‘I HOPE HE ROTS IN HELL’
a long time after the Port Arthur massacre, Jim Morrison carried a gun everywhere he went. The Special Operations Group (SOG) police officer felt a “moral obligation” to stop such a massacre happening again.
“I carried it 24/7. It was next to my bed. I went shopping, I carried it,’’ he recalled this week of his police-issued firearm.
“I was trying to get control. I was never going to let that happen again whilst I was somewhere where I could change it.”
Morrison has until now declined to speak publicly about his actions on the day of April 28, 1996, when a lone gunman massacred 35 people and wounded 20 more at the Port Arthur historic site in Tasmania.
But he has now agreed to detail his involvement when, as tactical commander of Tasmania Police’s Special Operations Group (SOG), he led the team that contained and eventually arrested the gunman, Hobart man Martin Bryant.
He remains deeply disturbed that the SOG was not able to prevent the massacre.
“It’s still one of my greatest frustrations to this day, such a highly trained group and we were bolstered by Victorians (specialist police) coming across, but we didn’t get a chance to stop the carnage.
“It had all occurred before we were deployed. All the tragedy that occurred at the Broad Arrow Café and that whole historic site and at the Seascape property had all occurred before we were deployed there. “It changed me forever. “Our role is to eliminate threats and we do that quite effectively. But not on this day.”
Tasmania Police’s SOG is a part-time unit. Morrison, then 38, was the 2IC and the tactical commander, and his day job was as a detective seniorFOR sergeant working beat in Hobart.
He was at home on his bush block outside Hobart when a colleague rang to alert him there were reports of a shooting at Port Arthur, and police were responding.
“The first call intimated there were maybe four or five people who had been shot,’’ he said. “Soon after that the calls came thick and fast. It went from five (casualties) to six to eight to 10 to 12 to 16 people had been shot.”
Morrison assembled the SOG duty team and sent them to the forward command post a few kilometres from the Port Arthur convict site.
Knowing how remote and heavily forested the area was, he managed to get a helicopter to take him down for a visual survey, and knew immediately from what he was hearing through the headset that a tragedy was unfolding.
A plume of smoke was seen the crime
Jim Morrison (above) was the second in command of Tasmania Police's Special Operations Group as Martin Bryant (right inset) went on a rampage during the Port Arthur massacre 25 years ago.
at the nearby Seascape guesthouse, which correlated with a report a car had been hijacked at a service station and taken to Seascape and set on fire.
The police didn’t know it then, but Bryant, armed with several high-powered rifles, had bunkered down for a siege, setting up piles of ammunition at the windows of the guesthouse, and firing hundreds of rounds throughout the day, and into the next night.
Morrison had to form a plan. There were two police pinned down in a ditch outside Seascape, unable to move due to gunfire. There were three known hostages at Seascape. People from the properties nearby needed to be evacuated.
There were an unknown number of people killed and injured down the road at the historic site. And there were an unknown number of offenders on the loose.
Tasmania’s SOG might have been a part-time group but they were required to maintain national counter-terrorism standards, and Morrison had made good contacts over the years with the Army.
They got access to some
Specialist Air Services (SAS) 4WD vehicles. They also inquired as to whether the Army had any armoured personnel carriers in Tasmania, to help evacuate the injured. They didn’t. Morrison made another plan and called in a D9 bulldozer. Police would use its blade for cover and approach the property, if required. Under an emergency action plan such as this, they estimated up to 30 per cent of their team would suffer casualties.
The SOG stayed just out of line of sight of the guesthouse,