Peter James arrived at Port Arthur after 5pm on 28 April 1996 to a scene already beginning to overwhelm the people trying to hold it together. The ambulance worker had driven from Launceston with two colleagues after hearing sketchy reports of a shooting on the radio and contacting the critical incident stress debriefing team.
By the time he reached the police command post in Taranna, officers were telling him the death toll was not yet confirmed but was already unthinkably high. Police and SES volunteers were still searching bushland for survivors who may have crawled away to hide, and James was sent in on back routes that avoided the Seascape guesthouse before he reached Port Arthur itself.
What he found was a site stripped of the living. Everyone who was still alive had already been removed to hospitals. James was then pulled into the work of supporting volunteer ambulance service workers who had been first on the scene, helping with crime scene walk-throughs, body identification, forensic examination and photography. He stayed almost 24 hours straight.
James said the early job was as much about listening as anything else. “People needed to ventilate, and it was my job to listen,” he said. He remembered telling exhausted officers, “You’re not going anywhere. We’ve got crime scene walk-throughs to do, and you’re gonna help us.”
The details around him kept turning uglier. Tasmanian devils were starting to come out and sniff around the bodies, he said, and the dead had to be protected and then loaded carefully and compassionately. He also advised police to rotate the officers guarding the bodies to reduce fatigue. “I would offer advice – try to reduce police fatigue by asking that they rotate the officers who were protecting bodies,” he said.
James said he was trying to hold other people together while some were falling apart. “I was also there to support people, as some were falling apart,” he said. “I would become one of them the next day.” Looking back, he said the scale of the Port Arthur massacre broke through the professional distance that usually keeps emergency workers going. “There’s black humour sometimes at jobs. But we operate behind a facade, and the magnitude of this, well, the facade fell away,” he said.
The account matters because it comes from inside the first hours after one of Australia’s worst mass shootings, when the work was still rescue, recovery and identification at once. It also shows the narrow margin between control and collapse at a scene where police were still hunting for survivors while others were already protecting the dead.
