a refresher as we get closer to verdicts in Assange
theguardian.com.au
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Growing up with The Family:
inside Anne Hamilton-Byrne’s sinister cult
Cruel and charismatic, Anne Hamilton-Byrne was the Australian leader of a doomsday cult who thought she was the Messiah.
Abigail Haworth on the woman behind The FamilyAbigail Haworth @AbiHaworthSun 20 Nov 2016 20.00 AEDT
Anne Hamilton-Byrne wore pearls and Chanel perfume. She played the harp and sang soprano. She had blonde hair, styled in waves that caught the light.
As leader of The Family, the Australian doomsday cult she founded in the 1960s, she claimed to be Jesus reborn as a woman.
Much of her power, say her former followers, lay in her grey-blue eyes.
“In ancient times we hear about enchantresses who could enslave people with one glance,” says ex-acolyte Fran Parker.
“She had eyes that looked through your soul.” Hamilton-Byrne’s ultimate tool of enslavement, however, was something she pinpointed herself in a rare radio interview after the cult’s devastating abuses were exposed. “It was love. Just love.” I’ve been waiting for you.
You are specialOne of the few female cult leaders in history – and apparently one of the cruellest – Hamilton-Byrne operated in almost total secrecy over two decades.
Hidden away 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.
It 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 hair platinum.
To keep her eerie brood under her control, 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’s victims. “She was offering it and then taking it back.
She broke people’s spirit.”The glamorous guru used the same tactic on her adult followers, handpicking them from Melbourne’s wealthy professional elite with promises of spiritual fulfilment in the 1960s and 70s when new age seeking was all the rage.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she’d say on first meeting a potential recruit. “You 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.
“There was only one rule: do absolutely everything she said,” says David Whitaker, a former child survivor.
“That included what to think, what to wear, what to eat, who to marry, who not to marry. Total obedience.”
The children were initiated with ‘huge, relentless doses of LSD’ in trips that lasted for daysA few years ago speculation emerged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had grown up in The Family.
His hair colour didn’t help nor, possibly, his personality. Assange admitted that a man who was his mother’s boyfriend in the late 1970s had been a member of the cult.
The man had been “a sinister presence” who sought to have “a certain psychological power” over his family, Assange said, and they eventually went on the run from him.
But he said he never met Hamilton-Byrne or had any direct contact with the group as a whole.
