LUMBERING across the concrete floor of his heavily fortified steel cage, Australia's worst mass killer cuts a lonely and pathetic figure as he fumbles a prison-issue footy.
At 48, Martin Bryant's wavy blond hair is gone, and the slim build of which he once boasted has given way to flab and a pendulous gut.
And his entire world is the Mersey unit of Risdon Prison's maximum security wing.
Through a series of interviews with former prison staff, medical carers and prisoners, the Sunday Herald Sun is able to reveal Bryant's day-to-day existence, until now a secret. 
Since being sentenced in 1996 to life without parole for killing 35 people and injuring 23 others in the Port Arthur massacre that shocked the world, Bryant has wreaked a violent path through various wings of Hobart's sprawling jail, including vicious assaults on staff and nurses.
Although it has been widely -reported Bryant is in solitary confinement, he has in fact been housed in various secure wings of the prison with selected other inmates for almost 19 years.
For the main part he is shunned by the other prisoners, but he has been known to swap chocolate for sexual favours.
Some jailers refer to him as "Porky Pig" and he has ballooned to 160kg at times. Morbidly obese, his weight fluctuates up to 30kg at any one time.
Some who have encountered him say Bryant rarely leaves his cell and is drugged to point of being "almost a vegetable".
Others talk of a violent and unpredictable predator who targets the most vulnerable of his fellow inmates.
From a vantage point on public land some 600m from Bryant's exercise yard, we witnessed him try a few kicks with a football, watch fellow prisoners exercise and try to join their conversations.
Mainly, he walked alone, pacing back and forth, rarely glancing towards the yard's front wall of bars, the only way to see the outside world.
Everyone interviewed for this story agreed he needs to be segregated from the general prison population - with one insider saying other prisoners would "kill him in a spit if they could get to him".
Bryant enjoys the relative protection of the Mersey unit, which is for high-dependency inmates, such as those on suicide watch or with mental health issues, and is staffed by both prison guards and health workers. It offers a greater level of security from other prisoners.
Former jail guard Tony Burley, who left the service after two decades in 2012, said Bryant was among the more highly functioning of his cellmates.
"In this unit, they are colloquially referred to as window lickers," he said. "They are like kids in a lolly shop, they just stand there and stare at the officers.
"They are that sort of a prisoner who is not quite all there. But in terms of Martin Bryant, he chooses to act like that. There is more to him, he is very calculating.
"It's the opposite of that well-known saying. In his case, the lights are off but there is someone home." Bryant is housed in a 2m by 3m creamy-yellow coloured cell, with his own 32cm television, desk, bookshelf and a concrete slab bed covered by a 10cm thick mattress, sheets, a blanket and a single pillow.
There's a shower with a privacy screen, but the toilet - which has a reinforced backing to stop it being pulled out for an escape route through the plumbing - is visible from a small window in the steel door.
Inmates have unlimited hot water and toilet rolls.
Bryant and up to 11 fellow occupants of the Mersey unit are woken at 7am to eat a breakfast pack of cereal delivered the night before. Sometimes guards will hand them a hot cup of tea or coffee as well. Once prison officers finish a perimeter check, inmates are usually allowed access to an exercise yard.
In Bryant's case this is a 25m-wide caged compound containing sparse exercise equipment and a few stools. It is visible from public land, from where the Sunday Herald Sun obtained these images.
Lunch is delivered from an off-site catering section around 11.15am and prisoners are again locked down for the day's second perimeter check, before being allowed access again to their outside areas from 1.30pm to about 4.30pm.
They are then shut in their cells for the night and given a hot "aeroplane style" dinner through the hatch in their door, usually a variation of meat and vegetables, according to Burley, the former head of Risdon's tactical response group, Burley says Bryant's position in the prison is "right at the bottom of the food chain. I can't think of anyone who would p--- on him if he was on fire".
When he was 29, Bryant's reaction to a world in which he couldn't find a way to belong was to spend months planning his revenge.
Left alone but relatively wealthy after the death of his benefactor and only friend Helen Harvey, an elderly and eccentric heir to the Tattersalls lottery fortune, Bryant stockpiled military-grade automatic weapons.
He then headed out on a sunny Sunday   April morning in 1996 to his childhood holiday haunt of Port Arthur and turned the weapons on both random strangers and those he believed had wronged him.
He was later described by experts as having the emotional and intellectual age of a five-year-old.
Reformed safecracker and former prisoner Tony Bull, 50, has spent much of his adult life in and out of jail and described Bryant as apparently childlike with a cunning edge.
"It was hard to reconcile this bloke with the one who had done all that killing. To be honest you wouldn't have thought he had it in him," Bull said of his first encounter with Bryant, a few months after his killing spree.
"In some ways he seemed like a dumb child - but then, he's a very good chess player, so he's got a lot more going on than you would think." Bull said Bryant had been the target of several assaults and that he "wouldn't stand a chance" in the general prison population, who would be all too keen to abide by the prisoners' code of honour which sees them mercilessly target men who hurt children and women.
Bryant slaughtered 20 people and injured another dozen in the first two minutes of opening fire with a Colt AR-15 in the Broad Arrow cafe and gift shop after his 1.10pm -arrival at the site.
Already he had stopped by the nearby Seascape guesthouse - where a fiery siege would end in his arrest some 19 hours later.
There he killed the owners David and Sally Martin, childhood acquaintances who would not sell Bryant's family their land.
Visitors to Port Arthur thought the gunshots were part of a re-enactment, some of them streaming towards the cafe to watch.
Others realised what was happening and ran for their lives, but Bryant shot at anyone he could see moving as he made his way to the carpark's tourist-packed coaches. Another four victims lost their lives and seven more were shot as he made his way to his yellow Volvo station wagon.
CONTINUED NEXT PAGE FROM PREVIOUS PAGE Mr Bull said that for inmates, the murder of children was the -tipping point. "Mainly he would be the target because he killed those poor little kids," he said.
"The fact is he's Martin Bryant, and in some circles, to kill Martin Bryant, well, you could certainly hold your head up." Bull said he had struggled over the years to describe Bryant, and he has had plenty of practice, given that "What's he really like?" is one of the first questions he is asked when discussing his time at Risdon.
"He acts normal. He walks normally and holds himself normally, but when he opens his mouth there's just nothing really there," he said.
"That's why it's hard to understand how he could have done what he done. That was cold and calculated and he was running off a plan, and I don't know how he would have been able to â€¦ be so premeditated to follow it through to the end." Bryant has reportedly made several suicide attempts and he has ongoing health issues which have seen him transferred under armed guard to Royal Hobart Hospital several times for treatment.
"When he is in the public hospital it's very difficult for all of us," said one former nurse, who did not want to be identified because of a media ban for public servants imposed by the Tasmanian government.
"A lot of us were here on the day of the massacre and we lost people we loved. Having to look after him is awful." Another former nurse -described the terror her colleagues felt when their roles required them to care for him in a prison facility.
"This particular part of the jail where it happened is a little more comfortable, they try to make it a little more homely to help keep the inmates calm," she said.
"That means there is carpet, a bit more space for them. But the problem is with carpet, you can't hear people coming at you. That's how he managed to get one of us, just by running at them from behind." Bryant has been involved in several assaults and was part of an attack in   February that left a male nurse with a fractured jaw. That nurse may not be able to return to duties, another innocent with lifelong scars from their encounter with the hate-filled loner.
Although he is sent a lot of mail - from ghoulish "fans" including teenage girls - and gets media requests from around the world, very little is passed on to him and is instead stored to be handed over on his faraway release date.
It's standard procedure for the nightshift prison guards to read every piece of personal mail that is sent to inmates before passing anything on, according to Tony Burley.
Bryant receives few visitors other than his mother, Carleen Bryant, although it is unclear how long it has been since they have seen each other. Several sources claim it has been years.
Mrs Bryant was unwilling to be interviewed, but friend Joan Errington Dunne said she had managed to put the pain of her son's unfathomable crime behind her and live a good life.
"She is a remarkable woman," said Mrs Errington Dunne.
If the past two decades are anything to go by, Bryant will at some stage be moved to a new unit at Risdon. But none of this is likely to be confirmed by officials, who have refused to comment on any aspect of this story.
But with the approach of next year's 20th anniversary, all eyes will again turn to Port Arthur and requests to talk to Bryant will again flood in from across the world, as they do each year. One source says the state government has begun planning how the event will be marked, with a memorial service being considered at site.
But   April 28, 2016, will be just another day in a cage for the man whose savage cry for attention caused so much pain.
PORTRAIT OF A KILLER â-  ATTACKED PRISON NURSE, LEAVING HIM WITH BROKEN JAW â-  INMATES SEE KILLING HIM AS A BADGE OF HONOUR â-  VIOLENT PRISONER WHO TARGETS THE MOST VULNERABLE â-  LONER WHO WEIGHS UP TO 160KGâ-  GUARDS CALL HIM 'PORKY PIG'