"AN Eye for an Eye" reads the chilling, spray painted slogan along the front wall of the Royal Hobart Hospital. Somebody has made a vain attempt to paint the slogan out.
Meanwhile, however, hospital staff have received death threats for continuing to treat Martin Bryant for the burns to his back which he suffered when the Port Arthur holiday lodge, where he allegedly took three hostages and held police at bay in an 18 hour siege, burned down. There is enormous bitterness and anger in Hobart today.
As Tasmanians try to come to grips with the horror of the Port Arthur massacre, 28 year old Bryant, the man accused of slaughtering 35 people, lies in a Hobart hospital, where he was formally charged yesterday in a bizarre bedside court hearing. Police charged Bryant with the murder of Kate Scott, a 21 year old who was among the victims of the massacre last Sunday. Further charges will follow.
Ms Helen Gray, of the Tasmanian nurses' association, said her colleagues were having a tough time reconciling their professional duties with their feelings of rage. Police stepped up security, as thousands of Hobart people prepared to stop work today to join an ecumenical church service attended by the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, and other political leaders to honour the victims.
Bryant lay silently in bed as he was charged. He entered no plea. Elsewhere in the same hospital, 16 of the 19 people injured in the shooting were also receiving treatment, some in serious condition. Newspapers around Australia splashed Bryant's photograph yesterday staring wistfully from beneath shoulder length blond hair.
Meanwhile, former friends and neighbours in Tasmania painted a disturbing portrait of Bryant as a complex young man, a loner who was alienated from his family, who inherited a fortune from a spinster twice his age and who had lately developed a morbid fascination with guns.
Bryant was born in Tasmania in May 1967. His father was a dock worker. While he was still at school, he became friendly with Miss Helen Harvey, an heiress to Tattersalls, a big Australian gaming fortune. She became his benefactor and took him into her mansion in the Hobart suburb of New Town, which Bryant later inherited from her along with a farm at Copping, a hamlet near Port Arthur.
Neighbours remember them as an odd pair. They kept up to 40 cats, dogs and birds on their farm as well as a pig which, locals claim, Bryant would sometimes sleep with. They would occasionally go for drives in one of Miss Harvey's expensive cars with a miniature pony in the back seat, which they would then take for walks in the countryside around Port Arthur.
When Miss Harvey died in a car crash near Copping about four years ago, she left Bryant property and other assets valued at about £300,000. Bryant suffered neck injuries in the crash and recovered in hospital. His father moved to the farm after her death, but his relationship with his son was strained.
About a year after Miss Harvey died, Bryant's father went missing. Neighbours alerted police who found his body floating in a farm dam with lead diving weights around his neck. Some people were suspicious about both deaths, but no charges have ever been laid.
Mr John Featherstone, and his wife Sue, farmers who live next door to the farm which Bryant has since sold, have unhappy memories of their former neighbour.
Mr Featherstone said yesterday that Bryant once invited his wife and daughter in for tea. "Then he herded them outside and told them not to come back ever or he'd shoot them," he said.
"He would go from being a 25 year old to a 12 year old delinquent kid, just like that. Miss Harvey once told us that he'd threatened to shoot his own father." The Featherstones reported their encounters and fears with Bryant to the police, but their complaints were not followed up.
When police on Monday raided the deserted mansion in New Town where Bryant lives, they took away boxes of ammunition and a firearm. The killer is believed to have purchased by mail order his guns, including two semi automatic military style weapons allegedly used in the Port Arthur shootings.
He was able to do so because Tasmania's gun laws up to this week had been the least restrictive in Australia. In the wake of public outrage over the killings, the Tasmanian state government yesterday announced that it would impose an immediate ban on the future sale of self loading military weapons.