punishment that was far worse than the potentially fatal practice of flogging was the psychologically debilitating practice of rock breaking, which was saved for only the worst of the worst.

In this punishment, prisoners would be chained to an iron post where they would be forced to smash rocks with a hammer for 12 hours a day without being able to move from that one single spot. The punishment here was the monotony, which drove some prisoners to the brink of insanity.

For example, one prisoner became so unhinged after rock breaking day after day that he beat another prisoner to death because a trip to the gallows was, in his mind, preferable to enduring another second of rock breaking.

Yeah, eventually.