Chris Johnston - The Family: the shocking true story of a notorious cult

THE FAMILY

Chris Johnston is a senior writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, based in Melbourne. He has been covering developments related to The Family for several years.

Rosie Jones is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and editor. Her most recent feature documentary, The Family, premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July 2016.

Scribe Publications
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First published by Scribe 2016

Copyright Big Stories Co Pty Ltd 2016

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9781925321678 (Australian edition)
9781925228687 (UK edition)
9781925307597 (e-book)

CiP data records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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For all the people who had the courage to speak out

CONTENTS

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

WALK ON

She is skeletal and pale, 95 years old and living in a nursing home in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. There are dense layers of secrecy surrounding her, as there have always been. Her followers have been told since the beginning to protect her, and never to betray her.

To these followers, Anne Hamilton-Byrne is a reincarnation of Jesus, a living god. But her story is one of betrayal upon bitter betrayal. Outsiders left-hand forces, according to Anne are never to be trusted.

We have been allowed to visit her in the nursing home: Rosie Jones, a documentary filmmaker, and me, Chris Johnston, a newspaper journalist. I had been writing stories on The Family, the group which Anne led, for The Age in Melbourne mainly about behind-the-scenes shuffling of assets in her vast property portfolio as she edges closer to death when I heard that Rosie was making a film. She had amassed a lot of information over two years of research and was gradually developing relationships with key people from the cult. We started comparing notes, and then decided to collaborate on a book in conjunction with the film.

The story of Anne Hamilton-Byrne and The Family is a tragic, sensational one about power, money, love, hope, and ultimately abuse and the extent to which everyday people are prepared to believe the most extraordinary things. As we continued to find our way into the story and piece the book and documentary film together, we both desperately wanted to meet the woman at the centre of it, to understand, if possible, the source of her power. Now, in this most humble of settings, we are here with her.

Anne has dementia and uses a wheelchair. The nursing home is within view of the forested hills on Melbournes fringe, where she formed her cult more than 50 years ago. But she will not return to the sanctuary of those hills now. She lies here in the final throes of her life even though she said she could transcend death. Her hair is long and silver and tied back very tightly, and she is dressed beautifully in blue, her cults most totemic colour, with delicate white slip-on shoes on her withered feet. Her eyes dart around the room. A cult member told us it was always, always in the eyes: If you could look into her eyes, he said, you would understand. Those eyes are piercing but somehow also vacant, as if the mystery, hope, fantasy, and lies inside them from decades past have flickered away, the focus lost.

Annes cult was at first called The Great White Brotherhood. Then it became known as The Family, and it seemed thats what she wanted: a family. She was glamorous and, of course, charismatic a Kim Novak blonde who wore red to the parties the cult had in the 1970s. But she was cruel and ordered others to be cruel for her. She was able to make well-educated, ordinary people do immoral things. The children she accumulated as her own allege they were abused and drugged.

Now Annes dementia means she can never again be challenged in court over her actions. It also means she cannot tell us or anyone else anything of real value. During her life as a self-proclaimed spiritual Master, her every word was taken as a glimmering truth, a light, a pathway. But now she talks only in dementias loop of echoes. Mummy really goes me, she says, as we sit in front of her. I just get along. Then, in a glimmer of clarity: Altogether we had four, five we had seven or eight children, Bill and I. Bill was her third husband and co-conspirator; photographs of him, distinguished and handsome, adorn her room. The pictures of the two of them show an immaculately dressed and confident pair.

So the dilemma for Rosie and me is this: Anne cannot answer our questions. She cant talk about Bill, her grand intentions for The Family, her unusual relationship with her mother. We can only gather glimpses of her, as filtered through the memories of others, or from photographs and the recordings she created over a lifetime. What is true and what is false in this complex, often contradictory story of the cult? Many, many people crossed Annes path, and among them many victims. Most of those caught up in this story are scarred in some way, and the testimonies they give are confronting. Whose version is closest to the truth?

In unpacking this extraordinary story, we wanted to understand the circumstances societal and personal that led this woman to operate at the edges of human belief. How did she convince people to trust her and take a leap of faith?

It was Michael, one of Annes most devoted followers, who brought us to meet her. This was against the wishes of other cult members. A rumpled man in his sixties, from one of Melbournes most eminent families, Michael loves Anne, and has done with extraordinary loyalty and deference for almost 50 years. At her peak she had perhaps 500 followers like him, but now they are few. Michael has been helpful weve had lunch together and been to his home. He is prepared to trust us, perhaps because he believes Anne has been persecuted and he wants to defend her. By defending her, he validates his own choice to belong to what he still calls The Brotherhood. Anne is introverted now, focused on her internal world. Michael says she doesnt need to speak or be cogent because her spirit as the Master is as powerful as ever.

Anne is wheeled from the common room back to her room, and we follow. There is a bib discarded on the bed. She sits in a chair sucking a protein drink from a straw.

Have you got a doggie down there? She rests her head on a tea tray in front of her. Mummy really goes me and I just get along. Thats what I am and thats all I am. Even today, a regular Thursday in the nursing home, she is wearing pearls. She struggles to itch her ankle with long, finely boned fingers heavy with gold rings. A story went around that she also had diamond earrings but one day they suddenly disappeared, after a visit by a cult member left her with bleeding earlobes.