Mel Doyle The Truth About My Life

The Sunday Night host opens up about everything from her latest special report to running a family.

- Jenny Brown

It was a quiet Sunday night in the suburbs when teenage misfit Julian Knight – drunk, broke and bitterly unhappy – went on a pitiless rampage that became infamous as the Hoddle Street massacre.

That barrage of shots fired in Melbourne on August 9, 1987, still resonates 30 years later. It lasted only 45 minutes, but left seven innocent people dead, 19 others seriously wounded and an entire city traumatised.

Sunday Night host Melissa Doyle was still in Year 12 at school when the slaughter unfolded – ‘Head down and studying for my HSC exams’ – but she remembers it vividly. Aged 17, she was only two years younger than Knight, the discharged Australian Army officer cadet who took his private war to the streets with such lethal consequences.

‘It was so, so shocking,’ says the award-winning TV presenter, who gained a new and chilling insight into the killer’s mind for her Sunday Night story marking the massacre’s 30th anniversary.

‘I think the only way to move forward from tragedies like Hoddle Street is to learn something from them, to make sure they don’t ever happen again.

‘Julian Knight was a 19year-old kid who had two semiautomatic rifles and a pump action shotgun hidden under his mother’s bed.