New Zealand Family Hit Power Lines Girl Sole Survivor in the 80's
A nne Hamilton-Byrne wore pearls and Chanel perfume. She played the harp and sang soprano. She had blonde pilus, styled in waves that defenseless the light. Every bit leader of The Family, the Australian doomsday cult she founded in the 1960s, she claimed to be Jesus reborn as a adult female. Much of her power, say her former followers, lay in her grey-blue optics. "In aboriginal times we hear virtually enchantresses who could enslave people with one glance," says ex-acolyte Fran Parker. "She had eyes that looked through your soul." Hamilton-Byrne'southward ultimate tool of enslavement, even so, was something she pinpointed herself in a rare radio interview afterward the cult's devastating abuses were exposed. "Information technology was beloved. Just love."
1 of the few female cult leaders in history – and plain one of the cruellest – Hamilton-Byrne operated in most total secrecy over ii decades. Hidden abroad in the countryside outside Melbourne, The Family's motto was "Unseen, unknown, unheard". The police, acting on information from two child escapees, raided the cult in 1987. Information technology emerged that over the years Hamilton-Byrne had collected 28 children through bogus adoptions and "gifts" from followers, dressing them in identical clothes and bleaching their pilus platinum. To keep her eerie brood under her command, they say she subjected them to vicious beatings, starvation and emotional torture.
"Anne wasn't giving love," says Parker, whose young son was one of Hamilton-Byrne'due south victims. "She was offering it and then taking it back. She broke people'south spirit."
The glamorous guru used the same tactic on her adult followers, handpicking them from Melbourne's wealthy professional person elite with promises of spiritual fulfilment in the 1960s and 70s when new age seeking was all the rage. "I've been waiting for yous," she'd say on outset meeting a potential recruit. "Y'all are special."
Preaching a mishmash of Christianity, eastern mysticism and apocalyptic prophecy, she allegedly forced followers, including children, to take dangerous amounts of LSD and other hallucinogenics as part of prolonged initiation rites. Once they had submitted, she'd dictate every aspect of their lives. "In that location was only one rule: do admittedly everything she said," says David Whitaker, a former kid survivor. "That included what to recall, what to wear, what to eat, who to marry, who not to marry. Total obedience."
A few years ago speculation emerged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had grown up in The Family. His hair color didn't help nor, possibly, his personality. Assange admitted that a man who was his mother's boyfriend in the tardily 1970s had been a member of the cult. The human being had been "a sinister presence" who sought to have "a certain psychological power" over his family unit, Assange said, and they eventually went on the run from him. But he said he never met Hamilton-Byrne or had whatsoever direct contact with the grouping equally a whole.
Past the fourth dimension of the police raid, Hamilton-Byrne had cleaved up families, destroyed marriages and left her kid victims with lifelong psychological scars. A number of followers tried to kill themselves, either during their fourth dimension in The Family or after they escaped. Tragically, some succeeded. The cult leader amassed an estimated AU$150m (£90m) through belongings, land and cash donated by followers. She hid overseas and was eventually arrested in 1993 on relatively minor fraud charges.
Together with her second husband, businessman Bill Byrne, whom one ex-follower described as "a handsome, rich, compliant handbag," she received an AU$5,000 fine, but no jail time. She has never been held to account for the bloodcurdling kid abuse or long list of other crimes of which she was accused when the cult'due south inner workings were exposed.
Now 96, Hamilton-Byrne has advanced dementia and has lived in a Melbourne nursing home for the past 12 years. Simply her story, and those of her victims, won't go untold, thank you to the efforts of Chris Johnston, a announcer with Melbourne-based newspaper The Age, and Rosie Jones, a documentary filmmaker. Johnston and Jones starting time met ii years ago when they realised they were working separately on stories about The Family, both enlightened that its once all-powerful leader was nearing death. "I was mostly writing stories well-nigh what was happening to the cult'southward remaining assets and structure, and Rosie was already ii years into making a film about the experiences of the survivors and their long-term emotional trauma," says Johnston.
Both New Zealanders, they discovered in a farther coincidence that they came from the same home town. They decided to collaborate. Their co-authored book and Jones's characteristic documentary, both titled The Family, are released in the UK this month.
Through i of the few followers who remains devoted, Johnston and Jones were able to visit Hamilton-Byrne at the nursing home. Her inability to requite consent as a upshot of her dementia meant it was impossible to interview or film her. "Information technology was an extraordinary see all the same," says Jones. "She was dressed beautifully in blue and still had long silver hair." Her hairline, however, was on the top of her head because of the numerous facelifts she had during her reign to maintain the illusion of youth and immortality. "Her speech was mostly breathless, but she sat there nursing a plastic baby doll. She held the doll so tenderly, then gently. I institute it incredibly powerful to witness," says Jones.
There have been a handful of female cult leaders in modern history, but none to rival the subversive notoriety of men like Jim Jones, David Koresh or Japan'due south Shoko Asahara. The closest is Houston-built-in Bonnie Lou Nettles, who co-founded the then-called UFO cult known as Heaven's Gate with Marshall Applewhite in the 1970s. Similar Hamilton-Byrne, Nettles believed she was on a divine mission, just she died of cancer 12 years before Applewhite and 38 other members committed mass suicide in 1997.
Most women founders are associated with so-called new religions, such as Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded the Foursquare religion in Los Angeles in the 1920s, or New Jersey-born Elizabeth Clare Prophet who launched the Church Universal and Triumphant in 1975 and encouraged her followers to build fallout shelters to prepare for imminent nuclear war.
According to Johnston, i of Hamilton-Byrne's inspirations was Helena Blavatsky, a Russian-born medium who co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Madame Blavatsky, equally she was known, was a champion of Tibetan esoteric wisdom. She described Theosophy as "the synthesis of science, organized religion and philosophy" and was instrumental in introducing Hinduism and Buddhism to the west.
Hamilton-Byrne first became attracted to eastern religions and mysticism when she took upwardly yoga in her mid-30s in the tardily 1950s. Born Evelyn Edwards in 1921, she grew upward in a one-road farming settlement two hours eastward of Melbourne. Her mother Florence was originally from Wandsworth in south London. Florence was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia afterwards setting her hair alight in the street, and spent 27 years in a psychiatric aviary until she died. Hamilton-Byrne'due south father was an itinerant worker and she spent fourth dimension in orphanages as a child. "Anne married her outset married man when she was about xx, but he died in a automobile accident," says Jones. "It's quite tragic, really. They had i daughter together and there have been rumours that she suffered a number of miscarriages afterwards that. It's only recently come to light that she and her husband were arranging to adopt a babe right before he died."
Yoga became the immature widow'due south salvation. The exercise was just emerging in the west, and Hamilton-Byrne started didactics information technology in the early 1960s, mostly to eye-anile women in Melbourne'southward well-heeled suburbs. "Anne was apparently a wonderful teacher, and these women became her first devotees," says Johnston. "She was clever and intuitive. She knew how to find the chinks in people's armour. Often these wives were in unhappy marriages, their children had grown up, they were looking for new meaning." Feminism was on the horizon, too. "It was a whole confluence of factors. Divorce was nonetheless not accustomed, but she would encourage the women to exit their husbands to bring together her," says Johnston. She also attracted gay male person followers, offering them refuge from Australia'southward laws against homosexuality at the time.
Hamilton-Byrne's masterstroke, all the same, was to recruit an eminent physicist from Leeds, Dr Raynor Johnson, who was Primary of Queen's College at Melbourne University. Spiritualism was gaining popularity in scientific circles and Johnson, nearing retirement, was eager to explore unconventional territory. He became besotted with the beguiling woman who claimed to have extrasensory perception. He even went one better and declared her to be the new Messiah. After experimenting with LSD – purely in the interests of scientific inquiry, he claimed – he recorded in his diary that "her face became divinely cute with sublime authority." After, he wrote that she was "unquestionably the wisest, the serenest and about gracious and generous soul I accept ever met."
Johnson and his wife bought a house in Ferny Creek, the hamlet where Hamilton-Byrne lived. The Family was built-in. The intellectual respectability Johnson brought to the mission enabled him and his high priestess to recruit many more wealthy, new historic period-seeking professionals, including doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, nurses and social workers. They held weekly meditation sessions, and Hamilton-Byrne started giving sermons, or discourses equally she chosen them, from a imperial throne in a specially built social club funded by donations.
The first children arrived in the early 1970s. Adoption was poorly regulated in Australia, and unmarried motherhood still carried social stigma. Through her network of followers, Hamilton-Byrne plant information technology easy to procure infants. "You had babies born in cult hospitals, delivered past cult midwives, handed over to cult social workers," says Lex de Human, one of just 2 senior detectives in the Victoria law force to endeavor to bring charges against Hamilton-Byrne and her collaborators afterward the 1987 police raid. Cult lawyers would falsify the adoption paperwork. The attitude of his colleagues at the time, Human being says, was that cases involving kids were "Welfare matters, not real policing."
Hamilton-Byrne told well-nigh of the children whom she adopted fraudulently that she was their birth mother – she faked numerous pregnancies by wearing homemade smocks. She said they would survive the end of the world to become a new master race. "Everything [we wore] had to be polished and looking the same," says Adam, a survivor in his 40s interviewed in Jones's film, who was adopted into the cult as a infant. Naturally fair, his hair was dyed white-blond to friction match the others. "That was to implant in u.s.a. that we were all brothers and sisters." Yet the children knew nothing of Hamilton-Byrne's real groundwork until the cult hit the headlines in the belatedly 1980s. In addition to being Jesus, she told them she came from royalty and owned castles in Europe. They non but worshipped her, they adored her, too. "We believed she was across the Queen of England," says Adam.
Hamilton-Byrne housed the children in a sprawling wooden lodge at Lake Eildon, two hours away from The Family's main base. The area was beautiful simply isolated. Once a flood plain, the lake was filled with partially submerged trees jutting out of the h2o in nighttime, spiky formations. The children, whose numbers eventually grew to 28 and included a few babies built-in to sect members, were home schooled. Hamilton-Byrne wanted to be the perfect mother figure to a perfect breed, but she seemed to take no involvement in raising them. If she was there when any of the children stepped out of line, they say she would ofttimes trounce them herself – her weapon of choice was a stiletto shoe. Only mostly she left it to the "aunties", a number of center-aged female followers, who feared for their own precarious place in her affections if they didn't enforce punishments. Too equally horrific beatings that make many of the cult'south now-adult survivors weep as they recall either witnessing or receiving them, the children were often starved for days for minor transgressions, such every bit getting their clothes dirty or forgetting to switch off a light. "Deprival of food was a very large component of control," says ane survivor, who remembers being and then hungry she raided bins and ate leaves. "It's better to keep your victims weak so they take less ability to fight dorsum."
The survivors call up beingness given daily doses of Mogadon and Valium as children to keep them docile. Then, ordinarily when they reached the age of xiv, they underwent formal initiation into the cult by being given "huge, relentless doses of LSD" in trips that oft lasted several days, says Chris Johnston. LSD was office of the cult's fabric. The prolonged doses were harrowing, even for adult followers. The furnishings were catastrophic on some of the young teenagers, who suffered depression, personality changes, nightmares and social withdrawal, sometimes for months afterwards. And that was on elevation of all their other childhood traumas.
Rosie Jones says "the longlasting nature" of the emotional and psychological trauma experienced past the cult'due south survivors shocked her the most during the making of her documentary. "It made me realise the critical importance of dear in a kid'southward groundwork." For most of the children, Hamilton-Byrne was the only mother they had. In a police interview shortly after the 1987 raid, one rescued teenager tried to explicate how she felt. "It'due south hard to say how devoted nosotros were to her; how we hung off her every wait and every idea she had nearly us. Nosotros wanted then much for her to love united states of america, simply I don't call up she e'er really did."
Extraordinarily wealthy, with overseas properties in Kent and upstate New York, Hamilton-Byrne managed to hibernate her whereabouts for two years preceding her capture. She was eventually extradited to Commonwealth of australia from the United states to face up charges of conspiracy to defraud over fake birth certificates – the only charges indomitable detective Lex de Human being felt would stick, and his all-time hope of forcing her to face any sort of justice. Now she has dementia, her victims have had to come up to terms with the fact that she will never be brought to account fully for her bizarre and unusual cruelty. It's probably piffling consolation that all she has left to torment is a plastic doll.
The Family by Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones is published on 24 November by Scribe at £14.99. The documentary of the same proper noun is on BBC 4'southward Storyville from 29 November
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/20/growing-up-with-the-family-inside-anne-hamilton-byrnes-sinister-cult
0 Response to "New Zealand Family Hit Power Lines Girl Sole Survivor in the 80's"
Post a Comment