Any Ordinary Day

by Leigh Sales

  ‘A year on, you’re just functioning. I really didn’t have any idea what I was going to do in the future. Twenty years on, it’s probably more like a surgical wound. You can see the scar. You’ve experienced a whole gamut of emotions but it sits okay. I still think about what the children would have been doing at this age. They might have finished uni. It’s a daily thought, just the loss of potential and what they could have been. Sometimes, I just wish so much that I could give them a hug.’

  His simple need to hug his little girls is the one part of our interview that nearly undoes me, and I can see Walter is immensely sad too.

  ‘Do the questions ever stop about why this happened to you?’ I ask in a wobbly voice. ‘How do you stop asking yourself that?’

  ‘You try. I still do. Things like if I hadn’t taken the car they wouldn’t have been there [trying to leave Port Arthur on foot, and therefore more vulnerable to gunfire], and that’s probably true. Those things keep going, they still occasionally go around through your head. But I think once you gain an acceptance that they’re not coming back, you can ask those questions without it flooring you,’ he says.

  I ask whether he’s scared about other people he loves dying, about experiencing more pain.

  ‘I personally don’t feel scared about dying,’ Walter says. ‘I suppose when you’ve seen it that close, it’s just inevitable, but I do cherish the time. I want to spoil my mum and do things because that opportunity won’t always be there. The number one lesson that comes out of what happened to me is that you don’t know when things are going to change. Life is not promised today or tomorrow. It can all be gone.’

  After he lost his family, Walter wanted to stay connected with other people rather than retreat from the community, even though in some ways it had added to his pain. He had a strong desire to find a way to honour the memories of Nanette, Alannah and Madeline. His first thought was to take advantage of his unwanted public profile to support the Australian government’s campaign to reform national gun laws. When it came to dealing with the media, Walter remembers initially feeling vulnerable, gullible and exploited. After a while, he figured out how to set limits and turn interviews towards issues on which he wanted to focus. Then once the gun laws had been reformed, he established the Alannah & Madeline Foundation to help children who are the victims of violence.

  ‘The one thing I promised myself and Nanette and the kids was that if they weren’t here, I wanted to make the best of what I could for them. To see the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, to see all the incredible things we’ve been able to do to help other children, it’s phenomenal,’ Walter says.

  ‘Everyone still knows their names. They’re still there,’ I offer.

  ‘It’s helped me a lot more than I think I even realise. Knowing they’re remembered in a good, positive way and that it’s going to continue beyond my lifetime. That makes it even more gratifying and special.’

  The night before we met, I had a nightmare in which Walter came to my house. He was in a wheelchair, his body slumped and broken as if he had a degenerative disease. Even his teeth were yellowed and decaying. It was as if my subconscious could not fathom that somebody who had suffered as much as Walter would bear no outward marks of it. Meeting him has helped disavow me of the fear that there are some things which prevent a person carrying on.

  Somehow people do keep going after such devastation. It’s clear that sharing your experience with people who understand it helps, and so does finding a purpose. Walter still carries deep pain but he’s no longer that barely functioning man you might remember from the news, holding the irises outside the church. He has a good, meaningful life and he finds happiness in all parts of it. By the time we say goodnight outside the pub, I feel comforted to have learned that even though he’s suffered the cruellest blow life could inflict, Walter Mikac has endured.

  When the community learns of a tragedy like Walter’s, the thought, That could have been me, is quickly replaced by: If that happened to me, I could never survive. It’s an example of the tendency to think of ourselves as exceptional: Walter might have handled the loss of his entire family but I wouldn’t. One of the reasons that somebody like Walter becomes an unwitting celebrity is that the community is morbidly fascinated to see how people cope with something that they couldn’t personally imagine enduring. It’s a way of letting our brains wrestle with one of life’s most challenging truths – that things can change catastrophically in an instant – without having to suffer it ourselves. As Walter learned from his painful encounters with both friends and strangers, many people can’t stand getting too close to that reality.

  The ripple effect of a national tragedy like Port Arthur is immense. It spreads outwards from the victims to the first responders, to families and friends and to people who live locally. Then the wave crashes over the rest of us as we watch the horror on television. Along with despair and a sense of helplessness, we experience collective trauma, because the values that underpin our community’s safe operation – trust in each other, public security, reliable routine – have been torn apart. We are desperate to stitch things back together again as quickly as possible.

  This compulsion to get ‘back to normal’ causes communities to behave in foreseeable patterns, just as our individual brains react predictably to awful events. Two collective behaviours in particular attend every tragedy: an effort to bond with one another, and a drive to build something positive from what’s happened.

  The need to connect with other people after loss is almost culturally universal. One of the most common ways Western communities do this is through spontaneous memorials of flowers, cards, candles or toys. After the death of Princess Diana, more than 50 million bouquets were laid outside Buckingham Palace, and after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the US, authorities eventually removed more than two hundred thousand memorial items from the scene.

  People act in this way because sharing grief helps them find solidarity and meaning. The compulsion to visit makeshift memorials is so strong that the volume of visitors can pose problems for public safety. Governments and police always try to manage grieving crowds rather than disperse them because community recovery is innately tied to the free and collective expression of grief. It is a time of extreme brittleness and any attempt to block spontaneous memorials can transform mass grieving into something angry or toxic. If they’re handled well, such sites instead become places of strength and support.

  Following the Lindt Café siege, a vast field of flowers soon blanketed Sydney’s Martin Place. A few nights after the tragedy, I was at a work function nearby that ended late. Close to midnight, I visited the memorial myself. I’m not sure why: curiosity, perhaps, or the need for reassurance that things would be okay. My lasting memory is of the overwhelming floral scent on the velvety night air. Even at that hour, many people still lingered. I was surprised to find that visiting the site truly was comforting. It gave me the sense that kindness and unity would triumph over destruction. It was almost as if you could see the communal fabric being sewn back together.

  Nobody understands you as well as somebody who has been through the same things, as Walter Mikac learned when he spent time with the Dunblane fathers. Emotional bonding can aid recovery, and this idea has underpinned the concept of support groups for decades. Alcoholics Anonymous is the best known of them, but today you can find groups for everything from victims of crime to parents of children with cancer.

  Thanks to the internet, you don’t even have to attend a support group face to face. There are hundreds of thousands of online groups worldwide, offering support on everything imaginable. Children of Alzheimer’s sufferers can connect with each other, and even people with severe dental anxiety have their own network. Online support groups usually don’t have a trained professional steering them but they offer some benefits that face-to-face interactions don’t. Anonymity permits people to speak without inhibition. Writing things in a forum or Facebook post can also help process feelings.
In both the digital and real worlds, participation can help restore a sense of control, wellbeing and self-confidence. Some group members take comfort from giving support as well as receiving it.

  Closely tied to the community’s desire to bond is the drive to see something positive come from tragedy. This may take the form of demands for formal inquiries or changes to the law so that similar tragedies can be avoided. The gun law reform that occurred after Port Arthur is one example. Sometimes people who share experiences of tragedy work together to build charitable organisations, many of which, whether for multiple sclerosis or lung cancer, rely heavily for volunteers and fundraising on those who’ve been personally affected. A 2017 Australian study asked people who donated to health or medical research why they did so. A whopping 87 per cent replied that they, a friend or a family member had been affected by the condition. A broader study – conducted the previous year and which looked at philanthropy across all sectors, not just health – reported that two-thirds of donations came from people who had a friend or family member linked to the cause.

  Unfortunately, being part of a community is not all upside when tragedy strikes. As Walter Mikac learned, the fishbowl effect and the insensitivity of strangers can wound deeply. Those of us a step removed from the catastrophe are not immune to damage either, if we absorb too much of it through the media. Numerous studies, including after the 1990 Gulf War, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, show that constant media exposure to awful events harms the mental health of a community. Simply by repeatedly viewing footage of disasters, any one of us can end up experiencing some of the same symptoms of post-traumatic stress as people more closely tied to the event. In the post-9/11 world, images of terrorist attacks are even more confronting, thanks to witnesses sharing real-time, unedited footage via social media.

  While tens of thousands of people were directly affected by 9/11, the collective trauma was felt much wider. Millions of people around the globe saw the distressing and pervasive television images of the terrorist attacks, many of which aired live. We watched the second passenger jet smash into the World Trade Center as it happened. We saw people diving from the burning tower, suiciding rather than waiting to die. We watched bleeding, dazed people stumbling and staggering through dust and rubble on the streets of New York, trying to get to safety. I’m sure I’m not alone in vividly recalling where I was as I watched those images, fear curdling in my gut about what would happen next. Was the Eiffel Tower about to blow up? Were Australian planes about to slam into the Sydney Harbour Bridge? It felt as if my entire world was tilting, even though I was on the other side of the planet.

  The research into television exposure to 9/11 is particularly comprehensive. A study that started in 2001 looked at the mental health of 931 Americans before the terrorist attacks and then for the two years afterwards (it tried to equalise for pre-existing mental conditions). The majority of the sample was not directly exposed to the attacks but watched them on live TV or soon after. Four out of five respondents reported symptoms including distress and heightened feelings of vulnerability, and many of those symptoms remained elevated in the weeks and months after 9/11. The compulsion among the sample group to find some sort of meaning in what had happened was similar to the behaviour observed in studies of people personally recovering from incest and sudden bereavement.

  Research after the Boston Marathon bombing found something similar. On 15 April 2013, at the finish line of the famous race, terrorists detonated two homemade bombs, killing three people and injuring several hundred others. It was the first major terrorist attack in the US since 9/11. Reporters and spectators filmed the mayhem on their smart phones and graphic images were widely shared. Researchers found that the more frequently that people with close connections to the disaster watched coverage of it, the more they experienced psychological distress and health problems. That’s unsurprising; what’s more notable is evidence of the same thing in people without direct links to the tragedy. Both real-life exposure and video-exposure were found to be associated with post-traumatic stress symptoms, including flashbacks (uncontrollably replaying in your mind what you’ve seen) and fear conditioning (a learned fear of activities associated with the trauma, such as being in a large crowd).

  The good news is that communities are generally very resilient. The number of people who feel acute stress is low and recovery is fast. Most of us are able to adapt, adjust and move on after a period of short-term distress. There are certain factors that can help us do that more effectively. We need to see that somebody in authority has taken control of the situation. We need the space to bond together, and we need to be shepherded towards ways to make something good come from something bad. We need to hear words that describe how we are feeling and to reassure us that things will be okay. In other words, we need strong leaders. During major tragedies, that role frequently falls to politicians.

  If good leaders put those things in place, the community will find itself on a path to recovery. It is a tough, high-stakes job for those who find themselves in leadership at such times, because the public is particularly attentive and also volatile. What equips a person to speak to an entire nation at a time of extraordinary community tragedy? How do they know what to say and what to do? And where do they find the strength to do it, when they are probably as rattled as the rest of us?

  As I watched a ceremony to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, the possible answers to these questions came to me in the form of an elderly white-haired man in a black trench coat, walking a little stiffly among the mourners.

  The former Australian prime minister John Howard was the only person formally invited to attend the Port Arthur service, a mark of gratitude and respect for his national leadership at the time. Against tough opposition inside his own political party, he reformed Australia’s gun laws, working alongside campaigners such as Walter Mikac to ensure that a massacre on the scale of Port Arthur could never recur in Australia. (Walter himself did not attend the twentieth anniversary event, instead keeping his own commemoration private after so much public attention over the years.)

  John Howard dealt with more Australian loss of life during his term in office than any other Australian prime minister outside of wartime. That’s partly to do with his longevity in the job, as the nation’s second-longest-serving PM (1996–2007), and partly because there was an unusual series of mass-fatality events during his tenure. His first two years in the Lodge were particularly notable for the range and scale of disaster. As well as Port Arthur and its thirty-five deaths, there was the crash of a Black Hawk helicopter in Townsville that killed eighteen soldiers, and the Thredbo landslide, which also claimed eighteen lives. Howard was PM during 9/11 (eleven Australians were killed) and the 2002 Bali bombings (eighty-eight Australian deaths). There were numerous other smaller-scale tragedies too.

  When John Howard and I meet for tea one day in his office, high in a skyscraper with views over Sydney Harbour, I ask him what he considered the role of prime minister to be at such times.

  ‘You had to put what happened into some sort of national context,’ he says. ‘That varied according to the incident. It really depended on whether there was a national significance or something about the tragedy that required a change of public attitude or public policy.’

  When John Howard first became prime minister, the media had only recently begun its transition to the 24-hour news cycle. CNN had started doing this in the US in 1980, but it was that network’s round-the-clock coverage of the 1991 Iraq War, live from Baghdad, that transformed the news business. It changed viewers’ expectations about what they could see on television and it altered networks’ ideas about the product they had to deliver. Sky News in Australia adopted similar coverage in 1996, a month before Howard’s election: it was the first, and for many years the sole, dedicated news channel in Australia.

  During Ho
ward’s term in office, the ABC and commercial television news operations added more bulletins throughout the day, in addition to the flagship evening broadcasts watched by millions of Australians. Newspapers would soon begin publishing their content online as events happened, rather than just once a day. The constant need to fill space meant that the media’s appetite for content became relentless. New information and pictures were required nonstop to keep stories turning over and to inspire consumers to keep watching or clicking. That in turn changed the way politicians engaged with the media. They responded to demand for commentary and also saw opportunities to fill the vacuum with their agendas.

  John Howard was the first person to lead the nation during this new media era. Politicians had always been expected to rally the nation at times of crisis, but the impact of disasters and tragedies on the community at large was now magnified. Networks would slip into rolling coverage for major stories, such as the Thredbo landslide or the death of Princess Diana or 9/11. Political leaders were expected to offer commentary. In the 1980s, Bob Hawke wasn’t asked for constant observations about the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain. Malcolm Fraser didn’t have to muster a profound reflection on the death of John Lennon. If those news stories had happened today, though, the prime minister would unquestionably be expected to have something to say. And it’s not only to fill air time, it’s also because many viewers want leaders to help them make sense of what they’re seeing.

  ‘People are looking for somebody to verbalise how they’re feeling,’ Howard says. ‘You’ve got to try and find the right words. That’s not easy.’

  Howard often emphasised heroism, family and mateship. To him, those things are the core of what it means to be Australian and he tried to help people by bonding them through national identity. Many of his press conferences were accompanied by displays of the flag, and the national anthem was played at public memorials. Howard’s approach seemed to be to try to unite the community as one Australian family, with himself in the role of reassuring father.