Shane Madej
speaker
210 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Shane Madej’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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