AUSTRALIANS were united in an outpouring of grief last night, asking how their country could become the scene of the world's worst modern civilian massacre. The death toll from Sunday's shooting in the Tasmanian settlement of Port Arthur rose to 34 yesterday after police found the bodies of two hostages in the smouldering ruins of the Seascape Lodge, the guesthouse that the gunman burned down after an 18 hour siege.
The killings seem certain to lead to a tightening of the country's gun laws.
The bodies were believed to be those of the elderly couple who owned the lodge. The fate of a third hostage was still unclear.
Police said the man they arrested outside the flaming guesthouse yesterday morning was Martin Bryant (29), of Hobart, the Tasmanian capital. Bryant was being held in custody in the Royal Hobart Hospital, where he was being treated for burns to his back and undergoing a psychiatric assessment. By last night, no charges had been laid.
Bryant arrived at the hospital strapped face down to a stretcher under heavy police guard after he emerged from the Seascape Lodge at 8.30 a.m. (local time) with his clothes on fire.
Bryant, blond and with a beard, lives in a Hobart suburb, but came from the Port Arthur area. Police and locals said he was a schizophrenic whose father had committed suicide about three years ago. At one point, he lived on a farm at Copping near Port Arthur. Neighbours recalled him as behaving oddly.
In a small community like Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula, where everyone knows each other, locals speculated that the killings were premeditated. Bryant is understood to have known Mrs Sally Martin, proprietor of the Seascape Lodge, and her family.
As shock and outrage swept Australia, the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, called a summit next week of federal and state government ministers to tighten the country's laws on gun control, which the Port Arthur massacre has exposed as being scandalously inadequate. "Let me make it clear that I will not retreat an inch from the national responsibilities have on this issue", Mr Howard said. "Not an inch."
Dr Tim Watson Munro, a forensic psychologist who studied three mass shootings in Melbourne and Sydney in 1989 and 1991, said yesterday such crimes were usually planned in advance rather than occurring on the spur of the moment.
"Once they kill the first people, it then becomes very impulsive and they then shoot very indiscriminately", he said. "We all have bad days, but what tends to convert them from being a bad day to mass murder is seething rage which has gone on before the event, coupled with the availability of firearms."
At Port Arthur, the killings were conducted with an Armalite rifle, a deadly military weapon. Public grief was accompanied by anger yesterday at the revelation that such weapons were still freely available in Australia, and were capable of causing such havoc in the country's most peaceful areas.
The grief over the Port Arthur horror has surpassed anything most Australians can remember For once, the nation's political leaders were united in expressing the popular mood. Mr Howard said: "The random cutting down and murder of people visiting a tourist attraction on a Sunday afternoon is something that most of us grew up believing couldn't happen here."
Mr Kim Beazley, the opposition Labour Party leader, said: "It will cast a cloud over this nation for some time." The two men will put their differences aside and travel together to Port Arthur tomorrow to visit the massacre scene and console the grieving.
As Mr Howard, Mr Beazley and Australia's political, diplomatic and church leaders attended an ecumenical service in Canberra yesterday to honour the massacre victims.
. Australian police in Hobart, today charged a 28 year old man with one count of murder at a hospital bedside court in relation to the Tasmanian killings.