Everything is taken away

from page 2 of The Daily Telegraph, May 1, 1996


[no by-line]

  This is what Walter Mikac told Australia on A Current Affair on the Nine Network on national television last night:
  "When I'd been out on the golf course we'd actually heard shots and little did we know that that could have been my family being killed.
  "And when I rang, when we got back, I learned that there'd been some incident at Port Arthur and I rang home and they had not arrived...
  "I found the car and that's when my worst thoughts had sort of came to fruition really.. I mean, to see her body just lying in the gutter like that was... quite sickening.
  "It's like in [one] afternoon my whole life's just been erased. Every possible thing that I've done through my life to succeed, and to do something for my wife and children has just been taken away in a very short space of time...
  "The main reason I have really come on here to talk to you is because I just hope to God that no person ever has to go through this again and by me talking to you if that occurs I'll be... it'll make me feel... no it won't make me feel happy but it'll never happen to anyone else.
  "I actually went to the site yesterday morning to see my... wife and children, um, lying on the road and, um... people who've got guns who say they need to have these things or, I mean I know there's a need for people in rural areas to have rifles... but if anybody had been there and saw those bodies strewn all over the place... it cannot happen if, unless a person has some sort of [an] automatic firearm that's capable of such carnage, it's just horrendous.
  "What would be the thing I would say to him? I would show him the pyjamas of my wife and my two daughters and ask him how on earth I'm going to keep living without them... I mean, it's just, it's just unbelievable.
  "I don't think anyone could deny that Nannette was an absolute classic, my wife. Alanah, I mean Alanah's just incredible. Some of the things she's written here [in her little book]. 'I love my family and mum and dad and my sister and I love them with all my heart. I love my family, I love them all'... and it keeps going on and on like that through the book. And, um, Maddie, we were quite certain that she was going to be somewhere in politics, yeah, she just yeah, non-stop, she'd argue, but ah, we'll never know...
  "...this is one of her [Alanah's] head bands. It's got some of Nannette's perfume on it as well. She looked absolutely stunning in that with her blue eyes -- they all had blue eyes..."

[image: "Walter Mikac... wife, daughters were killed" (7x3.5) ]


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