For more than twenty years, Wendy Scurr asked the same three questions about the day of the Port Arthur massacre. No official, inquiry or authority ever gave her a straight answer. There was no coronial inquest and no public inquiry, because Martin Bryant's guilty plea meant the case never went to trial. This page sets out Wendy's three questions and what we actually know about each of them.

Wendy rang police at 1:32pm, while the shooting was still happening. We understand there were some police (both on duty and off duty) at the Historical Site soon after the shooting, but it took hours for a substantial police presence to be established. During those hours, the staff and volunteers who stayed, Wendy among them, were left to look after the wounded largely on their own. That wait was real, and Wendy spoke of the lasting PTSD she carried from that day.

What the record shows is that the shooting at the site was over within minutes. By about 1:45pm the gunman had left the historic site; by 2pm he was holed up at Seascape Cottage, around two kilometres away, with a hostage, firing on the first officers who reached him. Much of the available police response was tied up there, at an active armed siege, while his whereabouts and whether there was more than one shooter were still unknown.

Port Arthur is remote, the site is large, and hundreds of frightened survivors were scattered across it. There were police on the ground, some local, some arriving with the helicopters carrying the injured to Hobart, but according to survivors like Wendy, nowhere near enough to secure a scene that size or to relieve the people holding it together. A comprehensive police presence took hours to build. None of that lessens what it cost the staff and visitors who looked after each other in the meantime, but it was not police refusing to come.

Wendy walked through the Broad Arrow Café and found people who had died near a door in the gift-shop area - a door she understood to be a fire exit, that wouldn't open. For the rest of her life she asked why, and how many people might have lived if it had.

In 1997 the Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutions, Damian Bugg QC, held an inquiry into that door. He concluded that its locking mechanism had been faulty for some weeks and that on the day it could not be opened from the inside. The door, in other words, had genuinely failed. But he also found that it was not marked as a fire exit, and that he could not establish that anyone had run to it trying to escape the gunman - the evidence, including from people who were in that part of the building, suggested the shooting was too sudden for the door to have changed who survived.

Other accounts, published survivor recollections, and statements Wendy gathered herself - point the other way. Wendy never accepted the Bugg Inquiry's findings, which didn't match what was remembered by the people who were there.

Around 6pm, Wendy and others heard three shots fired close to a building they were located in, and had to take cover.

This is the question with no documented answer. At that time, the gunman was still at large and then under siege at Seascape BnB, where he fired hundreds of rounds into the night; armed police were deploying across the peninsula and the road was closed. In that chaos, the source of those particular shots was never publicly identified. Not everything in a scene like that gets explained - and because there was never a coronial inquest or public inquiry, questions like this one never got the official airing that might have settled them.