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UPTOP

‘A better bunch of kids you couldn’t wish for,’ says Syd Savage, the handyman at The Family lakehouse in Eildon. ‘So pleasant, so tidy. They had them very well controlled.’

Almost ten years after Anne first swayed Raynor Johnson and set the cult’s wheels in motion, children started arriving at the lakehouse — Uptop, or Kai Lama — in 1971.

Kai Lama was the realisation of a vision Anne had long held: the monastery, her Manuka. The house itself was a classic split-level timber Australian holiday home behind tall trees. Anne gave the name Kai Lama as a tribute to the Tibetan Buddhism to which she said she adhered.

At first seven children were moved, in stages, from one of Anne’s homes in the hills. This first group of kids were all aged around three. Through the 1970s, the numbers would grow to 14. In 1978, Anne married William Byrne — Bill — her third husband. She added her surname, Hamilton (which was not her real surname), to his, and thus the children took the surname Hamilton-Byrne. Another group of 14 or so children were subsequently acquired and called ‘fosters’ because they did not take Anne’s name.

The Hamilton-Byrne children all thought they were brothers and sisters as they were growing up, but of course they were not. Some had been scouted for adoption by cult insiders at Melbourne hospitals and taken for Anne with fake paperwork. Or they were gifted to Anne by parents who were involved with the cult. These parents felt it was an honour to give over a child: their son or daughter would be raised by the hand of God.

Johnson wrote about the children. He began keeping his diary in a deed-box at a bank near the hills, for security. In a section headed ‘Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me’, he claimed that the gathering and educating of them was ‘the most amazing’ aspect of Anne’s life. ‘Viewed as a piece of organisation, with devoted and sacrificial help, it is staggering in its outlook, yet it was planned with consciousness of its magnitude and the great responsibility of this undertaking. It had to cover say 10–15 years before it could lead to success. Only a great Master, equally at home in this world and the next, could have hoped to carry it through to a conclusion.’

‘It amounted to this,’ he continued. ‘A group of children, some already born here, some yet to be born, were brought together, fostered and adopted and trained from the beginning of their lives in as perfect conditions as could be provided. Their health was meticulously supervised and all aspects of their welfare and education were considered and provided for. Before they came, it was known by the Master when and where and to what parents they were coming and what qualities potentially they brought with them from past lives … It is safe to say the future age will see them, unknown though they are, as custodians and continuers of the work their Master has set going in many parts of the world.’

Ian Weeks, Johnson’s former student, believes Johnson would never have entertained the idea that anything was wrong at Uptop. ‘He might have thought, Well, it’s very nice that these people are looking after a lot of children, who might be orphans. My guess, and it has to be a guess, is that perhaps you could say that he shut his eyes to some things that he ought not to have shut his eyes to.’

And for many years, hardly anyone did know something was wrong. Barely anyone from the outside was allowed into Uptop. Through the 1970s and 1980s, it became an increasingly paranoid enclosure: the cult motto of ‘unseen, unheard, unknown’ was paramount. Syd Savage was allowed in because he didn’t ask questions, despite seeing what were probably some very odd things. He posed no threat. Syd kept the place running: the power, the water, the cars, the plumbing, the gas (he owned the nearest petrol station). The cult bought a white Toyota minivan, which they named Jupiter, and he kept Jupiter humming along too.

‘As far as we were concerned,’ says Christine, his wife, ‘it was just a private school with children that were being home-schooled.’

Syd sometimes suspected unusual things were happening, but he thought it couldn’t have been anything too serious because the children were so polite, and so well turned out. ‘They certainly had a brilliant education,’ he says. ‘They presented well, they were dressed immaculately, extremely clean and tidy and extremely well mannered.’

When he walked into the house, the children would stop what they were doing and greet him. If he ate there, which he sometimes did — despite many of the children often going hungry or being punished by having meals taken away — they would wait until he had picked up his knife and fork before doing so themselves. ‘Typical extreme boarding house rules,’ he says.

Anne was always ‘dripping in expense … she looked good by the time she was all painted up. A bit rough early in the morning, but she was much older than everybody believes. You don’t get facelifts for nothing. And I think she wore wigs.’

Most of the kids eventually had the same sinister dyed-blonde hair, and Syd saw that too, though it didn’t strike him as strange at the time. The dressy clothes they wore were old-fashioned, but he never asked why. Both Syd and his wife insist that the children were happy and healthy. ‘I never had any kid come up to me and say “get me out of here,” he says. ‘We aren’t going to put up with seeing someone hurt their children, no matter whose they are. Cats and dogs and kids — they looked after the lot.’

Once he saw an old cult dog called Dinky lying dead in state inside the house, surrounded by candles. The place was full of cats and dogs, which, unbeknown to Syd, were often fed better than the children. One Uptop child’s favourite dog — Girly, a blue heeler — had been rescued by Bill, from the lake at the foot of the house, and given to the child, but when it got sick it wasn’t taken to the vet but instead put on a home-made drip, and it died. A white sheet was put on the bed, and the dog lay on it for three days before being buried in the garden.

The cult’s business was split between Lake Eildon, where most of the kids lived, and the Dandenong Ranges, home to most of the adults. Bill and Anne mainly lived together in the hills, their home shaded by eucalypts, when they were in Australia. Anne had encouraged her adult followers to move into the same street — a steep grove in the suburb of Ferny Creek — because she said they should be near her, and according to our sources, because she thought that if the authorities or the unbelievers tried to kill her she would be protected.

There had also been cult meditation sessions and prayer meetings in a house in Melbourne’s blue-ribbon suburb of Brighton, next to Port Phillip Bay. But there were too many neighbours in the area; it wasn’t covert enough. The landlord started asking cult members about the strange noises — the om chant — being heard coming from the house, and the neighbours did too. Then the police came. On one of her taped sermons, which she would make while she was travelling overseas and send to her followers on cassette, Anne said, ‘The police sergeant — his name was Les — asked us what went on. I said, “We are meditating.” Then he came again with another constable and said, “All those cars up and down here have only been here since you have been here.” He said, “Not only that, my bank manager comes to see you.” I said, “What do you want us to do?” So he gave the names of the streets to park our cars in.’

The cult then built themselves a brown-brick temple in the hills: the Santiniketan Lodge, pronounced shan-tin-ik-et-an, and meaning ‘abode of peace’, named after an ashram in Tagore, India. It sits on three green and ferny hectares next to protected forest, with high, padlocked gates. Days of worship — which involved listening to Anne speak, either in person or on a taped discourse — were Thursdays and Sundays. When Anne was present, she delivered her message from a purple chair up the front of the Lodge: her throne.

However, Anne and Bill’s time in Australia was also split with time spent at their overseas homes: the couple had begun to use cult money and ‘loans’ from followers to accumulate lavish properties in Kent, near London, and in Hurleyville, in the Catskill Mountains near New York. This was at Anne’s say-so. Bill Hamilton-Byrne was an ex-RAF Englishman who had found wealth in Australia as a rural earthmoving contractor and held positions on the shire council. One of the former cult children told us he was nothing more than a handsome handbag: compliant, rich, and willing.

Ben arrived at Uptop as a child. He is now a member of an evangelical Christian community in Western Australia, a devout family man who has been writing online about his experiences as a child of The Family. As with all the survivors of the cult that we met, we approached him cautiously because of the magnitude of what he had been through. But Ben was happy to tell his story.

He was born in a country town close to Lake Eildon in 1972, but his paperwork was faked to make him a twin born to Anne and Bill in another state. His biological mother was a cult member; both she and Ben’s grandmother had practised yoga with Anne in the 1960s.

When Ben’s mother became crippled with severe cervical degenerative disc disease and was bedridden, Anne contacted her. This was before Ben was born, but he has heard the story many times: Anne, at his mother’s bedside, told her that she could heal her and give her a reason to live. Within six weeks, Ben’s mother was out of bed and, after a year was walking, rusted onto the cult.

‘Anne pulled her back from death and gave her a future,’ Ben says. ‘From that moment, Anne was, as far as my mother was concerned, exactly who she claimed to be: the reincarnation of Jesus. With the power to prove it.’

From the outside, Uptop would have seemed idyllic. There were two playgrounds, a sandpit, a basketball ring, a badminton net, monkey bars, and six vegetable gardens. It was a messy, sprawling compound, with lots of places for children to explore and play. In one of Bill’s home movies, he filmed the children in matching red shorts and tops exercising in unison, doing star-jumps and running on the spot.

The house itself had wood-panelled walls and chintzy furniture, with soft toys and china figurines lining the shelves. There were beds and trundles everywhere, and images of Jesus and Anne in most rooms, alongside posters of koalas and cats. A telescope was covered in plastic sheets; there was a piano. Propped up near the fireplace in the main living room was a corkboard of photographs of the Uptop kids in matching blue tracksuits, holding on to one another.

The lake glimmered at the bottom of their sloping property, the partially submerged trees twisting and rising towards the sky, but the children were rarely allowed near it. Uptop was all they knew.

By the time Ben was at Uptop in 1972, Anne and Bill were becoming visibly wealthier. Cult members were donating money to them as a kind of membership fee, and the couple were also benefitting from property and estates donated by cult members. They were travelling regularly overseas and said to enjoy luxury cars: Daimlers and Jaguars. When not in Britain or New York State, they were in Hawaii, in a home donated by a wealthy American property developer who was married to a cult member.

Anne and Bill would visit Uptop from afar like dignitaries — a holy pair coming back to the doomed fairytale they were creating. ‘She would appear, like a magic queen,’ says Sarah Moore, one of the first to be adopted and go to Uptop, where she was christened with a new name: Andree.

Ben’s earliest memory is lying in his bed at Uptop looking at all the schoolbooks in a cupboard. He also remembers a car either approaching or driving away from the house. ‘We’d wait outside for them to arrive, the car coming down. It was normally a very much looked-forward-to event. Very special, a lot of hype, this was a wonderful thing. They would leave on Sunday night often, saying good night to us, putting us to bed, and they’d leave. It was sad to see them go. We’d hear them calling down from the steps, “Good night, everyone!”’

They could be away from Australia for months at a time; 18 months was the longest absence.

Anne delegated the task of looking after the children at Uptop to a group of women she dubbed ‘the Aunties’. Inside the house, with Anne away, discipline was strict, and the punishments meted out by the Aunties soon became abusive and cruel. They were under enormous pressure to keep Anne happy and keep their cool in a house full of children who were not theirs. They would work two weeks on and then two weeks off. Most were made to become nurses if they weren’t already, and donated their nurses’ wages — earned during the fortnights away from Uptop — to the cult.

‘They were chronically overtired,’ says Michael, the cult member who broke the rules to take us to see Anne in her nursing home. His own son Jerome spent time up there. ‘And young kids being young kids, they lost it sometimes, I’m sure they did.’

Uptop had two senior Aunties, who held rank over the others. Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Whitaker was a large, frumpy dark-haired woman, the ex-wife of a psychiatrist who helped Raynor Johnson and Anne to form the cult. Patricia ‘Trish’ MacFarlane was a chain-smoking cricket fan with a broad Australian accent who enjoyed a drink and drove a Leyland P76, a 1970s Australian muscle car. Margot McLellan, their deputy, was born Peggy Warren, and started doing yoga in the 1960s with Anne. At Uptop, she slept on a trundle mattress in a bathroom, next to the toilet. She was also made to sleep on a stair landing, and she kept her belongings in her car. The Aunties were made to submit to Anne too, like the children. Anne described this treatment of her enablers as part of their ‘training’.

All three Aunties are now dead, but Rosie and I met Margot not long before she died, in 2014. Her line was that Uptop was overwhelmingly positive for the children but the discipline was at times overdone. There’s a strong thread of denial in these kinds of memories. ‘There were so many children, unwanted children, and Anne took them on,’ she told us. ‘It was such a unique situation that you don’t have anything to go by. We were inventing it, and you learnt not to be shocked at anything.’

She said the children were always dressed beautifully and went on overseas trips, remembering them riding double-decker buses in London. ‘We had games — we’d get down on the floor with them and play card games. I used to take them shopping with me and we’d go to the local coffee shop and we’d sit down. Their table manners were lovely — very proud of them, I was.’

She said she distanced herself from the cruelty at Uptop and accepted that which she did encounter as part of their ‘pioneer’ spiritual life there. ‘A couple of the other Aunties used to put the boot in. We’d ring Anne and she’d mete out the punishment. I mostly had feelings about the shy ones, the ones that were a bit on the frightened side. I wanted to encourage them. But I didn’t believe in physical punishment at all.’

She told us that the discipline was for the children as well as the Aunties. ‘It’s a spiritual path. A tough one. And we were sometimes told to do things we didn’t really like doing.’ Anne continually told Margot that she needed to be more humble, and that Anne could do that for her — change her personality. And Margot believed her. ‘Spiritually, I think she had it.’

Margot took many of Uptop’s secrets to her deathbed. A few weeks before she died, she confided to an elderly friend in a suburban nursing home that she wanted to talk in detail about The Family, but she never got the opportunity. Instead, all we have of her are impressions from one conversation.

Trish MacFarlane grew up in an affluent bayside suburb in Melbourne. Her father worked for a bank. She went to a private Anglican girls’ school and became a nurse during World War II, then married a former airforce pilot called Don Webb, a lapsed Methodist and the son of missionaries.

Don and Trish were both were interested in broadening their ideas around religion, and before they were married, they had started looking into non-mainstream churches and spiritualities. After they married, they would go to bookshops together to encounter new ideas.

In the early 1960s, Don, by then an architect, was moved to country Victoria for work. He met Bill Byrne, Anne’s future husband, through a local Rotary Club. Bill had his earthmoving business based there, and both men were ex-airmen. They soon struck up a friendship.

Meanwhile, back in Melbourne in the mid-1960s, Trish, now a mother, went to listen to Raynor Johnson give a Council of Adult Education talk at a high-school hall, and was so taken with his lecture that she introduced herself afterwards. Johnson set about luring her in to the cult, first by telling Trish he wanted her to meet his wife — which happened soon after, over afternoon tea at Trish’s house — and then by telling her all about Anne, the special one. The Master.

Trish went twice to Johnson’s office at the university, telling him all about her marriage troubles with Don, who was unfaithful. ‘He [Johnson] was an extremely kindly man and I was very fond of him,’ Trish later said, according to police sources. Johnson befriended her — and kept telling her about the charismatic Anne.

Then, in 1967, Trish and Don’s son Adrian died in a car crash; he collided with a milkman’s horse and cart in the middle of the night. Two days later, Anne knocked on her door. ‘I could only assume that Raynor had told her of Adrian’s death. I was so beside myself with grief that I didn’t even question her presence at my home.’

Anne knew — also through Johnson — that Don was having an affair with a woman called Brenda. That day at Trish’s house, Anne ordered Don, who she had just met, to go and get Brenda and bring her over. ‘Anne talked with her alone,’ Trish said.

There was a funeral for Adrian, and then Anne summoned Don to the hills and told him that he and his dead son had an afterlife connection. Trish and Don were soon initiated into the cult. Anne then allegedly summoned Trish and Liz Whitaker, whom she had already earmarked, to her bedside at a private Melbourne clinic, the Cotham, where she had just had one of her facelifts. Her head was covered in bandages and she was heavily bruised. Don and Dr John Mackay — a stalwart cult member and Anne’s GP to this day — turned up as well.

Anne reportedly decreed the first marriage swap in The Family to take place immediately. Trish and Don split, and Don moved in with Liz. Anne told John Mackay to divorce his wife and move in with Trish, and that’s what happened. Anne was directing adult cult members’ movements as if they were marionettes, creating a complex shadowland of strange loyalties and odd cult couplings.

‘It honestly never crossed my mind to argue with any of Anne’s instructions,’ Trish said.

Trish’s extended family stepped in, worried. Anne told her not to talk to them anymore. ‘She used to say, “I’m your family now, you have a whole family.”’

A house was chosen in Ferny Creek for Trish and John, which they bought and started paying off. John, who was a psychiatrist at a private hospital at the time, still lives there today. Liz Whitaker and Don Webb moved into a house over the road from Anne, in the grove in Ferny Creek.

Anne was drumming into her new and increasingly loyal disciples that she was the Master who had been put on Earth at that exact time to be with them and guide them, but that her training came with non-negotiable requirements. It was the only way. As she noted on a taped discourse: ‘It is a call to that which is very noble in us. Nobody wants to be in anything they haven’t earned. My mother’s Teacher was a great friend who led her to become the person she was, and Mother always said her Teacher always said that those who are in earnest, fixed upon God, will go forward. Find the kingdom and help every other living thing. We have the great adventure open before us with the life itself as our initiator. We don’t know the divine until we find it. Remain humble, true, strong, loving, gentle. All the mystics down the ages and all the modern mystics tell the same story. Strong, sure and silent.’

By now Trish was wrangling eight kids at her Ferny Creek home: two of hers, five of John Mackay’s, and one ‘adopted’ boy who ostensibly belonged to Raynor Johnson’s daughter Maureen and her husband, Barry Ashcroft, a dentist. Anne had apparently procured the child for them from the Royal Women’s Hospital. Ashcroft wasn’t happy with the scenario and left Maureen, saying, according to police, that secrecy was considered spiritual in the cult and that the only loyalty a member must have was towards Anne.

Around the same time, Trish also adopted a child for Anne. Trish was told one day to hotstep it to the Royal Women’s Hospital from the hills to collect a baby. A doctor who addressed her as ‘Mrs Webb’ brought the baby out to her and explained she had a malformed jaw. Trish said she handed the baby to Anne while still inside the hospital. ‘I left the hospital alone,’ Trish recounted.

The child was given the name Anna (many of the girls had some variation of ‘Anne’ in their new cult names), but her real name is Leeanne. We met her, like all of the former Family children who have spoken to us, as an adult. She cried when telling us about her relationship with the man she knew as her father, Bill Hamilton-Byrne, and her difficulties in leaving the cult and trying — like the others she grew up with — to find and live a new life.

Leeanne became Bill’s favourite. ‘He was my father,’ she told us. ‘I was always Daddy’s girl, always. To me, he was amazing. I idolised him. We looked alike. We both had black curly hair, except mine was dyed blonde. We both had blue eyes. I did feel loved by him when I was a child, when I was a lot younger. I did feel loved by my father that I grew up with my whole life.’

Yet Bill did awful things, she saw. He hit children and was complicit in dozens of other crimes. If anyone was mesmerised by Anne, and compromised in his morality by her influence, it was him. Initially Anne had said she could cure, or at least look after, Bill’s son from another marriage, who had mental-health issues. But as Leeanne sees it, Bill became a puppet. ‘Some of the things he did were just horrific,’ says Leeanne. ‘When he lost his temper and he beat people, he was savage and he was horrible. He never did that to me, and the one time he did beat me, only one time I remember, I didn’t speak to him for a week, and he didn’t like that so he never did it again. I adored him.’

Because of the faked paperwork showing her as Leeanne’s mother, Trish got a government child-support benefit payment. When she received the cheques, she would cash them and give the money to Anne, she said. Trish got these cheques for 16 years.

Her partnership with John Mackay soon ended. Trish didn’t want to live in the same house as him anymore — she hadn’t wanted to live in the same house as him in the first place. She bought her own house in the hills. Then Anne told her to get her face and hair done. Many of the cult women received this order from Anne, and most had to use Anne’s surgery of choice, the Cotham. Next, Trish was told to go to an orthodontist to get her front teeth fixed. There was nothing wrong with her teeth, and the orthodontist told her so, but the work went ahead. The tops of four front teeth were drilled away and crowned, and her hair was dyed blonde.

Some of the other cult women had begun wearing blonde wigs, as Anne did. Appearances were everything; everything must be seen to be of a certain standard and status. Anne gave Trish a wig too, but Trish said she never wore it. Anne’s natural hair was quite lovely, with a coppery colour. Trish always wondered why Anne wore wigs when she didn’t really need to. They were masks, these new heads of hair, new faces, new noses, new teeth. New names.

Then, in 1971, Trish was dispatched to Uptop as ‘Aunty Trish’.

The regime of punishments, as the 1970s ticked through, became horrific. According to the children’s own accounts to the police and, 30 years later, to us, it extended into wilful neglect and chronic, endemic abuse. This happened as the children got older and less compliant, and as numbers grew, particularly as the ‘fosters’ — those without the Hamilton-Byrne surname — arrived.

‘There’s a hairline,’ a cult member told police, ‘between heaven and a heap of shit.’

A violin rest went missing, for example. It belonged to an adult cult member who lived in the hills but visited Uptop to give music and singing lessons. She stayed in a caravan outside. One of the children was accused of stealing the violin rest and was taken upstairs and hit repeatedly with a three-cornered black plastic cane.

Ben remembers hearing the beating and the whistling of the cane as it was being swung. He heard yelling — adults trying to get a confession out of the boy — heard him fighting back, and saw the cane as it flew down from a window above. ‘The Aunties tramped outside, yelling at him — bring it back up, keep doing it — and then it was on. He refused to confess.’

That’s because he didn’t do it. The missing violin rest was found on the ground outside the caravan — the music teacher had dropped it herself. There was no apology.

By this stage, the boy had already been dunked. This was when an errant child’s head was forced repeatedly, to the brink of drowning, into a bucket of water. During the violin-rest fracas, other children were similarly beaten with the cane on bared bottoms, leaving bruising, according to Ben, and then dunked, one by one. If one kid transgressed, many could cop it. Fear and secrecy sat among them, and also skewed notions of loyalty and friendship. Some ‘betrayed’ their siblings. Some chose not to, which in itself was a betrayal.

The dunkings were frightening. ‘You could hear each of the girls screaming in pain. It was terrifying, thinking of what their next torture method would be in order to obtain their confession,’ says Ben. ‘As each returned, you could see their clothes were wet. They were still gasping for air and their faces looked a bluey colour, extremely pale and absolutely distraught.’

The children’s arms and feet were held behind them, and their heads were held down in the bucket by their hair. ‘They’d pull it back out, gasping for breath, asking, “Did you do it?” Ten seconds, 20 seconds to answer and straight back in again, to the point where you are asphyxiated, you’re close on blacking out. I just remember my head being put in there, trying to hold your breath as long as possible. You’d begin bobbling, you can’t hold it any longer, you’re pulled up gasping for air.’

Ben once made the mistake of not lining up his shoes outside the front door properly, when he was about 11. He says Trish beat him with a hairbrush, bruising his head. Then there was an incident after a hot Australian summer night when a portable fan in a boys’ bedroom was left on overnight. Liz Whitaker took to the five boys in the room with a metre-long wooden ruler. ‘She wielded it above her head like a ninja,’ says Ben. One boy suffered abrasions to the ribs and bruised legs and back.

At Uptop, says Sarah Moore, Anne treated the girls much more harshly than the boys. A lot of it was to do with sexuality and her notions of purity. Yet as with everything she did to her captives, it was also about control and fear. ‘She would go into these incredible rages and psychotic outbursts towards us girls,’ says Sarah, ‘where she’d talk about cancerous tumors coming out of female genitals, and she would accuse us of walking in a way that would be trying to attract men. This was at age five.’

She says Anne hit her with the head of a broom. Another time, she had her hand held in a candle flame after she was caught playing with the wax. She stashed some food away in a hiding place and was hit 50 times with a round stick by Liz Whitaker. One former Uptop child’s foremost memory is the sensation of a stinging face.

Anne could be ‘a magic queen or a wicked witch depending on the mood she was in,’ Sarah tells us. ‘You never knew, and it could flip at any second.’ This was part of her ‘psychosis’, according to Sarah, who became a doctor after leaving the cult. ‘She might give us gifts, be nice to us. We might get good food or something when she was there, or she might start screaming abuse at us and beating us.’ Anne’s favourite weapon was a stiletto heel, Sarah told us. ‘You knew there was always going to be some kind of excitement or horror when she was there.’

Sarah’s real mother had her at 16 and was disowned by her family, but during her pregnancy was seen by a female doctor, who happened to be one of Raynor Johnson’s daughters and a cult member. When Sarah was born, her mother was reportedly drugged and a pillow was put over her face so she never saw her child. She was forced to give Sarah up.

Sarah wrote a book about her time in the cult, called Unseen, Unheard, Unknown, in 1995. In it, she writes that the children developed intense self-loathing, to the point where they would hurt themselves by picking scabs and making them infected or holding their breath until they fainted. Sarah says she cut herself with pins and scissors rubbed in dirt and fantasised about killing herself by drowning in the lake or poisoning herself with Dettol.

Anne would throw things at the children; she once threw a bowl of pears, we were told. One morning, Ben blew on a spoonful of porridge to cool it and some flew off. She hit him in the head and then threw a chair at him, he says.

The children were isolated not only from society but also from one another in their own bizarre community, the only place they knew. They didn’t know who they were. They thought, and would continue to think until their teens, that Anne and Bill were their biological parents, but they weren’t. Their ultimate mother figure was Anne, and she was for them a totem of all that could be good, or all that they knew as good, even though it was frequently very bad. So they craved her attention and affection.

The Aunties, meanwhile, beat the children and trod them down but also nurtured them in a perfunctory, distant, and inconsistent way. It was all the nurturing many had.

The Family’s teachings to the children in the Uptop monastery were about guiding them towards being able to see and access other spiritual dimensions, and then show other chosen ones how to do the same. Ben says the children were taught to try and access the divine consciousness. This was through hours of hatha yoga, meditation, and Hindu readings.

Anne said she could free others from the cycle of life and death. This is what Ben and Sarah and all the others believed as children. Only those on the inside could know the answer; it was only they who belonged properly to the world. Outsiders, and especially police, were dangerous: the children were told police would put them in bags to torture and rape them.

‘Anne was the filter for everything,’ Ben says. ‘Take a young child and train them up and control their inputs … I guess like Hitler did.’

Anne also said the world would end in an apocalypse. She was paranoid about nuclear war. This was post–Cuban Missile Crisis, when fear of another war involving the nuclear-capable superpowers was widespread. She said the chosen ones — the children, and the adults who were loyal — would survive and re-educate other survivors on how to transcend earthly realms. The children were to be a new race. They were bestowed with this responsibility: they were ‘perfect children who would save the world,’ as one former Uptop child puts it.

‘When the holocaust happened, we would come out as world leaders,’ Ben says.

In one of her taped discourses, Anne proclaimed that cruelty — ironically, such as that happening at Uptop — was a sin: ‘If anyone can be cruel, they are better off to ask God almighty to take them now. Don’t let us hurt or cause suffering in any way or any level … death is preferable, of course it is. Start again. There’s always more growth in whatever happens in the knowledge of God and his ways. Nothing else matters, all else is superficial, and the Earth is seen merely to be a training school for that soul.’

This notion of the tension between reality and appearance took on an especially curious dimension at Uptop. While still young, the children were made to star in home movies and photoshoots. This idealisation of what was happening beside the lake was aimed at persuading cult members that Uptop was as promised.

In these videos, the children look happy and relaxed. The girls wear pretty dresses and clutch Easter Eggs. They dance, and cuddle Anne and Bill, in scenes that were often orchestrated. These were ‘special days’, says Sarah, ‘where we would have to get dressed up in, actually, very fine clothes. We’d all be lined up in order of age and photographed … her fantasy of these perfect children all lined up in a row.’

The Aunties acted as crew, set dressers, and costume designers for the home movies, which were shot on Super 66 film. They were depicted as benign carers.

Occasionally the kids would be shown the footage back on a screen inside. The image projected was of ‘perfect children in perfect array having fun,’ says Sarah.