A JUDGE earlier today ordered the Tasmania massacre gunman to be jailed for the rest of his natural life.
Martin Bryant admitted shooting dead 35 people at a Tasmanian tourist spot on April 28th.
Chief Justice, Mr William Cox, passed 35 life sentences against Bryant in the Tasmanian Supreme Court, which was packed with relatives of the dead as well as survivors of the massacre.
The judge said he would never be eligible for parole.
Australia has no death penalty.
The massacre at Port Arthur, a former colonial penal colony 60 miles south of Hobart, shocked Australia and prompted the government to enact tough laws that ban a wide range of automatic and semiautomatic firearms.
Nineteen people were wounded, some maimed for life, in the massacre.
Prosecutors said Bryant (29) shot many of the victims in a cafeteria. He then drove down a road killing more as he went. A mother and two young children were killed after they pleaded for mercy.
Bryant's lawyer, Mr John Avery, told a pre sentencing hearing this week that his client was intellectually handicapped and had the IQ of a child.
He had a severe personality disorder, but was not insane, according to psychiatric evidence, which described him as a moody, loner who craved attention.
Mr Avery said Bryant knew what he had done and why he had done it.
He said his client had revelled in his notoriety, but would not make public his reasons for opening fire on defenceless people.
Bryant was badly burned in a house fire that he started at the end of a confrontation with police the day after the massacre.
Apart from a brief stay in a hospital where he was treated for burns, he has been kept in solitary confinement in a cell built especially for him in Hobart's Risdon Prison, where is under constant video surveillance.
Government officials said Bryant would be kept in isolation for his own safety in the immediate future, but would eventually be introduced to a standard maximum security prison with other inmates.