THE "lucky country" can no longer pretend to be a relaxed place where life is informal and people rub along together under, the national slogan, "No worries".

As Australia's 17 million people came home from their Sunday of leisure on April 28th, the news which assaulted horrified eyes and ears echoed around the world, to Dunblane, Bogota, Hungerford and Soul, whose people have seen their own gun rampages.

The photograph of a "blond surfie", like a character out of Neighbours or Home and Away, which subsequently flashed around the world only heightened the sense of shock: this inoffensive looking young man had calmly and deliberately aimed his automatic rifles at over 30 people and shot them dead.

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation reporter claimed this week that she had spoken to a man on the phone during the siege at the Seascape bed and breakfast from which Bryant fled with his clothes on fire. The person she spoke to, the reporter said, was laughing. Asked what he was doing, he said: "I'm having a lot of fun." Then he hung up.

As Martin Bryant, the 29 year old so far charged with just one of the 35 deaths, lay under heavy guard in Royal Hobart Hospital, he joined an exclusive and damned club: mass killers who have not taken their own lives in a final flourish. In this and in other characteristics he resembles another young Australian, who ushered in a spurt of mass killings in 1987.

Some commentators on this side of the world have claimed that Bryant was very probably influenced by the blanket coverage of the atrocity at Dunblane primary school on March 13th. Psychologists in Britain say the publicity given to the Dunblane killer, Thomas Hamilton, might have impressed the twisted mind of Martin Bryant.

But it seems also likely that it was his countryman Julian Knight, a disgraced army cadet who killed seven people one Sunday evening in Melbourne, who influenced a younger Bryant.

Knight is now serving a fixed minimum of 27 years in Pentridge prison, Melbourne. Like Bryant, he was the product of a broken marriage - although, according to iconoclastic journalist Tess Lawrence, who interviewed Knight several times, he loved his father, a major in the Australian army.

Something of a misfit, he made it into officer training school at Duntroon, Canberra, but was expelled after stabbing one of his superiors who found him in a disco when he had been confined to barracks.

Just 10 weeks later, on August 9th, 1987, Knight, aged 19, took his army issue rifle to a spot near one of Melbourne's busiest feeder roads and picked off anybody who happened to be passing by. He was charged with seven murders and 46 attempted murders.

Significantly - and Tess Lawrence says Knight is inordinately proud of this - he disabled with one bullet a police helicopter which was trying to run him down. Martin Bryant, too, shot at helicopters, those trying to ferry his victims to hospital.

We have yet to hear of Bryant's motives, if any, and his reaction to his crimes. But Knight apparently gloried in his notoriety.

Tess Lawrence describes him as avid for details of the publicity given his crimes when talking to her: "Have you seen the pictures? All the pictures. You know, those pictures. The pictures of the victims."

MARTIN BRYANT was born in 1967 - coincidentally, the year of the last execution for murder in Australia. Now his grotesque crime has sparked calls for the restoration of the death penalty.

He never got on with his father. His relationship with his mother, Carleen, does not seem to have been so fraught, but they have not shared a home for some years.

She issued a statement through her solicitor on Thursday night, expressing "deep felt sympathy" for her son's victims and their families, and asking that her own privacy be respected. "The incident has been very traumatic for her," the statement said.

The picture of Bryant which emerges is of somebody with few "normal" human relationships. He had a couple of girlfriends, but no male friends in the Australian tradition of "mates"; Although he "had a surfboard and appeared to cultivate a surfie appearance; he does not seem to have actually tackled the waves.

"He's what the guys call a `highway surfer', he used to hang around a lot but never actually surfed," a Hobart surf shop owner, Mr Dave Edmondson, told Sydney's Daily Telegraph. "The guy was a full on recluse. I don't reckon he spoke a word to anyone," he said.

Bryant dated a woman his own age, but also had a pattern of attachments with older women. He seems to have met the Tattersall's lottery company heiress, Mrs Helen Harvey, about five years ago when he was hitch hiking.

She developed a relationship with the youth which came to include his father, Maurice, who was an executor of her will. Martin Bryant did errands for her and eventually went to live at her house in an affluent part of Hobart.

Mrs Harvey (59), who had made Bryant the sole beneficiary of her $650,000 (about £342,000) estate, died in a car accident with Bryant as a passenger.

Former friends of the heiress remember asking her why she habitually drove so slowly around her country property. She told them she had to be careful because "Martin grabs the wheel".

The police report on Mrs Harvey's death four years ago notes that the weather was good, and the road straight and in good condition at the time. However, despite neighbours' fears, there was no investigation of possible foul play.

The police were similarly unsuspicious about the death of Bryant's father the following year.

Maurice Bryant was dragged from a dam on the property his son inherited from Helen Harvey. He had a weighted diving belt around his neck.

Again, neighbours claim they told the police they had heard Martin Bryant threaten his father, but this was never followed up.

After Mrs Harvey's death Bryant went out with a neighbour on the farm he inherited from the Tattersall's heiress. Mrs Yvonne Briggs said this week that she had gone on dates with Bryant even though, at 50, she was twice his age.

Mrs Briggs said she had separated from her husband, and was collecting some things from the former family home when Bryant approached her and asked her to go out with him.

"I couldn't understand it. I thought he was joking," she said. "He said, `I am very lonely. It's awful to be lonely and have no one.'"

She said no. But after he asked her again a week later she relented, and they had a couple of outings.

"We went dancing one night at a place down Elizabeth Street in Hobart, and the second time to the Wrest Point Casino. He seemed to have a lot of money - he would take out $100 notes," she said.

"He would open the car door and things like that. He didn't seem like he'd harm anyone."

THE WORLD Martin Bryant came into was a much simpler, less sophisticated Australia than the vibrant go ahead urban nation of 1996. In the 1960s the seeds of change had certainly taken root, but the cult of the "wowser" - an Australian word for a killjoy - was strong.

In the 1960s, the Chief Secretary of the Victorian state cabinet took a righteous pleasure in banning books such as Lady Chatterley's Lover.

A feature of daily life was the "six o'clock swill", when overwhelmingly male groups of drinkers crammed into pubs to down as much beer as possible between finishing work and the legal closing time of 6 p.m.

Murder cases were big news, especially if the crime was double - Heywood and Madill, or Bogle and Chandler, sent shock waves for years. Now Australians have to take on the idea of a death toll of 35 - and for no apparent reason.

The new Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, was surely not exaggerating this week when he said the shootings at Port Arthur on April 28th have "rocked the soul" of a nation that has now completed its growing up.