by Leigh Sales
‘So,’ I ask, ‘how do I start with all these questions I have – how have scholars answered these questions about fate and chance and blindsides?’
He sits for a while to think. ‘There are two dominant ways in which people have dealt with this, broadly speaking. Some philosophies have dealt with it by saying there’s a complementarity between life and death, between sickness and health, between the destructive and the creative. So there’s this sort of creative and destructive dance, the yin and yang thing, all the rest of it. And there’s a certain beauty in that pattern. But as an English author once said, that’s fine from a long way off, but close up, it doesn’t feel like that.’
‘The other way is the kind of Middle Eastern, in particular the Judaeo-Christian, way of doing it, of saying, actually somehow health and beauty and life are more authentic, more true, more real, than sickness and death and the rest of it. So then you have to have some sort of explanation as to why the bad things are an aberration.’
Michael tells me about a course at Yale University called A Life Worth Living, which introduces students to speakers from all sorts of different faiths. They hear from committed secular atheists, Marxists, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists. Each speaker answers a series of the same questions: How do you explain suffering? Does death have meaning? What are the characteristics of something you would regard as good?
‘There are huge resources in every tradition,’ Michael says. ‘The thing is, there’s no neutral ground. Living a reflective life seems to involve adopting a position in relation to these things and then trying to live coherently within that position.’
We chat about the various psychological and evolutionary theories I’ve been reading about.
‘There seems to be this universal human need to try to find a way to explain why things happen,’ I say, ‘including why awful things happen.’
‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘and the interesting meta-question is, Why do we have that need? It is a plausible explanation to say that that need has an evolutionary function, in just keeping us going. But the problem, to me, is that’s not how it feels, that’s not my lived experience. I want to actually say that, in a deep sense, when I see images of a child who’s suffered, or a great disaster, that it is wrong. There is a story in John’s Gospel of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, where Jesus is angry and weeps, and also a story of Jesus at another place where he meets a man who is unwell, and the verb that’s used in the Greek is the same one used for the snorting of an angry horse. There’s this notion that it’s okay, and indeed right, to say that things shouldn’t be like this. To me, they’re pretty powerful stories. I suppose when I’ve had a hard time one way or another, that’s been very important.’
With that answer, Michael helps something click in my brain. Scientific explanations are only the background to the story I’m interested in. Evolutionary biology is an important way of understanding why humans feel the way they do, but it’s how that wiring connects in every individual that really interests me. If Louisa believes that being a hostage and having MS made her stronger, or if Michael feels that the death of his wife strengthened his faith, their stories are just as valid when it comes to understanding humanity as theoretical research is. Michael himself suggests that I take an anecdotal approach, using academic papers for context.
‘I think that’s a really interesting exercise, and then think about what are the commonalities of experience,’ he suggests. ‘And how do you deal with it from within? You can try to see the world through the eyes of a particular person.’
Meeting Michael frees me from feeling that answers are sitting out there somewhere in the universe, waiting for me to find them. I will find some insights in the books and journals that Cathy is sending my way, but I can still use my journalistic skills too. There is going to be enormous wisdom and insight in the lived experience of others.
The big news stories that happened when I was a young reporter in the 1990s seem far more memorable to me than recent headlines, perhaps because the job was still so new and exciting. I vividly recall the days when Princess Diana and INXS frontman Michael Hutchence died, the night that Paul Keating lost the Australian prime ministership, and the scramble to get reporters to Thredbo to cover an enormous landslide. The newsroom bristled with energy as journalists scurried in every direction, phones ringing nonstop. The whiteboard behind the chief of staff’s desk, showing the assigning of crews and journalists, was an incomprehensible wall of arrows, lines, names and numbers by the time the evening news bulletin somehow made it to air.
I remember a very famous news photograph taken during one of those intense periods. It’s almost as memorable in Australia as the image of accused murderer Lindy Chamberlain unfurling a poster of baby Azaria. It is a picture of a man in a suit, dark hair neatly combed, leaving a church. He clutches three irises, and a bright pink hair elastic is wrapped around one wrist. His eyes are cast downward, face contorted in grief as he weeps uncontrollably. A man on either side grips his arms, holding him upright. One of them is crying and the other looks desperately grim, as they half escort, half carry the stricken man from the church.
The man in the photograph is Walter Mikac, and he’s leaving a memorial for the thirty-five victims of the 1996 Port Arthur shooting. Port Arthur was the worst massacre in Australian history, outside colonial times, and it prompted a controversial overhaul of the nation’s weapons laws.
Walter would have given anything to not be in that famous picture or thrust into the national spotlight. On 28 April that year, he was playing a round of golf while his wife, Nanette, and two daughters, Alannah and Madeline, aged six and three, were enjoying an outing at the Port Arthur historic site. The trio heard gunfire and were attempting to flee when a car pulled over alongside them. No doubt thinking it was somebody who could help, Nanette walked towards it. The gunman stepped out and fatally shot her and then the two girls.
Like Louisa Hope, Walter Mikac knows there’s no comfort in the generalisations of probability if you happen to be the one in the equation. The odds of living in rural Australia, as the Mikac family did in 1996, and being the victim of a gun massacre would have been utterly unlikely. Losing your entire family in such a way would have been a more remote prospect still. Yet that is what happened to Walter, a pharmacist who was at the time in his early thirties.
That devastating experience turned Walter Mikac into one of the most famous faces of tragedy in Australia. It’s a group nobody would ever want to join, and yet once you’re a member, the public never allows you to leave: Bruce and Denise Morcombe, Lindy Chamberlain, Stuart Diver. In 2008, newspapers ran a story about the death of Garry Lynch, the father of Anita Cobby, one of the most famous murder victims in Australian history. Garry was ninety. Even in death, his life was still defined by the brutal crime visited upon his daughter.
If, like Walter Mikac and those others, you have the great misfortune to find yourself in the middle of a public tragedy that grabs and violently shakes the community, there will never be a time when your life is truly your own again, no matter how many years pass. There will be anniversaries when journalists come knocking, there will be similar tragedies on which you’re asked to comment, there will be pressure to ‘make a difference’, there will be ‘Where Are They Now?’ magazine articles. The media gives these stories such prominence that we almost come to feel as if we know the people involved. We become emotionally invested in finding out what happens to them next.
There’s another reason why we become fascinated with these people’s lives. As the last chapter explained, we are very rattled by major events that shatter our sense of security. Our minds keep turning them over until we find ways to make sense of what happened. The more shocking and awful the tragedy, the harder it is for us to process. Our individual brains behave predictably in that quest, but we also act predictably as a community. Any news story of a disaster will be followed by more news stories of the collective reaction. We almost always leave flowers and create memorials an
d gather together.
I’ve seen this pattern of group mourning repeated time and time again during my journalism career but now I want to understand why we do it. What exactly is the community looking for in the aftermath of a major tragedy, and why does it act the way it does? What does that behaviour tell us about ourselves? And how does the way the rest of us act affect the already shattered people at the centre of the storm?
One night a few months after the twentieth anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, I’m sitting in a pub on the northern coast of New South Wales waiting to meet Walter Mikac for dinner. It’s a rainy night and I watch for him out the window. Frankly, I’m scared to meet him. What happened to Walter is close to the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to me. I’m worried I will start to cry when he talks about it, as I did with Michael Spence, or that my face will betray my fear. I’m conscious that so many people over the years will have treated Walter like That Port Arthur Guy, not as a normal man to whom a terrible thing happened. I’m so nervous that I’ve pre-gamed my small talk as if I’m on a date. (I’ve read that he likes gardening, so I have a few anecdotes about my plants, and I figure he probably likes AFL because he’s originally from Melbourne.)
As I fidget with my cutlery, I see Walter park his car in the street and cross the road. He’s wearing a light grey hoodie over a business shirt and looks much as he did twenty years ago, perhaps with a little less hair on top, a tiny bit heavier. He’s still a handsome man.
After we shake hands, I blather through my prepared icebreakers, praying I don’t appear as giant a goose as I feel, and we order our meals (Moreton Bay bugs for Walter, a rib-eye for me). My fears prove unfounded: Walter is easy to talk to and my nerves dissolve very quickly.
It turns out I’m far from the first person to fear talking to him. In the year after the massacre, Walter would go shopping and women would sometimes recognise him, burst into tears and quickly rush away without saying a word. The horror of what had happened to him was so unfathomable that even close friends fled.
‘The one I think about,’ he tells me, ‘was my friend Doug, who I played cricket with and who was the dad of the girl who worked in my pharmacy. And one day, I was walking down the street and he was coming the other way. As soon as he saw me he turned and started walking the other way. I sort of had to make a split-second decision. What am I going to do? If I let him go, we’ll probably never have a conversation ever again. So I started walking quicker. As I started walking quicker, he was nearly running. I caught up to him and put my hand on his shoulder and as he turned around, he just had tears streaming down his face. I said, “It’s okay, Doug, you don’t have to say anything.’’ ’
I can completely understand why Doug would do that, and yet at the same time it seems so terrible that Walter, in the midst of all his anguish, was the one who had to console others. It reminds me of Michael Spence accepting that he would have to be the one to diffuse any awkwardness at work, even though he was the person suffering the most. Walter says that having friends avoid him for fear of not knowing what to say or do was one of the worst things in the aftermath of losing his family.
‘If you thought someone was genuinely a good friend, and you had shared a lot of experience with them, and they avoided you, that hurt,’ Walter says. ‘You could sort of understand, but by the same token, it’s another part of loss. You’ve lost whatever you had but then people just go by the wayside and it’s more loss. There’s nothing anyone could say, no matter how badly it came out, that could be as bad as what’s already happened to you. So it’s much better for people to just let you know that they’re there to help, if you need it. For people to show that they’re still there is the most important thing.’
While some of Walter’s friends weren’t up to that task, he found that the insensitivity of strangers could be appalling too. There was a combination of intense curiosity and fear.
‘You’re conscious that people are looking at you or maybe making judgements about how you’re going. That’s a hard thing because you can’t be sad every minute of the day,’ he says. ‘But sometimes I’d go out with my brothers, who were single at the time, to nightclubs in Melbourne and people would see you laughing or joking and dancing around the dance floor. People would actually say, “So you’re over it?” or, “You’re better now?” and I would say, “It’s just a distraction, it’s a way of passing time.’’ ’
Walter tells me he felt like he was living in a fishbowl.
‘People would come up and say, “Aren’t you that guy that had all your family killed in Port Arthur?” without any other part to it. That happened for quite a while. People would just say it without really thinking. People see your car somewhere and they make assumptions. There were a few times where people thought I was sleeping in the pharmacy and that I wasn’t coping,’ he recalls.
What Walter is implying, but doesn’t say directly, is that people were wondering if he would kill himself. When they speculated about that, what they were really grappling with was the question of whether or not they would kill themselves in his position. So I ask him what might seem a shockingly direct question, because I think I would be wasting his time – as well as that of everyone interviewed for this book and your time as a reader – if I didn’t ask the questions everybody secretly thinks about.
‘Nobody has more knowledge of or access to the means to commit suicide than a pharmacist,’ I say. ‘What made you think that life was worth carrying on?’
I’m glad that Walter doesn’t seem remotely offended.
‘The thing that kept coming up for me was family,’ he replies. ‘My thought was, All these people have battled really hard. They’re hurting as well because it’s their grandchildren, or their nieces. It was a sense that I really can’t do it. There’s been enough hurt here. It’s not to say that I haven’t thought of wanting to do that, but it would have to be really bad for that to be the case. I kept holding onto the hope that whilst today or this week was awful – the court case was on and it was going to be very traumatic – that once that was over, there’s hope that the next week I might go away and build new memories or share things with other people, and that would be good.’
There were even times, I learn, amidst his terrible suffering when Walter felt fortunate.
‘There was a lady I visited, Carol Loughton, who was in the café and lost her daughter,’ he recalls.
Carolyn Loughton had been in the Broad Arrow Café, one of the bloodiest sites of the massacre. She suffered terrible physical injuries from gunshot and was also left with great psychological scars because her daughter was killed in front of her.
‘Whenever I went to see Carol, I actually felt lucky. I thought, You’ve lost Nanette and the children. But at least you haven’t been physically hurt. If you can muster up the energy, you can do anything from here,’ Walter says.
It wasn’t as if mustering up the energy was easy. At times it was near impossible. Yet while some strangers and friends were insensitive, the community also came together in ways that were extraordinary. In the weeks immediately following the massacre, there was a nonstop delivery of food to Walter’s house. There was also an astounding number of letters, around three thousand, from people all over the world. There were presents too: soft toys, religious material, cheques for large sums of money. The Pharmacy Guild of Australia was particularly generous, organising a roster of pharmacists from all over the country to keep Walter’s small business running while he took time out to grieve.
‘It was pretty humbling,’ he says. ‘It was a case of there’s a lot more good people in the world than bad. That did help restore my faith in humanity.’
Another way in which the community helped was by plugging Walter into a network of men who had lost children in the Dunblane school massacre in Scotland. (Around the same time as Port Arthur, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher in one of the worst mass murders in UK history.) Some of the fathers visited Australia and Walter formed a bond with
them. Then he and his brother went to Scotland and met the families again.
‘Prior to that, I was thinking, There’s nobody in the world who really knows how I feel. Being in their company was a really healing thing. For them to be able to share, for me to be able to share, to have tears, to be able to talk about things that you can’t necessarily talk to your family about because it’s either too gruesome or they’re just dark thoughts. You don’t want to burden people with them.’
When Walter now sees tragedy befall others he watches them start on the same journey he once took: the shock, the grief, the media intrusion, the community reaction, the struggle to keep going. He feels a connection with such people.
‘I read this article a month ago, in Good Weekend, about a man named Matt Golinski,’ Walter says. (Matt Golinski is a chef who was severely burned in a house fire on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland while trying to rescue his wife and three daughters, all of whom died.) ‘I tore the article out. I subscribed to his website, hoping if he saw my name he might contact me. I would love to have a conversation with him, just to say things aren’t the same but there is some light.’
It touches me greatly that Walter, such a gentle soul, did not directly contact Matt Golinski, but instead reached out so subtly. There’s no doubt that twenty years after losing his family, Walter has much wisdom to share. He has managed to rebuild his life. He remarried and has a daughter. He lives by the beach and tries to go for a swim every day. He owns a pharmacy that he shares with a business partner, so he works one week on, one week off. Quite a few people in his local community don’t even know his history. He’s just Walter the chemist.
‘Twenty years on, what does grief feel like compared to what it felt like one year on?’ I ask.