Phil: It wasn't the first time I'd ever met Bryant. I'd actually met him 3 years before when his father disappeared, and so we were out there searching and the police rescue divers found Morris Bryant. He had a weight belt around him and he'd committed suicide.

Phil: Martin came down to the dam, identified his father, and walked off laughing.

Kumi: A few years later, he was rostered to guard shooter Martin Bryant's hospital room.

Phil: I sat out in the hallway and I just leaned forward to him, and we've got about 3 metres between us, and I tapped my revolver, and I said, you get out of those handcuffs, Martin, this is for you. I'm not a 3 year old girl hiding behind a tree.

Kumi: Phil, it's so great to see you again. Thank you so much for coming back and chatting.

Phil: It's great to be back in touch with you and the team again, it's a real privilege.

Kumi: Phil, childhood in Tasmania, what was that like? What was it like growing up there?

Phil: I grew up on a farm south of Hobart. My great grandfather, who was a politician, who actually campaigned in the 1920s to keep Port Arthur as a tourist place. Wow. So he was really key. That was one of his campaigns back then, Benjamin Pearsall, my great grandfather, never obviously realising all these years later where it would go.

Kumi: Were your parents also frontline workers in that area of service?

Phil: My father did army, of course, and he was an officer in the army reserve, and it was fairly intense across that Vietnam era because of the scourge of communism as it was, so nobody knew when they were going to get called up. My mother was a teacher, but of course in those days, Kirby, once she got married, had children, Stay at home, stay at home so we grow up.

Phil: With Mum always at home, but that whole element of service, and I think it was just installed in us because all around us, our family were doing the same thing, always part of community, contributing community. My mum and grandmother were on the hospital auxiliary. They'd all sit down in the parish centre knitting, crocheting squares and all that sort of thing, and you could almost say life was.

Phil: idyllic. I'm sure for a young child it was very idyllic, but at the parent level and above it was probably quite hard.

Kumi: You were 18 years old when you joined the Army Reserve. Why did you join?

Phil: We're first fleeters here in Tasmania, 1804 and in the 1840s, the 199th Regiment came out from England. It was posted here to Hobart, one of the British regiments.

Phil: And they were taken from here to go and fight the Maori wars in New Zealand. One of those was with my ancestral grandfather. He settled in Hobart, but every generation from the day he arrived in Hobart right through to my children today have served in the military in some form over those or since 1840.

Kumi: That's such a long lineage.

Phil: It is and some of it's Army reserve services in my father, myself since 1982 with a short break, and of course my children who were both full-time navy.

Kumi: You've also been a police officer and a volunteer firefighter. What is it that draws you to this kind of frontline

Phil: work? There's an element of excitement, the mundane job.

Phil: Being at work at 8 o'clock in the morning to 5 o'clock at night, 30 years later it's pretty mediocre in many ways unless someone has a passion for their job. I joined the Tasmania Fire Service as a volunteer in 1983. There's 30 odd years there. It was a way to meet people. It was a way to mix with people. It was a way to serve community.

Phil: And bearing in mind this is Tasmania at times you tend to, as a police officer lock up your relatives, lock up your old school friends, deal with them on the worst day of their lives, and the people that you deal with, you see quite often around the community.

NEWS ANCHOR: A siege is underway in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur, where at least 25 people have been shot dead in Australia's worst massacre, and a warning that some of the pictures in this report may be disturbing.

NEWS ANCHOR: Helicopters began ferrying the injured to Hobart from Port Arthur after a gunman opened fire there this afternoon. Locals near the site cringed in fear inside their shops and homes as the gunmen opened fire. What do you understand he may have done.

Kumi: You were in the police force for only 3 years when the Port Arthur massacre happened. You were rostered to guard shooter Martin Bryant's hospital room after he was injured following the shootings. What was that like?

Phil: One of the things I've always thought, and this might sound rather strange, that I've always been privileged to see key parts of history.

Phil: And I understood that this was a key part of history. So whatever happened, this was going to be a significant time in history, which it still is. And so I made lots of observations and I kept notebooks of those days and conversations and all that sort of thing, but for me it wasn't the first time I'd ever met Bryant. I'd actually met him 3 years before when we were in the academy.

Phil: When his father disappeared, we went down to search for his father because it was believed that his father Morris had wandered off into the bush and shot himself. So we were out there searching and we wondered who this weird guy was that was just following us and trying to chat up with the policewomen on my course, and they still remember weird little Martin to this day.

Phil: But anyway, all of a sudden Gary Whittle, the local police officer, called out and the police dive team had gone into a dam to search, and it wasn't a very big dam. It was probably about 5 metres wide, but deep dam, and it sits just above the Arthur Highway, which is the road to Port Arthur.

Phil: And in that, the police rescue divers found Morris Bryant. He had a weight belt around him and he had committed suicide. And I remember Martin came down to the dam, identified his father, and walked off laughing. Really? And for us we just thought.

Phil: That was weird. That was weird. Now Tasmania, being Tasmania, the next property was owned by my former sister-in-law, and they said, you know, he killed him. He's throw him in the dam, and I just said, Oh look, that's for the detectives to find. It's not for me to be concerned about, but they just didn't want Martin as their neighbour because he'd be walking across their land all the time shooting and things like that. Uh, he just had no comprehension of other people.

Kumi: Gosh, I'm just taking this in, Phil, and then I'm thinking 3 years later, you are outside guarding him in this room and he's at that point shot.

Kumi: A number of people, killed a number of people.

Kumi: Did that moment. Of the father in the dam and going to that property and seeing him laughing when the father was pulled up from the dam, did that come back into your mind then?

Phil: Look, it did, but let's rewind to the actual day. I worked that night in the major incident room, and I could hear and see the police negotiators talking to this Jamie down there at SeaScape.

Phil: And what was happening was there were names going up on the whiteboard, possible names of who Jamie was, and then all of a sudden someone walked up to that board and put up his name, and I went, I know that bloke. I know him.

NEWS ANCHOR: The man believed responsible for Australia's worst mass murder this century is sedated and under police guard in a hospital. Police say they expect to talk to him later this morning when charges can be laid.

NEWS ANCHOR: A person has been taken into custody.

NEWS ANCHOR: The killer was taken by ambulance to Hobart Hospital, the same hospital in which many of his victims are still being treated.

Kumi: When you were standing outside his room at the hospital, who were you guarding him from or from what? Was it from him escaping, was it from people potentially wanting to have a go at him, what was the idea behind it?

Phil: When we were sent over to look after him, our briefings were, you're going out there to guard him. Oh, OK, and we've heard there's people trying to get him.

Phil: And so there were reports of people trying to get at him, but we were never told who, which nowadays if you're doing that sort of thing, you'd probably have the special operations group manning those floors, not constables that were fairly new, but in reality it was also about protecting the prison officers and the nursing staff.

Kumi: What would you have done if someone, a group of people had come for him at that time?

Phil: We were exhausted. We'd been going flat.

Phil: Working at the scene, working down at the mortuary, dealing with families, I went back and dealt with the families around the Broad Arrow Cafe helping the CIB identify who the cars belonged to, and we just found some horrific, I guess, exhibits as they turned out to be, so we were really exhausted.

Phil: And my view, when one of my prison officer mates asked me who are you here to protect him from, I said, I don't want to protect him. I said, I'm here to protect you guys and the nursing staff, and I turned around and said, Director Bryant, they come through that door, mate, they can have you.

Kumi: And you said that to him.

Phil: I said that to him. It wasn't professional, no, but it was one shot at our worst mass killer.

Phil: And he just put his head down because he was quite challenging and I sat out in the hallway and what he would do was just lie there and glare at us with such anger and such hatred in his eyes.

Phil: That was the Martin that did this. The little quiet Martin that was there going, Could I have a drink of water, please? Could I have some food? It was just switch, switch, switch, switch constantly. And I could, I, I was talking to somebody and I could feel him watching me, and I would look at him, swing around and look at him. And the anger and hatred that he had when he was looking at me, what was incredible. And I just leant forward to him.

Phil: And we've got about 3 metres between us, and I tapped my revolver and I said, you get out of those handcuffs, Martin. This is for you. I'm not a 3 year old girl hiding behind a tree. Wow. And he put his head down again, closed his eyes, and he did not engage with me for the rest of that shift, but

Phil: We were aggravated. We'd been dealing down at the scene. We'd been working and I'm talking like Tasmania Police was 1100 police officers at that time. Over 400 were on the Port Arthur matter. Wow. Our media room at that time was one person. That's was one of the challenges, and we were not versed in something of that scale. None of us were. None of us were.

Phil: Everyone was scrambling to understand what all this actually meant. You mentioned

Kumi: a notebook before. I'm wondering, did you write these observations down in your notebook when you got back from a shift each day or each night? Is that what's in those notebooks now?

Phil: It's literally dozens of pages. It was just

Phil: My observations, and I've done it in conflict as well, in wars, because it is, it is part of history, not exciting to be part of that. It'd be great that that never happened. Many of us in Tasmania, we all had firearms. We all enjoyed firearms. I actually go to America to go shooting now with my US Army mate. I go over there to go shooting, which I think is quite nice because I actually keep firearms in America, which is not so.

Kumi: What is that feeling, I guess, so much of a sort of run away from danger, but you tend to run towards it in the work that you do. Does it take a certain personality type to do that?

Phil: I think at times people could say, you can be incredibly brave. Sometimes I think you can be incredibly stupid. No one ever goes out on those days to win a Victoria Cross. They just find them in the worst of themselves and others in the worst positions ever.

Phil: And it somehow works out, so often they find themselves in danger. There's always that the world turns to crap very quickly, and I think it's not so much running towards danger, it's that danger catches up with you.

Kumi: Yes, and that the danger might not be what you would expect. It can be in the mundane or something pretty ordinary.

Phil: And it usually is the job that you get, particularly in policing or fire because you're responding.

Phil: Is the one that you'll sit there and you'll go through all the processes in your mind on the way to the job. Yep, you go here, we'll go here, etc. and you'll turn up and it'll be nothing. It could be someone threatening someone with an axe, say, and you turn up there and it's just been a bit of push and shove and someone's threatened to get an axe and not actually physically had an axe, but you're prepared for something like that. But the one that's pretty mundane and you're sitting there relaxed, you've just had, uh, you know, your coffee and all that, and you're going to these jobs.

Phil: And all of a sudden there's someone behind you with the axe.

Phil: And that's the difference is that suddenly you know what is mediocre, what is standard.

Phil: Suddenly turns to a world of

Kumi: hurt. You were with the police force just shy of 15 years. Why did you leave? What led to that?

Phil: I took leave from Tasmania police because I had an opportunity to go over to Iraq and work as part of the strategic communications, the public affairs team, combat camera teams if you would, and I spent 5 months there in the Middle East in southern Iraq into Baghdad. I actually had my 38th birthday in Baghdad where Alexander Downer sang me Happy birthday.

Phil: Singing was not Alex's forte. It was very, very good in that regard of once again being there as a part of history, despite how turbulent those times were.

NEWS ANCHOR: Dangerous cocktail of hot, dry and windy conditions has authorities on edge. Tonight as 50 bushfires burn across the state, police are taking no chances.

Kumi: In 2006 you were diagnosed with PTSD and depression, but you remained in the front lines, including the 2019 bushfire in New South Wales and Victoria. How did those fires affect you, especially when your, I guess your mental health was, you know, challenged at that point.

Phil: Those fires, I think finished me right. I wasn't on the front line. I was involved with the higher headquarters. I was a lieutenant colonel in the army. I'd left police in 2006, and what made me realise there I couldn't go on was actually the death of Richard Carleton at Beaconsfield.

Phil: So I was the police officer there with Mel Bush who's here at ABC Hobart and some other people that helped us to try and resuscitate him and obviously as we know that he didn't make it. That to me was I just couldn't be a police officer anymore. He

Kumi: was a famous Australian journalist for our listeners who might not know. You were there when he died and that was it that broke you and

Kumi: Was there something in the fires that sort of, you thought, I can't do this anymore?

Phil: They were long days for us, even though we were on the higher headquarters. I had teams all around the place. We're trying to get people back to Malakuta. We're trying to get people out of Malakuda. We'd gone on for weeks and weeks, very little downtime, and it was just one day I saw a clip of a koala in a fire and a lady trying to rescue it, and that was it. Just knew no more, no more.

spk_8: He just went straight into the flames, and I jumped out of the car and ran towards him, using the shirt from her back and bottles of water to douse the koala, his fur, on fire. They bundled him in a doona heading for Port Macquarie Hospital.

Kumi: Oh.

Kumi: What was it about seeing that koala that broke you? I can see you're getting quite emotional now.

Phil: It was the, uh, it was the screams and it just, just wrecked me. And I guess with, with PTSD, it doesn't take much of a trigger.

Phil: It just doesn't take much.

Phil: And that to this day it still triggers.

Kumi: Was it something about the innocence of the koala, the animal?

Phil: It was the very fact that there was just no protection for them.

Kumi: That's so sad.

Phil: We just have this great impact on, on our environment and when it comes to looking after the animals, we just, we just don't do it well.

Kumi: How did you try to deal with all this? It's kind of unravelling a bit at this point.

Phil: It is because I'd gone back into army full time in 2019.

Phil: And I was posted into Sydney close to my children because they live up there in Sydney. Then I got sent back to Canberra as COVID hit and it was isolating. You went to work, if there was work, you stayed at home in your apartment, you couldn't walk around. It was bloody awful. And so all this just kept on chipping away, bearing in mind that I'd come out of Iraq and when my contract was finished there came me.

Phil: I was just back on the streets in Hobart. There was no decompression and just sit me. My team had gone. They'd gone to their families, and it was just, this is awful. This was worse than prison, I think. Those things just carry with you and they build and everything is a layer, a cup of water analogy, a cup overflows, and that sort of thing.

Kumi: You turned to alcohol to try and cope. How did that work for you, I guess, at least temporarily?

Phil: You're not in control. It was constant. It was whiskey. It was just, just not in control, and that impacts on family and everyone else around you. Your mental health becomes even more shot, you're counteracting any drugs that you're on.

Phil: But defence, I guess, gave me an opportunity to be medically discharged a year before I would have had to go anyway. Compulsory retirement age is 60, and so I left. They put me out.

Kumi: What was the big impact on relationships during that time with policing?

Phil: It cost me my first marriage. My ex-wife and I approach our 30th anniversary of separation and divorce. I'll actually send her a card and she'll ring me and tell me that I'm an idiot.

Phil: But we communicate, we stay connected. And what is scary, and this is really scary, is my wife and my ex-wife get on very well.

Kumi: Phil, you're now 60. Are you retired? Are you still volunteering?

Phil: I'm still volunteering out there. I'm still with the fire service. I guess in a way, firefighting is a young person's game, but like all volunteer fire brigades across Australia.

Phil: Struggle for numbers, struggle for younger people to volunteer. I belong to Lackland Fire Brigade. It's not Lachlan, it's Lackland, which is over behind Mount Wellington. Lachlan Brigade has a motto of looking after Hobart's backside since 1983.

Kumi: Is that a t-shirt? Can you get a t-shirt? We've got T-shirt. I want a t-shirt. I want a cap.

Phil: We've got the cap. We've got everything.

Kumi: It's been such a pleasure to see you again, to chat to you again. I can't thank you for your time and all your service and all that you've done for all of us as well. It's just such a pleasure. Have a lovely time on the beach with the dogs.

Phil: Thanks, Kumi, take care.