This website adds to the media scrutiny of Mr Julian Knight since his infamous mass shooting crime (at age 19) along Melbourne’s busy Hoddle Street thoroughfare way back in August 1987.
It serves to counter the media ignorance and vilification campaign, and seeks to go to the facts and the contributory factors of why an accepted elite officer cadet at RMC Duntroon in January 1987 would be forced to resign in July 1987, and within 16 days commit Hoddle Street. No-one, no-one in the media, no other website seeks to investigate the WHY? Sheepishly, other media two the scapegoat ‘single shooter’ narrative. All that does is keep the victims and their families and friends, the witnesses and first responders in the dark in perpetuity.
This website is about the facts, the broader narrative and the WHY of Hoddle Street? It is not about trying to excuse the heinous, unnecessary mass shooting crimes by Julian Knight on Hoddle Street in 1987 in any way.
But the shootings were completely avoidable.
If Melbourne society fails to learn about the causation, there is nothing to prevent a repetition somewhere else. And guess what? Duntroon and the Australian Defence Force ‘s same bastardisation and censorship culture prevails to this day.
Institutionalised bullying inculcates those bullied to bully others. At Duntroon, within training barracks to successive intakes of recruits and persists after graduation in active service.
We cite:
- The ADF’s internal 1998 Grey Review into ADFA (redacted from public access)
- The 2011 ADFA Skype Sex Scandal
- The 2011 DLA Piper Review of Abuse in Defence (commissioned by the Gillard Government)
- The 2020 Brereton Report into war Crimes by ADF soldiers in the Afghanistan War over ten years (2005-2016).
RMC Duntroon’s bullying culture wasted this natural career soldier and many elites. Cowardly, the ADF Brass remains an archaic clique conditioned to not accept one iota of culpability for Hoddle Street.
This website is also about the Julian Knight before Hoddle Street, when he was selected by the Australian Army Selection Board to train as an Army Officer Staff Cadet at its Royal Military College [Est. 1911] at Duntroon in Canberra.
This website was created 30 March 2021 as a response to the blanket one-sided media persecution of Julian Knight ever since his mass shooting crime on Hoddle Street immediately after his discharge from Duntroon. Understandably, though ignorant of the causation, the media as a tribe have pursued a singularly vindictive ‘rot in hell you low-life bludger‘ message line against Julian Knight and been selective by omission of what ever possible contributory factors could have possibly led this elite Army officer recruit to commit such a heinous crime?
Conspicuous in the media reporting is a palpable self-imposed from on-high in the corporate media mogul ownership and control, that Julian Knight was some rogue nutter and that any consideration Duntroon Bastardisation that he endure for six months training Jan -Jul 1987 could have any culpable causation of Knight’s depressed, drunken, delusional psychotic state of mind to commit ‘Hoddle Street’ just 16 days later.
The purpose of this website is multifaceted, but is essentially motivated and focused on the truth, warts and all, bad and good:
- Defence’s institutional abuse of junior cadets since Duntroon intake of 2012 bureaucratically evading culpability for enlisted victims of physical abuse, bashings, rape (plus with broom), torture, harassment, intimidation, suicide long long pre-dating the 2011 ADFA Skype Sex Scandal – senior cadets publishing live sex on the Internet without the female cadets consent, et al.
- The ongoing political usurpation of the judiciary – its setup of useless quangos to supplant Australia’s judiciary to investigate and trial brought criminal cases by thousands of employed Defence over decades
- The David v Goliath undermining of due legal hearing and process
- The victims of Hoddle Street none the wiser except for the psychotic guilty scapegoat Julian Knight
- That under the institutionalised and covered up sadistic bastardisation culture of junior recruits throughout the ADF across its tri-services (in training, service, and combat deployment), well another Hoddle Street equivalent is destined to happen again, and on deployment like in Uruzgan, New Guinea, Surafend. Australians are better than the Japs on Bangka Island, and not just in hindsight. Else ADF train up incarcerated murderers in a new ‘Para Lynch Battalion’.
- Duntroon officer staff cadet through 1987 before Hoddle Street did not run from the constant torment he endured from senior cadets in Kokoda barracks, he refused to voluntarily give up and resign, he didn’t complain to the Brass, he didn’t commit suicide. Instead, he retaliated like any trained committed soldier would do. He attacked his lead tormetor CO Philip Mongo Reed before Reeds gang of 10 could do Julian in.
- Knight’s demise from Duntroon ultimately culminated with his gut feel as a born soldier. Standing up again his tormentors, the senior staff cadets of his Duntrron comnay the very ones that were supposed to mentor to his training were in reality bully boys, informally delegated by the Duntroon Brass negative leadership culture to “weed out” any junior staff cadet by whatever means available (aka by out-of-sight in-barracks bastardisation) their favourite bully boy senior cadets chose to take a disliking to. Any means!!
- Knight copped crap but after the moral line was crossed, he retaliated against his abusers whilst at Duntroon.
- The ADF has much to answer for but maintains its barbarism and hide it and continues to hoodwink the Australian Government it knows what’s best for recruits to be hardened for battle (and so conditioned to commit atrocities) and the incoming ignorant politicians acquiesce as they have done so. Since it all began – RMC Duntroon’s first ‘hazing’ (bastardisation) scandal of 1912 – the first intake of junior cadets having senior cadets abuse them from 1911. The ADF training culture is archaic out-of-sight = out-of-mind – designed to weed out the weak! And that was before females were invited to join up – very scary thereafter for the young females. Nothing has changed.
LADIES, DO NOT TREAD NEAR NOR ENTRUST THE AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE BLOKEY BULLING RAPE CULTURE – YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!
- In hindsight, instead of Hoddle Street and random innocent civilians in Clifton Hill being despicably and unforgiveably murdered and slaughtered , Knight would have warranted justification though still criminal mass murder had he return to Duntroon with his three firearms and executed his identified senior cadet assailants of Kokoda Company “with extreme prejudice“. He wasn’t planning to get through the night alive after Hoddle Street anyway, given his stashing his suicide bullet in his jeans before the shootings. Th senior cadets would have been similarly unarmed in barracks – they only stored the bolt of their issued SLR automatic assault rifle in their private quarters plus the bayonet, but not the SLR itself, nor ammunition. The standard verbal protocol declaration demanded of all staff cadets immediately following return from weapons training:
“I have no live rounds, or blanks or ammunition in my possession sir!”
- Would sicko NAZI Duntroon have changed its culture after such a mass shooting on Duntroon’s military college barracks, afterwards discovering it had been one of its part-trained own staff cadet? Nuh!
- Yep, Knight would have expectedly to have been shot dead after his massacre payback by one of RMC’s onsite armed Military Police, and the media reporting (suppressed by the ADF) and history record would have been a whole lot different. Those innocent civvy motorists along Hoddle Street would, like other live and unaffected Australians, have read the Herald-Sun and started realising something was not right in the Australian Defence Force.
- Pity it was all covered up to the media and so to the general public by the Duntroon Commandant at the time, Major General Murray Blake. According to Mr Knight, sometime much later feedback arrived to him that the day after the Hoddle Street Shooting Spree. The Melbourne media’s label of “massacre” is exaggerated. Yes, 7 individuals were randomly murdered by Julian Knight along with another 11 wounded as attempted murder – he had also tried to murder them, but missed, so they lived. The carnage and the trauma inflicted was an inexcusable compounded mass crime.
- But the Australia media have never witnessed a massacre like what the Japanese Imperial Army horrifically committed back in 1938 in Chinese Manchuria upon hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians in the old Manchurian capital of Nanjing. The Nanjing Massacre (‘Rape of Nanjing’) sustained between December 1937–January 1938 saw up to 300,000 civilians murdered by Japanese soldiers under the direct orders of Matsui Iwane, commanding general of the Japanese Central China Front Army that had captured the Nanjing city. That is a massacre.
- Julian knight committed a ‘mass shooting’ crime, not to in any way play down his crimes that night. But it must be fairly observed in Australia at that time, such a unprovoked mass shooting had not previously occurred in Australia in living memory, so the relatively seriousness of the Hoddle Street mass crime prompted exaggeration by the media. Of course the Cowra Breakout 5 August 1944, saw a prison escape (not a criminal massacre) but 234 Japanese P.O.W.’s killed trying to escape custody and a further 108 wounded. Technically a massacre but not a crime. Worse indeed were decades of undocumented massacres of Chinese gold prospectors in the late 1800’s and before that the unreported colonial massacres of tens of thousands of Aborigines.
In Lord Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ (1823):
‘T’is strange, but true; for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.”
Do we say this from experience at Duntroon?