[dramatic music]
- [Reporter] Why did you start to take in the children?
- [Anne] Over 21 years, 28 young people
went through our hands.
- [Reporter] Why did you do that?
- I love children.
- Once she became the leader of a cult
and could get whatever she wanted,
one thing that she wanted was lots of little children.
- When a child is born, delivered by sect doctors,
given to a sect nurse, and within a period
of 15, 20 minutes from birth, child born, child taken.
- [Roland] She was preparing us for when the time happens
to reeducate the world, what's left of it.
- There was a glamour about Anne
that meant that all the men were besotted.
Bill was totally beglamoured.
- When they come out of the LSD experience
they actually believe that she is Jesus Christ.
- There's such secrecy around her.
Devotees would do anything to protect Anne.
- When they hit the news in Australia,
they pick up sticks and move to England.
- [Man] When Anne and Bill were there,
we'd be disciplined heavily by her and by Bill.
- [Man] The drug was given to me by my father.
Anne was there, and it was done under her instruction.
- What was going on was wrong.
Someone had to do something about it.
♪ Waiting for redemption ♪
♪ Like a dog expecting a reward ♪
♪ Is this the endless point of nothing ♪
♪ Or the coming of the Lord ♪
♪ Come on, give me a sign ♪
♪ Show me your love is real ♪
♪ Oh Saint Valentine ♪
♪ Is this part of the deal ♪
[police radio chattering]
[slow music]
[dog barking]
- [Man] All of a sudden the door bursts open.
- [Woman] People broke into our house
and came loudly down the stairs.
- [Woman] You're Anouree.
- We're going away. - Anouree.
- We are. - You can trust us.
- [Child] Are we going to go away--
- [Detective] Great big deep breaths.
Good girl.
[woman sobbing]
Okay, everybody.
I'll explain to you what's going to happen.
- [Child] They taking them somewhere.
- [Detective] We realise it's very, very stressful for you.
- [Child] Where are they going?
You broke Mum and Dad's heart.
- [Announcer] Well investigations are still underway
into a religious sect in Victoria known as The Family.
At the weekend, six children were seized
from a property owned by the sect at Lake Eildon
about two hours from Melbourne.
Five of the children have appeared
in a Melbourne Children's Court
under care and protection applications.
- [Reporter] Children stolen at birth,
brainwashed, beaten, even given
mind-altering drugs like LSD.
The list of the abuses at The Family's isolated retreat
near Melbourne goes on.
[slow dramatic music]
- It was early December and it looked as though Melbourne
was heading into a very hot summer.
I was in the arson squad, Victoria Police Arson Squad.
We got a call to attend a fire at a school near Ferny Creek.
There was a student in the school,
a young fella by the name of Roland Whitaker.
The local senior constable, he said to me,
"Roland's parents are tied up with this religious sect."
And that was the first I'd ever heard
of this cult called The Family.
His first words were, "Don't get involved.
"If you get involved, it'll be with you for a lifetime."
He told me that the leader of The Family
was this woman called Anne Hamilton-Byrne.
The sect commenced in the 1960s
and was based in Ferny Creek on the outskirts of Melbourne.
The sect was made up of professional people
who worshipped Anne Hamilton-Byrne as Jesus Christ
reincarnated in the female form.
- [Anne] I'm looking right at each one of you.
You are the initiate.
You are the cosmic being.
You're staring into the awakening.
- [Roland] Under the influence of LSD,
well Auntie Anne had this vision that she's got to collect
all these children from birth
because one day there's going to be either World War III
or natural disasters galore
where most of the population of the world's going to perish.
[slow music]
She was preparing us for when the time happens,
to reeducate the world, what's left of it.
- [Anne] This is the moment of rebirth upon a new planet.
We're received the call,
and great things will be done.
[dog barking]
- Anne thought that UFOs would come down.
That was one of the reasons for the perfect discipline.
We wouldn't question, we would just walk straight
into the UFOs in a file.
When it was all over, we'd come down
and we would tend to what was left of the world.
- [Lex] It was such a bizarre story.
There were allegations of the theft of children at birth
and of the administration
of illicit drugs, LSD, to these children.
As a bit of an inquisitive copper,
of course you want to see for yourself.
- The paranoia amongst The Family was just rife.
[camera clicking]
Everyone thought that everyone
was listening into everything.
I mean, I was petrified of people
standing out the front just looking at the property.
Being stalked, our phones being tapped.
- [Lex] We knew that Anne
and her husband Bill had fled overseas.
But Anne was still directing her followers by telephone.
- Lots of phone calls, to-ing and fro-ing
with Auntie Anne and Uncle Bill.
Oh, she knew she had a lot of enemies.
Auntie Anne was always afraid
that somebody was going to kill her.
She rang and told us to get rid of all the records.
It was chaotic.
It was extremely chaotic.
Uncle Bill's stuff, Auntie Anne's paperwork.
Everything that could be destroyed was destroyed.
[fire crackling]
- [Lex] At that time, Vic Pol was treating this as a,
oh, "this is a welfare issue.
We've got these kids.
Yeah, might have been a bit mistreated and so forth.
But it's really for the Department of Community Services.
It's not really a policing issue."
And I differed in my view
because of the information that I'd gathered.
[slow dramatic music]
Late October, early November of 1989
I got a phone call from the detective chief inspector
in charge of the Victoria Police Drug Squad, said,
"We're going to set up a task force. "Want you to be on it."
And I said, "Yeah, more than happy to be on it."
"We're going to give you a senior sergeant."
I was a sergeant.
"Senior sergeant.
And we'll give you four detectives.
You've got three months, 12 weeks to clean it up."
Morning, all.
- Good morning. - Hey, Lex.
- We had folders.
We had my report.
We had a phone book.
I mean, we had one car allocated.
That was the total resourcing for Operation Forest.
I was desperate to meet Anne Hamilton-Byrne from day one.
But we didn't know where Anne was.
We were told that Anne was in the UK.
We were told that Anne was in the United States.
We were told that Anne was here and there
but never in Australia.
The closest I could get for now was a TV interview.
- [Reporter] No Aryan race?
- What's this Aryan race business?
You're talking about Germany, aren't you?
- No, we didn't want the children to look like
so-called Nazi children
they've been labelled as.
- No, I wanted them to look
like brothers and sisters though, I must admit this.
I love them.
I love them in their little smocks and jeans,
the long hair in ribbons.
It was beautiful.
It was lovely to see.
- [Reporter] Why did you start to take in the children?
- Over 21 years, 28 young people went through our hands.
- Why did you do that?
- I love children.
[slow music]
- [Lex] Something just did not ring true to me.
There was something driving this woman.
I didn't know what it was, but it was absolutely bizarre.
We needed to dig and dig and dig to find out
who we were dealing with, why did they want these children
What was behind it all?
[rock music]
- [Sarah] In the 50s and 60s in Australia
there was a huge interest amongst upper
and middle class people in alternative spirituality.
- [Anthony] A lot of people in the 60s were trying to find
a truth, somewhere to fit in in the world.
And there was more to life than the 50s and 60s
and the staid plaid go to work,
go to the six o'clock swill,
earn your money, retire, die.
[slow music]
- [ News reporter] Yoga is a philosophy of life.
It began in India centuries ago,
spread through the east, and is now becoming
increasingly popular in Australia.
Most of the new devotees are women.
- [Anne] I had been teaching yoga quietly.
I had already started meditation classes
but I came to the conclusion
that I was very, very definitely going to have my school
for the physical, the mental,
and the spiritual control of the body.
And from there I met Raynor Johnson.
[singing in foreign language]
- [News Reader] Today Prime Minister Robert Menzies
led the procession to open a new wing at Queen's College,
named after Dr. Raynor Johnson,
Master of the college for 25 years.
- Raynor was a typical Edwardian English gentleman.
He grew up in the city of Leeds
and was a very clever young boy.
He was a First Class honours graduate from Oxford.
He had worked at the Cavendish Laboratory
at the very front edge of nuclear physics.
The University of Melbourne thought they were getting
a very distinguished physicist.
But he really lost interest in physics
by the time he arrived.
Raynor was interested in the world
of spirits and spiritualism.
He believed that he had been chosen
by a college of spirits in the beyond somewhere
because he was a scientist
and would be able to speak to his generation.
[slow music]
- [spiritualist] Nothing is impossible.
- Edwardian Liberals were as a group
very interested in Spiritualism.
In many homes, if you had a dinner party,
after you'd had coffee and port
you would go into a living room
and you'd have a Ouija board
and you'd try and connect with spirits beyond.
This was really surprisingly widespread
in the sort of upper middle classes.
I was working very hard on an essay
in the east wing of the College when the master
came into the quadrangle accompanied
by a youngish blond woman.
She was doing something strange
around the entrances and exits from the quadrangle.
That was Anne Hamilton-Byrne.
It's very clear that Raynor would have been flattered
by Anne Hamilton-Byrne.
But Raynor was naive.
I think that she was cultivating or grooming the Master.
- I can't imagine really why he fell
into her trap so quickly.
I remember very clearly the first time that Raynor met Anne.
It was Sunday.
Everybody was in the kitchen except Raynor.
He was in his study, and
Mary was making the gravy for the dinner.
The doorbell went, and I opened the door.
And Anne was there.
Raynor was expecting her, so I brought her in.
In the time it took for Mary to make the gravy,
Raynor came flying out of the study,
almost in a flap, very excited, saying,
"Mary, Mary, come quickly.
"She wants to speak to you."
Maybe she batted her eyelashes at him
with her dyed blond hair.
It was as if she'd waved a magic wand over him.
[slow dramatic music]
- [Anne] I had to start it.
That was divine orders.
That was my mission.
That was the divine vision.
- [Raynor Johnson] From this date onwards
there was but little doubt in my mind
that I had met my master.
During the closing months of 1963,
Anne was gathering around her a nucleus of a dozen people
and showing us the foundations of the spiritual path.
From time to time, as the teachers saw
they were ready, she initiated them.
So far the master's plan involves her remaining hidden.
Her work is being done unseen, unheard, and unknown.
- [Tricia] In the early 60s my mother was working in
the tuck shop at Box Hill Technical College.
And one of the ladies there was doing yoga and she suggested
to Mum that she do the same
because she was a little bit overweight.
When Mum first started the yoga, it was wonderful
because she lost weight, she was motivated,
she was getting out of the house.
She told me that what she was doing
was very special, because Anne Hamilton-Byrne
was this Jesus Christ.
There was a lot of talk about ruling the world,
and having a perfect world,
and how everybody that didn't fit in
to that little group weren't going to survive.
[people talking]
- We didn't think of ourselves as a cult.
I mean, that would have been ridiculous.
This was a very, very gradual immersion in new values.
It wasn't just random happy hippies.
It was Australian people who were handpicked,
genuinely professional, successful people
that you might live next door to.
And it was all secret.
- [Dave] You've got to remember,
this woman had phenomenal presence.
- [Fran] In ancient times we hear about enchantresses
who could enslave people just by a glance.
There was a glamour about Anne that meant
that all the men were besotted.
Bill was totally beglamoured, just beglamoured.
- [Roland] She's strong, she's powerful.
- [Fran] Entrancing, beautiful, loving.
- I was looking for a mother figure
because I didn't have much of a one growing up.
Anne personified this sort of idealised mother figure,
the perfect mother, or the great mother.
I had this yearning to belong to Anne's group of people.
If I could get close to her
I would have a place where I belonged.
- They would meet regularly at a hall
in Ferny Creek on a five acre property.
[slow music]
And in its heyday in the late 60s, early 70s
there were hundreds of people that would turn up there,
including people of high standing in the community.
- We waited, and we meditated,
and we waited, and we meditated.
And then eventually Anne would come in
from the back of the hall.
- [Anne] To thy last supper.
- When she spoke, you listened.
And what came out of her mouth
was very much worth listening to, believe me.
- [Anne] For neither have I betrayed any secrets
to thine enemies, nor have I given thee the kiss of Judas.
But like a thief I pray unto thee--
- Right the way through my entire 32 years with the Lodge,
I was in the sound room recording
every single lecture, speech.
Every word that Anne uttered went on tape.
- She taught this mishmash of Eastern religions
involving an endless wheel
of life and death and reincarnation,
and the bad karma builds up and up and up.
And it's a bit like a toxic debt of a nation.
It's actually so big you can never pay it off.
So you have to have somebody to cancel it out for you.
And she cancels all of your karma
at the initiation ceremony.
So the only karma you've got left to work out
is what you were born to work out in this life.
- [Roland] We were brought up that
we've had many millions of lives.
And Auntie Anne promised us that this
was our last life if we stood by her.
- Only one rule, do absolutely everything she tells ya.
And that might range from what to eat,
what to wear, what to think, who to marry,
who to not marry, everything.
Total obedience.
[slow dramatic music]
- [ Police Interviewer] All right, it's 4:50.
- 4.53.
- 4.53 on Wednesday the 1st 1990.
- And weren't we taping?
- Mm-hm.
- Where is it?
- [laughs] Here.
- Oh, right.
- It's difficult with dates because our life was sort of,
we were brought up in such a stultifying daily routine.
Every day was the same.
Every weekend was the same.
- By the colours of our aura,
she could tell what we were feeling,
or supposedly what we were feeling or thinking.
- I remember sitting down with the children
in the early days and I said,
"I can't promise you that we will arrest someone,
"or charge someone, or get a conviction."
But I said that we will do our absolute best.
[slow music]
- [Roland] My first memory is Mum was taking me
up to Eildon.
And I knew I was going to live up there.
I would have been only about maybe two, two and a half.
And I remember saying,
"Oh, Mum, look at all the wattle trees."
It was beautiful.
That's my first memory of the actual sect,
being up with all the other kids.
- As far as we knew, we were all
Anne Hamilton-Byrne's children, well 14 of us were.
- Growing up it was Anne and it was Bill.
They were Mum and Dad.
And then there was foster kids.
They were kids of other sect members
that would either come up on weekends
or stay there for stints of a couple of years.
At its heyday, or I should say the greatest amount of kids
at any given stage was 28.
- We all had blonded bleached hair.
Not all of us.
Some had red hair.
Because Auntie Anne was actually naturally red-headed.
Very, very royal Von Trapp sort of clothes.
Your velvets, your smart shoes,
and everything had to be polished and looking the same.
And that was really to implant in us
that we're all brothers and sisters.
- The Aunties were the people who looked after us.
When the Aunties knew that we were going for walks
we were always accompanied by them.
There must have been that fear that we would run away.
We'd walk around and we'd peer into people's houses,
wondered if they had the same food as we did.
And if not, what was that food that they were eating?
- You weren't encouraged to socialise
or interact with other people.
In fact, it was us and them.
So we were separate from the rest of the world.
[slow music]
- [Lex] We received information that Bill Hamilton-Byrne
had been seen in Langton Green, a small village in Kent
where the cult owned a large property.
- With the sect, every so often they hit the news.
And when the hit the news in Australia,
they pick up sticks and move to England.
Langton Green is a big farm
in the stockbroker's belt in England,
10 acres, a 16th century house.
And it's got tunnels going under right down to Brighton.
Kings escaped through there, whatever.
All sorts of history in that place.
- [Bill] Show them this side of the house here, honey.
Along here the little window up at the top.
- [Anne] Queen Elizabeth..before Queen Elizabeth.
There's our dining room window open.
- [Bill] I believe it goes back to 15th century.
- [Anne] Yes.
- Big house, but it had been added on.
And one section was for Anne.
- [laughs] Look.
[Bill laughing]
Turn around, Daddy.
- Who me?
- [Anne] Say something.
- Mm, love you, darling.
- [Anne] Love you to the children.
- To the children.
- [Anne] You love them, don't you, Daddy?
- I do love them, darling, I do.
- [Anne] And I love you, darling.
- Love you, Annie.
[slow music]
- When we were children they would travel a lot overseas
between Australia, America, and England.
So they weren't always at home with us at Eildon.
- We'd be told they'd be overseas,
so we thought they were over the other side of the lake.
And we'd rock ourselves to sleep at night
calling out, "Mummy, Daddy,"
thinking that they were just over the lake.
- When Mum and Dad came back from England or overseas
was generally the time that they used to do filming,
'cause of course we were all very excited
and all very happy to see them.
- I think we put on quite a good performance.
It's a very a neat piece of propaganda, the movie business.
I'm sure it was designed to show people
who Anne wanted to get into the cult,
why wouldn't you want to be a part of this?
It looks idyllic.
You starve the kids, but you want them all for film,
so anyway, you just tell them
that they're going to have some chocolate or something
and then you've got a nice happy-looking family.
- Very few adult members of the sect
really knew what was happening to those children.
They were kept in isolation even from the sect.
There were special aunties and uncles
who Anne entrusted to raise her children.
But the others only saw them occasionally
when they'd go to the hall and perform for the sect.
And then they'd be shunted off again in buses,
but back to Eildon.
[children singing]
- The main Aunties were Trish and Aunt Elizabeth.
And they used to come up every fortnight
and look after us for two weeks on, two weeks off.
They starved us, they beat us,
they did all sorts of horrible things to us.
[slow music] [insects chirping]
- [Ben] Around 5:30 in the morning we would be woken up.
There would be hatha yoga meditation.
- [Anouree] And then set up the boys' room for school
- [Ben] Beds would be rolled away.
Out would come the school books.
There were trestle tables, all the chairs,
with a blackboard at the end, seven days a week.
[mid-temple music]
- [Anouree] A plate of vegetables for lunch,
a plate of vegetables for dinner.
- With all of the vitamins were laid out.
School finished four o'clock.
There were showers, yoga, meditation,
dinner, and then there was homework, reading, bed.
And that pretty much repeated 52 weeks in the year.
- From about 1980 Anne increased the dosage
and types of drugs we were taking.
I was given Valium, half a tablet three times a day.
- Anatensol and Tegretol,
Mogadon and Valium every single day, morning and night.
- I do remember of one occasion where I had LSD
when I was about eight or nine.
I do not remember actually being administered it.
But I certainly remember the effects of it.
- You were punished most days in some way,
whether it was lines or missing food,
or three days was really bad,
if you went without food for three days.
- The longest I ever went without food was for a week.
- The denial of food was a very large component
of control for Anne.
It's better to keep your victims weak
so that they have less ability to fight back.
- The police doctor told me the youngest one
suffered from psychosocial dwarfism.
Because she lived in a harsh, uncaring environment,
her growth hormones as a young child were never released.
And when they took the children out in the raid
in August '87, and they removed them from the sect,
I think it was within a week or two
she grew two centimetres.
To me that was clear evidence
that the children had been maltreated.
One of our tasks was to visit Lake Eildon,
where the children had been held in captivity,
to gather evidence.
It was eerie.
This was where some of the worst crimes
were committed, allegedly, against the children.
I saw where the children were secreted under the house
when those evil police officers came,
who the children were told would kill you if they saw you.
[slow music]
[camera clicking]
Anne had said at one stage that there had been 28 children.
We knew of 14 or 15, which in my calculations
meant there was around 13, 14 children that, who were they?
Bizarre as it sounds, we needed to exclude any possibility
that there was anything other than dogs
buried in those graves.
Thank goodness we were able to do that.
It was a real interesting raid 'cause it actually gave us
the intelligence and confirmed
what we had been told by the children.
- Eildon itself was very regimented,
but at the same time very unpredictable.
The rules could change and you didn't know
they'd changed until you'd broken them.
It made it a lot more dangerous.
You can't save yourself if you don't know
what you're going to get into trouble for.
One of the rules is don't wet your bed.
Of course, that night I wet my bed.
In the morning I got a belting.
The Auntie would come in and she'd rip the sheets back.
And if it was wet, then that was you
in the bathroom having a belting.
And when it wasn't you, it was the others.
So there were three or four beltings in the morning,
and it's quite a distressing way to wake up.
[slow music]
- [Ben] We used to call the place, a concentration camp.
And you'd just decide how you're going to play the system
to get what you need to survive.
- [Anouree] If Anne could team us up
and get us against each other,
that was going to work very well for her.
- [Ben] If relationships were built among us,
she would purposely split that up.
- [Sarah] A lot of us kids believed
that she could read our thoughts.
- [Leeanne] If someone did something wrong
and didn't own up, everybody got punished.
- [Ben] And so if I found out who did it,
I would tell on them.
You become very unpopular with that.
No one likes the class snitch.
- I kept to myself.
Sometimes I'd hide under my bed.
That was my place to be, I would just sit on my bed
frozen as a statue, just staring out the window.
I just shut down.
Which is why I uselessly dreamed of going to Mars
and living there.
There were no humans, just little creatures
that would be getting about in an industrial way,
making their civilization work.
- Not all the time, but just occasionally,
I'd trap my cat in my room.
And I used to throw her around.
And then that anger would subside
and I'd hold her, and I'd rock,
and I was sobbing, and "I'm sorry," and "I'm sorry."
And no one ever heard.
No one ever came and said, "Are you okay?
"What's going on?
"Why are you doing this?"
And it wasn't that I wanted to hurt the cat.
I wasn't sitting there going,
"Ooh, I'm going to hurt the cat."
It just exploded.
- I was actually one of the naughtier ones.
I think that's probably one of the reasons
why Uncle Bill told me to leave.
And I was just devastated.
They were my family.
[slow dramatic music]
I never felt like I was a part of any
of the groups, except for Eildon.
I was getting a little bit rebellious, I think.
For example, cutting people's car brakes.
[match striking]
Then I started trying to burn down Dad's house
and trying to burn down the Sherbrooke Forest.
And still today I really cannot
answer the question why I did that.
The only thing I can think of is that I was crying for help.
- Mum was spending an awful lot of time up in Ferny Creek.
She said she was going to meetings, and yoga,
and all this sort of thing.
And we really didn't know what was happening.
I don't know whether because Dad worked long hours
and he was away a lot whether Mum just got sick and tired
of being home with the children.
Dad went up to Ferny Creek quite a few times.
He used to go up and there and sit and watch
and see if he could sort of see anything going on.
He said the husbands that were up there
were really, really angry.
[men yelling]
Some of them had placards,
things about Anne breaking up families.
Dad was angry, but he was just a bit frightened
that it might come to blows.
It wasn't long after that
that Mum shifted out completely.
Dad had to sell the house
and Mum took her money and gave it to the cult.
And then Dad had to shift back in with his mother
because he didn't have enough money to buy another house.
He was just a broken man.
- I was delving back into historical matters
and I came across information that there had been
a television programme put together
by a journalist by the name of Phil De Montignie.
- A very few people would talk.
All the information that I got came from people
who had left the, we called it a cult, had left the cult.
The survivors told me their endeavours to leave
were met with being forcibly being taken
to Newhaven Hospital and given shock treatment,
which was not necessary.
The only thing that was wrong with them
was that they were beginning
not to believe in The Family and wanting to leave it.
They referred to things like brainwashing,
children who didn't know who their parents were.
They seemed to all be locked away.
You just never got to the kids.
There's also been some concern about children,
baby farm is an expression--
- Well that's just ridiculous.
I think that kind of nasty allegation,
if somebody will come out with it
we'll take action against them.
- It's been suggested that drugs are used within your group.
Can you seen any basis for this?
- Well this of course, I deny absolutely.
We are respectable citizens,
as I've tried to indicate to you.
[slow music]
- After it went to air, The Family
approached Reg Ansett with a complaint.
Reg used to come every day, spend half an hour
with the Board, and then buzz off.
Well on this particular day I got hauled in to talk to him.
I got told in no uncertain terms
that I had to do a follow up
and it had to be a friendly one.
We felt a strong enough case was there
for an investigation to do with child abuse.
We took all of our material to Dick Hamer,
who was the premier at the time.
Because the judiciary were involved in The Family,
I got the feeling that if I took it to the police
it would just disappear, nothing would happen.
So we took it to the Premier,
and in fact that's what happened, nothing.
It got swept under the carpet.
- There's no doubt that there were tentacles
reaching sort of right to the top.
- In 1956, 0.05% of the Australian population
were at or had even been to a university.
And you knew that the people that were in college with you
were going to become judges and specialist medical people.
Many very distinguished Australians
had spent their early 20s in Queen's College,
and he was their Master.
[slow music]
Raynor was involved in a club in downtown Melbourne,
a club that he was introduced to
by David Syme from The Age newspaper.
Robert Menzies was a member of the same club.
Ansett was probably connected.
It was part of the group that led to the formation
of the Liberal Party of Australia.
- They definitely did have friends in high places.
I mean, when you start with the Queen's College Master,
Raynor Johnson, being first devotee.
When you look at some of the associations
with the highest offices in the state.
Now how influential those people were
to making sure these investigations
never went too far, I can't answer.
But you've always got to wonder.
[bell ringing]
- [Female Announcer] Today in the chapel at Queen's College,
former University of Melbourne medical student,
Dr. Howard Whitaker married Elizabeth Jean,
younger daughter of Mr. and Mrs D. Black--
- My father, Howard Whitaker, wanted to find somebody
who was a medium who would help him
use LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs
to treat mentally ill people.
He went to his old friend, Raynor Johnson,
who knew Anne Hamilton-Byrne
and put the three of them in touch.
[slow dramatic music]
- Most of the sect members were taken away
to a psychiatric hospital in Newhaven in Kew,
where they were administered LSD and psilocybin,
another hallucinogenic drug.
- The owner of Newhaven became a member of The Family cult,
and that's how Anne then started
to use Newhaven as a recruiting base.
These professional people who had gone through
a traumatic experience went to this private hospital
so that it was discrete, so it wasn't generally known.
And when they were there, being administered with LSD,
and then seeing the figure of Anne
appearing at the doorway in a white gown
with a bucket of bloody dry ice behind her,
and then when they've come out of the LSD experience
they actually believe that she's Jesus Christ.
LSD was a legal drug for Newhaven
because it had been authorised
by the Victorian Health Department.
And of course, those who administered LSD were sect members.
- [Woman interviewer] Dr. Mackay, did you ever prescribe
or administer LSD or psilocybin to people in The Family
for so-called 'clearing sessions'?
- Yes, I think that's fair enough
to say yes to that question.
Depends on what you define as a 'clearing'.
- [Woman interviewer] How would you define it?
- That was a way of describing looking
into your own psyche to untie some knots, a little like--
- But these people weren't
strictly speaking patients, were they?
- Oh, they're all patients, all patients.
[slow dramatic music]
- The drug was given to me by my father, Howard Whitaker.
Anne was there, and it was done under her instruction.
A few minutes, maybe half an hour after it started,
the world just went crazy.
[dramatic music]
And she whispered to me, "Who is Jesus?"
And that thought bounced around my head
and then bounced around the room for a while.
So I said to her, "You're Jesus."
And she goes, "That's right, David, that's right.
"You always knew I was Jesus."
[slow dramatic music]
It was confirmed later by my father, Howard.
He said, "Yeah, that's right, she's the prophet."
And I was told in no uncertain terms
that if I told anybody I'd end up in Newhaven and crazy.
[slow music]
- There was always the threat of the mental hospital.
She said to one woman,
"It only takes two psychiatrists to commit you.
"And you'll be there for years
"if that's what I say should happen."
- Bill Byrne had an earthmoving business
somewhere in the La Trobe Valley.
He was quite a wealthy man.
And Anne decided that this is the man that she would marry.
He had four children and a wife.
- May Byrne was a bit of a fighter
and she didn't just give up easily.
She didn't take to this woman taking over her husband
and children too, and she stood up to it.
Pretty quickly she was in Newhaven Hospital
and put heavily under drugs with no knowledge
whether she'd ever get out.
And at one stage Anne went into the room and she said,
"May, you might as well face it, he's mine now, not yours."
- [Bill] How was that, kids?
- How was that, kids?
[both laughing] - [Man] Oh, look at that.
- That's enough, Tim.
[Tim laughing] [Anne laughing]
- Anne would tell you to move to a different school,
move to a different country, marry a different person.
[slow music]
Every time the person did that,
then that reinforced her power over them.
And I think she got her kicks directing people.
- There was this man who had returned
from India called Peter Kibby.
And Anne told him that he should marry me
and I should marry him.
[people cheering]
I did like him and I fell in love with him.
[people applauding]
But I had no idea how difficult it would be
to live with a man who had a very bad case
of obsessive compulsive disorder.
- She looked at me once and she said,
"Why don't you admit your marriage is over?
"Why don't you just go home
"and leave a little note and say it's over?"
And the next thing I knew, Anne rang up and she said,
"Frances," always called me Frances,
"your little baby has arrived.
Now jump in a taxi and go off to the children's hospital
and ask for nurse such and such, and there he will be."
I went into the ward.
I looked around at the incubators.
Then I saw him.
[baby crying]
And I just fell in love with that baby at first sight.
I took him home and I was just so happy.
He was gorgeous.
And as he started growing up I had no reason
then to think it wasn't legal.
Later on I got worried.
- When a child is born, delivered by sect doctors,
given to a sect nurse, handed to a sect social worker,
and then taken straight out of the hospital
and given to Anne Hamilton-Byrne,
you then start to understand the power
that this person had over so many people.
- It didn't take me long to realise
that there was something really, really wrong going on.
And that's when I disassociated myself from my mother.
I told her that I could no longer
have anything to do with her,
and not to come back to the house
because I was really frightened for my children.
I was terrified that she would come
and just take the children and disappear,
and I wouldn't ever know where they were.
- Les and I were married at Queen's College in 1960.
Our first daughter was born four years later.
When she started school I was worried
that the cult might try to get hold of her.
I went to the headmaster at the primary school
and said to him, "Nobody's to take her out of school
"without you asking me first."
He said, "Well who would?"
I says, "Well, the people might come
"and say they're her grandparents,
"or aunties, or something.
"Nobody, nobody's to take her out of school
"except me or her own dad, only us."
Because I was scared of them.
I just was.
They were so involved with these people
that they'd be a party to anything.
- There was a growing unease.
Things were not as they should be at Queen's College.
And probably the Master was to blame
because he was into all this weird stuff
and had written these weird books.
It was a strongly Methodist place,
and institutional religion began to be worried about him.
There were mumblings about dismissing him
or maybe even having a heresy trial.
Raynor saw Anne was a medium,
the sense that through this person
the spirit world was addressing him, had called him,
led to a view that meant that he couldn't be wrong.
And that's really a dangerous situation to arrive at.
- I met the children a few years after
I started investigating the sect.
It took a long time to convince people
that there was a problem.
You keep a lot of children
in the commune here, is that right?
- [Auntie Trish] No, that's not right at all.
- There's no children here? - No, no.
- Right, why do the locals say there's children here?
There's such secrecy around her.
Devotees would do anything to protect Anne.
So you're up against a lot of brick walls.
- We just don't want to speak to you.
There's nothing to talk about.
- Does it concern you the allegations
former sect members have been making?
- No, it doesn't concern me one bit.
- Are you a follower of Mrs Hamilton-Byrne's?
- I'm a friend of Mrs Hamilton-Byrne's.
- Do you believe she's a teacher?
- I believe that she's just
a great friend of mine, all right?
Now can you leave the property?
- Is she a teacher?
Is she your guru?
- I don't think I have anything to say, all right?
[slow music]
- Anne would ring up and want to hear us being disciplined.
This was something that she wanted to happen
and the aunts were obeying her rules.
- I always hated my mum.
I was petrified of her.
She was rough and nasty.
Mum was, I hate to say it, but she was a bitch.
- [Detective] Would you tell me your full name and
address please?
- Elizabeth Jean Whitaker, [beep] Ferny Creek.
- All right, and your occupation?
- State registered nurse.
- Is that your signature?
No comment. - Sorry?
- No comment.
- Do you recognise that document?
It's a photostat document of an original.
- No comment.
- We had metre long rulers.
This was Elizabeth Whitaker.
And I remember her one night, it was hot,
she had the fan on for us.
She forgot to turn it off, thought we'd turned it back on,
and when she woke up it's on,
and demanded to know who done it,
and then flew into a rage and just swang that ruler around.
And it collected people on their ribs, across the head.
I mean, it was just, she lost the plot.
- She pulled a cane out and started beating me
around the head and the shoulders.
So then I got up and I was trying to cover, protect myself.
And as I moved around the table, I tripped.
And there was a large pipe going from floor to ceiling,
and I just curled round that, and the beating
just kept coming, she just kept hitting me,
and kept hitting me.
- Did you want to speak to your solicitor again?
Or try to ring him again?
- I would like to.
- All right, well we'll make arrangements.
- [Anouree] Unfortunately the relationship
between the aunties and ourselves
was so catastrophic that I viewed the aunties,
and all adults, as extremely dangerous people
to stay away from.
[slow music]
- When Anne and Bill were there,
we'd be disciplined heavily by her and by Bill.
And you remember absolute terror.
- I was always a daddy's girl.
You know, he was my knight in shining armour.
But he did awful things.
- I mean, when he lost his temper and he beat people,
he was savage and he was horrible.
- Sarah was thrashed.
Excuse me.
Yeah, it was watching her being belted with a buckle,
being beaten to the point
where she's wriggling out of her clothes,
hearing her body smash against the,
across the balustrade.
It was horrendous to know
they had the power to do that, and would do it.
[birds chirping]
- What was going on was wrong.
Someone had to do something about it.
[slow dramatic music]
So I jumped out the window onto the tank,
slid down the tank, and ran down
to the lake and kept running.
[Leeanne panting]
I was petrified.
The adrenaline kept me going until I saw a light.
All I could say to them was, "Please get me the police."
So they did.
A very nice constable turned up.
He said to me, "What are you going to do?"
And I said, "I don't care.
"But I will sleep in the gutter
"if you don't do something,
"because I'm not going back there."
[dog barking]
[child sobbing]
- [Detective] You're Anouree.
- We're going away. - Anouree.
- We are. - You can trust us.
- Are we going to go away-- - Great big deep breaths.
- [Child] You broke Mum and Dad's heart.
- So I'm lying in bed at the end of that night
thinking through what had happened through the day.
It's probably when I realised
the prison doors had opened for good.
[slow music]
- [Radio Interviewer] How many did you actually adopt?
How many are your natural children?
- [Anne] There are eight or nine.
You got eight this morning
when we were counting it out, weren't we?
We never told them they weren't ours.
- [Lex] At the birth we've got a doctor who's a sect member,
a midwife that's a sect member.
- [Roland] I'm sure my mum was coerced to give me up.
- I'm wondering if you've got any comment to make now
about what happened to the children.
- [Robert Maclellan] Shots are being fired through windows.
Car tyres are being slashed.
There are death threats.
- She would say all we had to do
is just follow what she said,
except that it was never quite right, or were never enough.
- Millions of dollars went through Auntie Anne's pockets.
- I know that Muktananda practised black magic.
That's why Anne was there, to learn more about it.
- [Lex] There were so many bizarre stories
about who she was.
- [Roland] I didn't even know
that Auntie Anne had another name.
[slow dramatic music]