Blondes Have More Guns
by Dominic Pettman

Did you ever notice how Martin Bryant looks exactly like Helen Darville-Demidenko? It's uncanny. When I first saw the courtroom sketch of the mass murderer Bryant on the cover of The Age - head tilted to one side, a flaxen mane of hair bringing his intense gaze into sharp relief - I wondered whether some kind of eerie albino-gothic doubling was going on, and if they were in fact the same person; on a symbolic level at least. What is it about these two renegade blondes which helped fuse them into diabolical and hermaphroditic Siamese-twins in the popular unconscious? Their distinctive features seem to mask a refusal to adhere to the norm, while simultaneously presenting a face on which we can project our deepest anxieties. It seems hard to deny that Bryant and Darville dazzlingly reflect that part of our national identity which we would prefer to deny or repress: the anglo-grotesque.

Until very recently some people believed that "the enemy" came from beyond our shores, with slanted eyes, different coloured skin or thick accents. In various ways, including vague references to "security" and "innoculations against the Asian crisis," the yellow peril is being reinvented. But in the post-Port Arthur era we are haunted by another, less abstract threat, namely ourselves. The myth of a coherent national identity is dissolving and we can see the consequences in the manic glint of the honey-haired enemy within. This was vividly demonstrated a few years ago in America, when the xenophobic reaction to the Oklahoma bombing gave way to the numb realization that "one of their own" was responsible for the carnage.

In the crazed pupils of these blonde sons and daughters of our sunburnt country is the darkness within our hearts - the ringing of repressed terror which burns the ears only so long as one minute's silence, before being drowned out by the first-quarter football siren. Like Charles Manson in the Summer of Love, Bryant is the hippie-surfer psycho - the flipside of our indulged and indulgent youth (obviously only a sub-set of "youth" in general). When asked on the phone by an ABC journalist during his killing spree what he was doing, he said "having fun." I'm sure Darville thought her deception of our literary establishment was a hoot (which, of course, it was). Maybe blondes do have more fun. What's next? Kimberley Davies with a flame thrower?

Perhaps my conflation of these two extremely different cases is at best trite and at worst irresponsible, yet I believe there is a link - if not a direct causal one - in terms of media demonization. Darville may not own a gun, but she sure shot off at the mouth. What the farce which followed her unmasking obscured was her book's self-conscious manipulation of history, and while this did not lead to the spectacular bodycount of the Port Arthur massacre, it was in a sense written with the blood of many (just as real) murdered people. The media seized on the imposter angle in favour of the Aryan Nazi one. (Not forgetting, of course, the professed inspiration for Bryant's actions, namely his hatred of Asian tourists.)

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The tendency I am trying to identify here relates to what is known as millenarianism; the general panic and hysteria of the end of the millennium. We may therefore consider adding a new steed to the four horsemen of the apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence, Death and Blondes. (Don't get me wrong, I used to be a blond before the combination of postgraduate study and Fitzroy landlords turned it a mousy grey).

Australia seems to have an interesting cameo-role to play in the fin de siècle angst of the 1990s. The Aum Shinrikyo cult, which filled the Tokyo subway system with sarin nerve gas, tested its fatal properties on a Western Australian sheep station. At one stage it was believed that the "suicidal" Temple of the Solar Order was hiding out in Australia after murdering most of his followers in Sweden and Canada.

Richard Neville, our own hippie-hippie shaker, has identified Martin Bryant as "millennial man": whose symbolic media image has him poised at the end of history and on the brink of the 21st century. Bryant is "the globe-trotting surfer who never surfs, with a Volvo, a stack of crass videos and a hairdo invoking Helen Demidenko, the writer who never writes." Neville goes on to say that Bryant is the product of "hip-hop violence" and that:

The sweeping away of traditional values and lifestyles puts a mental strain on millions of people. This will either transform human capacities and prompt an evolution of our psychology, or it will spark a chain reaction of psychotic collapse.

I certainly know which one I'm betting on; not because I lament the passing of such "traditional values," but because they produce such monsters in the first place and then fail to admit any responsibility.

It is in this sense that we should take seriously Neville's claim that "in some strange way, we are all connected to the killer." Port Arthur has a particularly long and bloody history, which is why the victims of this latest massacre were there in the first place. First the aborigines and then the convicts were butchered in the violent birth of a nation, just as the bloodshed in April 1996 represents the symbolic viscera of an aborted Republic.

The congealing gun-lobby was initially derided by the media and dismissed as a whining group of Elmer Fudds, yet these people directly connect to the myth we valorize every ANZAC day. People with terse voices on talk-back radio discussed Howard's new gun laws as a castrating conspiracy theory to "disarm the populace," one of the signs, they believe, preceding the great and final battle between Lucifer's dark army and the warrior angels of Heaven. (How come everyone thinks they're fighting on God's side, will Satan's soldiers please raise their hands?)

Perhaps this is the true meaning of the manic glint in Bryant's and Darville's eye. (A glint, it must be said, provided by the doctoring-wizadry of Fairfax's Photoshop team.) They have glimpsed the impending Apocalypse and see no point in behaving rationally. As blondes, they are going to exploit their prerogative to have "fun" - and in the last days, one person's fun is another person's nightmare.