
Twenty-two years ago to the day, on a Sunday, Walter Mikac was hosting a local golf tournament on the sprawling greens of a course in Tasmania. His wife, Nanette, and young daughters, Alannah, 6, and Madeline, 3, decided to visit the local historic site of Port Arthur as he played.
Standing on the golf course, Mikac remembers hearing shots flying from across the bay. They were coming from Port Arthur, he thought, but those on course assumed they were a re-enactment of sorts. Tasmania was a safe state, Nubeena — the place he, his wife and two young daughters had settled in, having bought the local pharmacy — a safer city. The family would rarely lock their doors at night.
When the game finished, he later wrote, a young couple ran into the clubhouse. People at Port Arthur had been shot, they yelled. Racing home, Mikac arrived to an empty house.
He would later learn Nanette, Alannah and Madeline had been killed by a lone gunman who shot 35 people and wounded 23 more.
He does his best not to think about that day.
“I don’t tend to look back at it, but it’s one of the main things that lives in your memory bank. So whilst it may not happen every day, and I may not re-live it all the time, there are certain days you feel emotional,” he tells Mamamia over the phone from his home in Byron Bay.
