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 Melbourne’s 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 cult’s 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.

Anne’s cult was at first called The Great White Brotherhood. Then it became known as The Family, and it seemed that’s 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 Anne’s 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 dementia’s 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 can’t 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 Anne’s 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 Anne’s 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 Melbourne’s 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 — we’ve 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 doesn’t 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. That’s what I am and that’s 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.

There’s a plastic doll under a crocheted blanket on her bed, and she picks it up and cradles it tenderly. On the walls there are photographs of the children she acquired and dressed up. Who were they, where did they come from? We want to hear her perspective, but she cannot tell us why.

There is another photograph, of Anne playing the harp, beside a print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. In her younger days she wore Chanel perfume and loved to sing soprano. She also gave out a mantra to all her cult members, spelling out the order never to betray. She offered hope but would ultimately be double-crossed by some who had been so loyal. Is the da Vinci print a coincidence, or a reminder?

Anne hid herself and her adult followers in the forested hills near Melbourne, the Dandenong Ranges, an hour by car now and even further through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when The Family was most active. The roads are steep, through mountain ash trees and national parks. The houses are concealed.

Anne hid the children two hours away in another direction, beside Lake Eildon, in the foothills of the High Country. The artificial lake is surrounded by mountains and has partly submerged trees dotted throughout it, as if there is a secret life under the surface. Entire living plains were flooded to make the lake; it’s a very pretty place, but the trees rising up from the water give an air of menace.

Anne offered her followers a message of eternal life and hope. She took it all from many sources — Christianity, Hinduism, hatha yoga, and New Age journeys into crystals, auras, light, colour, LSD and magic mushrooms, and even extraterrestrial life. She used to always say it was a warning when the flying saucers came in spring.

One of Anne’s signature sayings was walk on. Michael told us what she meant was walk on, into the oneness; it seemed to us what she meant was follow me; I am the light. Nothing or no one can offer more. The phrase gave her followers further permission to do her will.

And so, confused, rambling, and very old — but, it must be said, quite radiant — Anne fields visitors from dwindling cult ranks in her tiny room but can never properly know what has happened in her past or what might be in her future.

She pushes her protein drink away, across her tray, and rests her head again on her arms. She drifts in and out of sleep. When she wakes, those eyes dart around the room. There are crystals on a table, and a newspaper.

‘What’s that woman with children done?’ she says. ‘Done a bunk?’