3

THE HOLE

The kitchen cupboards at Uptop were padlocked; the Aunties had sets of keys dangling from their waists. There was a chain and padlock around the fridge, and an Aunty would often be on guard duty in the kitchen.

The children ate a Spartan vegetarian diet at Uptop that was very low in protein. Breakfast was usually two or three segments of fruit. Lunch was always steamed vegetables, and dinner was salad or soup and sometimes raisins and nuts; perhaps yoghurt. But a child could go up to three days without eating, as a punishment for even little things such as not screwing the toothpaste cap back on or getting their clothes dirty while outside. The withdrawal of food became a form of disciplinary leverage for the Aunties.

The children would scavenge like animals. They’d look under the dining table, in the rubbish bins and compost bins. Sarah says she ate leaves and grass. Another went for the bacon bones that were fed to the dogs. They ate the stale bread that was thrown outside for the birds; they would eat birdseed too.

A young girl called Anouree came to Uptop in 1973. Her father was Bill Hamilton-Byrne’s son Michael, her mother a vulnerable young woman caught up in the cult. Anouree spent her first three years living between them and Winbirra, Anne’s house in Ferny Creek. Her mother was back and forth between the hills and psychiatric hospitals and had tried to keep Anouree, but Anne reportedly stood between them. Then Michael handed her over to Anne and Bill. Anouree says she was driven halfway to Lake Eildon and exchanged for $AU7,000 with an Auntie on the side of the road.

As she got older, the only way she found she could escape was in her mind. She imagined she was on a deserted planet, based on her concept of Mars. It was people who caused her harm; in her imagination there were creatures that she said were much friendlier: ‘… probably more like cats than humans … furry and very cuddly’.

‘I wanted to hide. Sometimes I would 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’d 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 civilisation work.’

When the children were taken on outings to the local town of Eildon, she remembers not understanding what was going on around her, what shops were for, what people meant when they used conversational language. If someone in the street spoke to her, she didn’t know what to say. ‘For example, if someone said, “Good day, how’s your day been?” I would find it difficult to respond. What’s “good day”, for example?’

The children were also regularly weighed, under orders from Anne. If they were deemed too heavy, they would be denied food. The children, especially the girls, purged like bulimics before weigh-ins to drop their weight. ‘It was a very desperate time for a lot of my siblings.’

When the girls approached puberty, it was drummed into them that their changing bodies were ugly. ‘The message we’d been given was that our body was really a disgusting thing to think about,’ says Anouree. One of her ‘sisters’ had an anatomy book, from which they learned, but Anouree couldn’t even look at herself. She didn’t recognise her body as the body in the book. ‘I didn’t really use a mirror even to look at my face when I was up at Eildon, I don’t think. I don’t remember looking at myself much at all.’

She calls it a denial, on Anne’s part and administered through the Aunties, of their bodies. A refusal to believe they were growing up and might harbour independent thought or physical strength. Or strength of mind. When the girls started getting their periods, it was made hard for them because pads were rationed.

‘There was always this underlying feeling or theme that girls were dirty and sexual,’ says Sarah. ‘It was an insidious sort of thing that made us feel yucky and bad and evil for no reason, and it was obviously something that preoccupied her a lot.’

Sarah says the effect on some of the girls, who are now women, is an enduring sense of shame around their bodies. At Uptop, they were taught or shown nothing about adolescence or sexuality. Girls were accused of being lesbians if they were perceived to be being sexual in the way they dressed or walked. ‘It was this weird sort of coyness and recoil from anything that had to with sex or sexuality, so we were very naïve, very innocent, but we also had that feeling of dirtiness they had projected onto us.’

Anne had hang-ups in this regard, according to interviews with those who knew her. She was known to be extremely modest, in terms of not letting anyone see her get dressed or in a state of undress. As Sarah says, it appears she transmitted this phobia to the girls at Uptop; it was an idea of modesty combined with a sense of fright at being anything other than chaste. The girls were unfamiliar, almost, with the way their bodies worked. The contradiction was that Anne also had a dirty mouth at times. She used the word ‘pussy’. She also commonly referred to sex in her discourses as one of the universe’s great powers. ‘Sex, baby!’ she once told followers. ‘That’s all there is.’ And of course although she only ever gave birth to one child, by her first husband, she pretended to have many, and even faked pregnancies.

The girls were also getting the message that they were not perfect enough, despite trying, for Anne, to be so. Consequently, they strived to be more ‘ideal’ — and thin.

Food was always the ultimate battleground. The Aunties ate better-quality food, and while the children were sometimes given such treats as salmon mornay or macaroni cheese, this was a rarity. Survival instincts kicked in, and as the situation worsened they started to steal food both from Uptop and from empty holiday houses nearby. There was a shed near the house where canned food and fresh fruit and vegetables were kept. One of the kids figured out how to unscrew the hinges on the locked door. Anouree went in one night with some others and couldn’t get the bread and canned fish into her mouth fast enough. They were in a hurry, trying to be quiet while eating as quickly as possible. They were overwhelmed and confused and happy in the moment. ‘One of my siblings said, “Come on, come on, Boo, hurry up.” I said, “I can’t, I can’t.”’

Sarah was the most adventurous of the Uptop children. She was the bravest, others thought, and the wisest. She discovered she could get into an Aunty’s empty caravan at night and make toast and vegemite. But one night she wiped a knife on a tea towel and left a telltale smear of vegemite behind. Anne hit her with a shoe and threw her down a staircase, she tells us, and she had a chair thrown at her.

Sarah began walking further away at night, leaving the property, and saw all the other houses, the holiday houses, empty. One night there was an open window, and she scrambled in and found things she had never seen: lollies, cakes. She showed Anouree, but the food confused her. She didn’t know what it was. They found some Nutri-Grain — ‘little things with holes in them, and we wondered among ourselves, “I wonder what you do with these?” So we just ate them without any milk, we just ate them by themselves, and we thought they were really good. And another thing we ate was raw pizza. We didn’t know that you cooked it, for example. And we didn’t really know it was called pizza.’

Stolen food would be hidden in piles of leaves. Only Sarah and Anouree knew at first, but then word leaked out. Ben joined them on a mission to find more one night, and they broke into a house and took a pack of cards. But Trish caught them. Ben was contrite, frightened: ‘I said, “I’d rather be dead.” She said, “I bet you do, you little shit, look what trouble you’ve caused us all.”’

The great contradiction of Uptop was the regimentation coupled with the unpredictability. The monotony would suddenly be broken by wild outbursts of punishment and violent anger. The children never knew exactly how to escape punishment because the rules changed all the time. They were not allowed to say they were unhappy. The children became hyper-vigilant, traumatised, anxious: scared of being punished but not sure how to prevent it. Compliance and silence became important to them, to save themselves. They learned to be helpless, while all the adults had absolute power.

The local police started to drop in through the mid to late 1970s, acting on suspicions from locals in the small lakeside community. Homes were being broken into, food taken. Packs of cards went missing. What was it the group was into, witchcraft? They had a van they called Jupiter, full of identical kids, residents murmured to one another. All the caravans, the comings and goings. Pretty weird.

‘We were led to believe that anyone outside was there to sabotage our perfect lives,’ says Ben.

Workmen came one year in the late 1970s to fix electricity lines. They needed two weeks. The children were told they should talk to the workmen but act retarded, to make them think it was a special school. ‘We were taught how to roll our heads, put our heads on one side, talk nonsense, garbled noises, and act uncoordinated,’ said one former Uptop child.

Whenever the police came, they always left satisfied. According to Aunty Margot McLellan, a local policeman once said to her: ‘I’ve been through every inch of this place and there is nothing wrong going on here at all.’

But the police never saw ‘the Hole’, a narrow, cramped crawlspace behind a pump room downstairs in the lakehouse. It had a small entrance that was concealed with a wallchart. One night at 10.30, the police came. It was unusually late for a police visit, according to one of the children who was there. The girls were woken and told to make their beds and rush downstairs towards the Hole. When they got there, the boys were already crawling in. Liz Whitaker was upstairs, talking to police, as a decoy. Margot McLellan was shoving the kids — 18 of them — into the crawlspace one by one.

Then the covering was put back over the entrance. The kids could hear noises but were scared to make any noise themselves. It was dirty, dusty, cold, and damp, and they were in their pyjamas, terrified they would be found and taken away, as they were told the police would do, to be killed or raped.

About 20 minutes later, the children heard noises at the entrance. It was Liz Whitaker letting them out; she said the police had come looking for two male fugitives, not the children.

Syd Savage remembers it differently. He told us he went into the Hole several times to fix hot-water pipes. ‘The cobwebs tell me it wasn’t being used every day.’

This was life at Uptop through the 1970s. The cult was trying to keep it contained and secret — unseen and unknown — but something had to give.

Then, in 1980, a ten-year-old girl went missing. Her name was Kim Halm. Her father, Hans Halm, told police she was born into The Family.

Patricia Halm, the girl’s mother, had found the cult early on through yoga. She was a librarian but had become a nurse, apparently on Anne’s orders. Hans was initially in the cult with her, but he was unenthusiastic, and they split up. Patricia fled with Kim, despite Hans having partial legal custody. So he called it in, telling the Australian Federal Police — because he suspected the girl had been taken out of the country — all about Uptop.

The Feds, known then as the Commonwealth Police, went and searched Uptop but couldn’t find Kim. It seems extraordinary now to think they went to a cramped lakehouse and found many of the children had the same ‘Hamilton-Byrne’ surname yet did not launch an investigation. Police documents reveal that in fact they had started to gather intelligence on The Family a year before, telling Melbourne’s state police that ‘no further action’ on The Family was required.

Documents we have seen also show that a former cult member, Hazel Dalton, contacted her nephew, who worked for Ben Bodna, a very senior Victorian state bureaucrat — the Director-General of Community Services — to tell him about Uptop and the life the children had there. She even drew him a map of how to get to the house. Bodna passed it all to Victoria Police, but no action was taken by them either.

Frustrated, Hans Halm hired a private investigator, Barbara Palmer, who brought with her a journalist from The Bulletin magazine, Dick Wordley, to find his daughter. Wordley had written the book Cathy’s Child, about a search for an abducted child. The pair staked out Uptop, taking photographs and watching. They hired a boat for a better view from the lake, and on one mission Palmer told the media that she took her top off, exposing her breasts, to entice the children to look at her so she could get clearer pictures.

Wordley doorknocked the surrounds and also recorded some interviews with adults in the cult in the hills. In Melbourne, The Age newspaper was also onto the story. One of the paper’s most dogged journalists, David Elias, lived in the hills, in one of the Ferny Creek streets that had become a strong cult enclave. It was an unfortunate coincidence for a cult that thrived on secrecy. His daughter had begun playing with one of the girls living over the road and had told him about her new friend: ‘She doesn’t have a mummy and daddy. She has lots of mummies and daddies.’

Hans last saw Kim when he dropped her off at her mother’s house after a father–daughter day out and saw a white Datsun parked in the driveway. It didn’t belong to anyone he knew. He also saw a silhouette of a woman he didn’t recognise in a window. Kim didn’t turn up for school the next day. Hans went back and found the house abandoned.

But a neighbour had seen his ex-wife and Kim loading up the car, and had written down the licence-plate number. Hans gave it to Elias, who traced it to a female cult member who admitted to Elias that she had helped Kim and Patricia Halm pack up and leave the house that day.

Elias reported his findings in The Age — and then a man called George Ellis, a former cult member, contacted him. He handed over 20 pages of information on who was who in the cult. The documents named a solicitor, Peter Kibby, a tall, slender man with a thatch of wavy hair who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Kibby had phobias around dirt and germs: he washed his hands constantly and would only be driven in Michael’s car because he knew Michael kept it clean. He even washed his money — at a time when he was also laundering the cult’s money.

When Elias contacted him, Kibby stayed on message and painted a rosy picture of Uptop and Anne’s methods, denying any cult involvement with Kim Halm’s disappearance. The curious lawyer was staying loyal to Anne, who had nicknamed him Pontius Pilate, after the judge in Jesus’s trial. Kibby was protecting her. But soon enough he would betray her.

The Truth tabloid was reporting on the Halm case too. According to the paper’s sources, Jewish ‘heavies’ who knew Mr Halm had threatened to kidnap a child from the cult if Kim was not returned to her father. Hans told the newspaper they weren’t heavies and they weren’t Jewish — one was Catholic, he said, and the other just a Methodist.

Hans decided to go to court. He wanted to get full custody of his daughter, but he didn’t even know where she was. This was very bad for the cult: it was the first time they had become embroiled in a court case. The judge bucked convention by allowing proceedings to be reported in the media even though the case involved a child.

Kibby and a cult Aunty called Christabel Wallace, who was a GP, were ordered to give evidence in court about Kim Halm. Wallace — who was from New Zealand — was physically similar to Liz Whitaker: large and matronly, and very keen on gaudy lipstick and heavy eye make-up. She had already told the private investigator Barbara Palmer that she knew where the girl was. She had also spoken to Dick Wordley. But in court the denials, under oath, continued. Wallace backtracked and said she didn’t know where the child was and had not said anything to Palmer. She denied telling Wordley that a ‘chain of very important people all around Australia were concerned about the welfare of Mrs Halm and her daughter’.

The judge ruled that the cult members were not telling the truth, and had given evidence ‘bordering on the provocative’. He ordered for Patricia Halm, who was still on the run, to bring Kim back. She didn’t. A warrant for her arrest was issued. A week later, in September 1983, mother and daughter were found in Auckland, New Zealand; they were using the names Jeannette Berger and Jeannette De Haven and were using a motel as a contact address.

All of this was likely the worst-case scenario for Anne. Her group’s dirty laundry was being aired very publicly. Names and addresses presented in court, accusations, counter-claims, custody battles, a missing kid, private detectives. A solicitor and a GP within the cult identified. Journalists with reliable sources. Betrayals within the closed community.

As the children got older and began to challenge aspects of the life into which they were forced, Anne told her adult disciples that the children were projecting ‘conflicts’ at Uptop because of pre-conditioning. They had apparently made certain things up because it was not their ‘real selves’ objecting to their treatment (that is, being hit, starved, dunked, demeaned, according to the former children). She told her followers that the children she had collected and left to the Aunties to raise had two separate lives and had become confused about which was real: ‘We must realise that although many have a tremendous conflict, we may have a serenity and calmness as well when we are together.’

But Anne was also loosening the reins, suggesting perhaps that she was more interested in small children than older ones. In 1985, she let six of her teenage female children, including Sarah, Leeanne, and Anouree, out of her clutches to join a dancing school in the hills. They took ballroom-dancing classes, and Leeanne also did ballet. Exactly why she let them mingle with a group of outsiders and whisperers is unclear, but she was by now a distant leader, more overseas than at home. The girls were 15. Perhaps Anne thought they were by then wedded to her for life, and that none of her manipulations could be undone.

If so, she was wrong. The innocence and utter normality of teenage girls at a suburban dancing school proved, for Anne, a disaster. The girls were taken from Uptop every Friday night to Anne’s rambling mansion, Crowther House, which was behind high fences in the hills. Then they were taken to nearby Kenlaurel, the dancing school owned by ballroom-dancing champions Ken and Laurel Sims, stayed the night at Crowther, and were ferried back to Lake Eildon the next morning. Leon Dawes, a schoolteacher involved with The Family, did the driving, in Jupiter.

Dance-school staff noticed that the girls’ clothes were old-fashioned but otherwise thought they were nice, and very polite. They showed no signs or abuse and never said anything to anyone.

It wasn’t the act of dancing, as such, that awakened the girls, although the freedom of expression must have counted for something. It was this sudden and unfiltered exposure to the outside world, and the realisation upon experiencing it that the insular cult was dangerous — not the wider society, as they had been taught.

Sarah and Leeanne struck out on their own at Kenlaurel. They found their feet, and they met two new friends, who were local girls of the same age. Cathy and Helen were normal, everyday teenagers from a normal, everyday family. Sarah and Leeanne persuaded Anne to let them stay at the girls’ house for a few nights during school holidays that year. This was unthinkable to the other kids. They couldn’t believe it. ‘Absolutely unheard of,’ says Ben. He thinks Anne probably thought she could attract more cult members by sending her model children out into the world as ambassadors.

The girls stayed with Cathy and Helen for four days. ‘[It was] completely different to anything I had done before in my life,’ says Leeanne. They went to McDonald’s; they had home-cooked meals. Erica, the mum, was nice to them. They watched television and caught a bus to a shopping centre without adults. ‘We were allowed to get dirty when we were playing,’ says Leeanne, ‘without getting into trouble.’

After they left that school holidays and went back to Uptop, the girls were allowed to write to their new friends. The idea that the cult was strange and the outside world was normal was reinforced in the back-and-forth of the letters. ‘Our pen-friends made it clear that they thought our lives were weird,’ says Sarah.

The Aunties censored the letters at first, but after a while they just let them through. This was complacency but also, most likely, exhaustion. Uptop had been running for more than ten years by this stage.

Soon enough, Sarah and Leeanne began to think about breaking free. The teenagers were by now calling themselves POAs: Prisoners of Anne. They were big and strong enough, and also smart enough, to pull off an escape if they dared. The physical boundaries were not great — jump a fence, climb out a window. But the psychological barriers were immense. They had only known another life for a matter of days.

Leeanne began to fight hard against Anne’s repressive household. She had already briefly escaped to a neighbours’ house in Eildon. She had jumped out her bedroom window, climbed down over a water tank, and run around the lake until she saw a house with a light on. The couple there phoned the local policeman, who picked her up, but the Aunties told them she was mentally disturbed. The police took her straight back to Uptop, choosing to believe the adults rather than Leeanne. She was underage, and so still legally a child.

The fact that the Uptop kids were all children when these things happened to them is crucial to the way this story played out. They were ignored, their allegations discounted. Maybe it was just that outsiders — such as Syd Savage — could not entertain the idea that a sophisticated regime of abuse could actually be happening. Especially when everything sounded so rosy, at least as the Aunties described it. Children’s rights were not enshrined in legislation in Australia and its states and territories until, at the earliest, the mid-1990s.

Then Leeanne had a big argument with Anne over where she would do her senior year in high school and what she would study. There was an established school at Uptop, with adults involved in The Family serving as teachers. Leeanne refused to be dictated to this time. She and Anne were nose to nose, eye to eye. ‘Anne went berserk, like a madwoman,’ says Leeanne, ‘and began hitting me around the face.’ Then Leeanne was on a bed with Anne on top of her, she tells us. Anne was 65; Leeanne, 16. Anne was sitting with her legs either side of Leeanne, slapping her face. Leeanne grabbed Anne’s bony wrists and slapped Anne across the face. Anne winced. Leeanne wrestled her off. Anne called out for Bill to help her — Leeanne was still Daddy’s girl and listened to him — and Leeanne bolted outside and hid down near the lake. Anne was due to leave on an overseas flight that day, and when Leeanne got back to Uptop she was gone. It was among Leeanne’s last memories of Uptop, and the last time Anne ever touched her.

Soon after, around the end of 1986, Leeanne had a stand-up row with Trish MacFarlane, where she threw cushions at her. Trish baited Leeanne to leave: ‘Go on then. See how you would go without us!’ Leeanne went up to the girls’ bedroom and barricaded herself in, with her cassette player on loud. Trish turned the electricity off, so Leeanne switched her cassette player to batteries. Then she packed a bag and jumped out the window and ended up by accident, rather than design, at the same neighbours’ house that she had fled to before. The elderly man in the house said to her, ‘You’re the same girl that ran away [before].’

Leeanne asked again if she could call the local police station. She was terrified. As far as the local police officer knew, Leeanne was mentally ill and unstable, reliant on medication. So when he arrived at the house, he came in with his baton drawn. But Leeanne spoke to him calmly about the abuse and the unspeakable life she had been made to live in the cult. He phoned the nearest community policing squad, who dealt with welfare issues, and also a kind married couple he knew in the nearby town of Alexandra, whom he was sure would look after her. She was now legally an adult and couldn’t be forced to return to Uptop.

‘He introduced me to these beautiful people,’ Leeanne says. ‘They took me in that night.’ The couple, Brian and Josie Slater, already had three daughters. ‘They took me into their home and looked after me.’ She stayed six weeks.

By this point, Anne was in crisis mode, and Leeanne’s departure only intensified things. The Family as a whole was also falling into crisis. Anne had not only seen adult members of The Family leave of their own accord, but some had even betrayed her in the worst possible way by airing secrets, acting as whistleblowers to the media. She had seen evidence of illegal actions in her group go before the courts; now her children were running away. Her message was that Leeanne had betrayed the sacred cult mantra and was ‘a whore on the streets and stole and sold drugs to make money’.

Leeanne, finally out of Uptop and boarding with the Slaters, felt guilty. She was free, but still imprisoned by the idea she had betrayed the rest of the children at Uptop: her brothers and sisters. ‘I did actually have a life outside of The Family. [But] I felt a lot of grief and a lot of heartache and a lot of guilt that the children were [still] there.’

A youth welfare group moved her into a sharehouse in inner-city Melbourne, and she managed to enrol at a university for her final school year. The house was dysfunctional and full of drugs: heroin and marijuana. She would sometimes leave the chaos — having come from chaos — to sleep on a park bench. The other girls in the house were ‘vicious, nasty girls’, says Leeanne. They didn’t let her eat any of the food, so she went to charity places to feed herself and the animals in the house.

A school counsellor heard her stories about the cult over a period of months and challenged her to go to the police about Uptop.

Meanwhile, Sarah was living in the hills at one of Anne’s houses but spent weekends at Uptop. She was doing her final year of school by correspondence and had a part-time job at an osteopathy clinic in the hills whose owner was associated with The Family. One day, out the blue, Cathy, Helen, and their mother, Erica, walked in. They arranged to have dinner together after Sarah’s shift finished. Sarah missed the last bus back to the hills, and Erica gave her a ride. Then Sarah did a remarkable thing. She invited Erica into the house where she lived. It was provoking a reaction — and she got one. Sarah recounts that Anne was told what happened and, by phone from overseas, threw her out of the house and the cult, saying: ‘You are no longer our daughter. Go out there — go and die in the gutter.’

Erica came to her rescue again, and Sarah was taken into their home from the beginning of winter 1987. This was where it got really sticky for The Family. Erica persuaded Sarah that she should do something, or at least talk to someone, about what was going on in the hills and beside the lake. She introduced her to a private investigator, Helen Dubont, who also, as it turned out, had been talking to Bill Hamilton-Byrne’s first wife. When Leeanne and Sarah and the other children were at Kenlaurel, Dubont had been there too, watching from afar.

When she met Dubont, Sarah found out almost immediately that she was not a Hamilton-Byrne, and neither were the others. Anne was not her mother. She was making it all up.

Sarah set about trying to get birth and adoption records to find out who she was. She went to the state office and asked for her birth certificate, as Sarah Hamilton-Byrne. ‘I got back this piece of paper saying there is no such person. I thought, okay, well who am I?’

With Dubont, she went back to Uptop one night, secretly, and snuck in to the girls’ bedroom to check on her ‘family’. She left postage stamps for them.

Leeanne went to see Bill’s first wife, May, who had been treated very badly by the cult and held a grudge against them. ‘Do you know who I am?’ Leeanne asked her.

May replied: ‘I know someone who can help you.’ She introduced her to Dubont. Through her, she found out that Anne was not her mother, and that Bill — her ‘knight in shining armour’, despite it all — was not her father. Trish had fraudulently adopted her and gifted her to Anne. ‘I was absolutely devastated that I wasn’t who I thought I was and that somebody I hated as a child [Trish] had adopted me, and that someone who was so cruel had [been given] me. Why didn’t she [Trish] want me? Why was she part of what we had been put through? It was a very confronting situation for a 17-year-old.’

Leeanne was angry with Bill. He had betrayed what she thought was a great love between them in the most heinous way: it was all a lie; he had been lying to her all along. But she was angrier with Anne, who, as Leeanne saw it, had duped Bill and made him do it — to Leeanne and to all of them. ‘She was the one that controlled everybody. I was devastated by the betrayal.’

Sarah and Leeanne were urged to go the police — specifically the community policing squad, the welfare police. They were hesitant, and in the end Dubont invited the girls to lunch with two ‘friends’, who happened to be female community policing officers. Over a period of a few weeks, they made official statements. They recounted their lives: the cult, the people, the beliefs, the punishments. A senior police medical officer, Dr Edward Ogden, was assigned to their case.

In August of 1987, just before Kylie Minogue’s first hit, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, entered the charts, Uptop was raided by armed state and federal police. Not long after 7.00 am, the police entered — they did not knock on the door. Anne was in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, but Bill was there. He told ABC Radio much later: ‘It was a terrible shock. I served during the war, I was a pilot, and I’ve gone through a few shocks and things, but this was grossly rude. If I may say so. The police didn’t just wait for me to open the door, they just crashed in. Poured all over the place, turning things upside down and searching the place. In all this melee or whatever we can call it, the children were being picked up by various guards and carried off …

‘(A child) ran over to me screaming and hung onto me, almost pulling my head off. A smallish policeman in plainclothes with a drape type of overcoat and revolver in his hand shot across and poked the revolver into my stomach and said, “Let her go.” He said, “You’re a very dangerous person.” I said, “Oh, really? What about you?” Of course, [the child] wouldn’t let go, I wouldn’t let go, and the gun was pushed rather hard in my stomach. And then someone stepped in and took it away from him. It was absolutely ridiculous.’

Police also raided houses in the hills and a safety deposit box at a bank in the Dandenongs. Drugs — prescription and LSD, found in one of Anne’s bedrooms — were also seized. The full extent of how LSD, the most powerful hallucinogenic drug ever made, was used on cult members, including children, was a story that was yet to unravel. But here was the first clue.

Anouree huddled with several other teenage children in the corner of a bedroom in the Uptop house. The police stomped through. Anouree could see that she and the others were being removed, and didn’t know how she would manage herself in such dramatic circumstances. She tried, in these moments, to prepare herself. She trusted Leeanne and Sarah. She rushed into her bedroom with Sarah to grab her torch and her winter gloves, but panicked when she couldn’t find them. ‘We were ushered out quite quickly, out of the house, and up to the [police] bus at the end of our driveway. And we just had to keep moving. I would describe it as … a multitude of voices, just going at the same time.’

Trish MacFarlane was on one of her two-week stints away from Uptop. She was at home in the hills. Liz Whitaker phoned her, and Trish burst into tears. From upstate New York, Anne sent a five-page letter and an eight-page document for circulation among her disciples to defend herself and justify her actions. A portion of the letter read, of the children: ‘Quite a number had heart damage, others were brain-damaged at birth.’

A phone call was recorded between Bill and Anne. He was still in the hills, and police were staking him out. ‘I can see them,’ he told her, ‘but they can’t see me. I am going to get a baseball bat and keep it inside the door too. I am not taking any shit from anybody, Anne.’

Anne was also under pressure, and must have been wondering how to keep her group together, wondering how to plug the leaks and to persuade those followers she had to persevere and ‘walk on’. She cried often. We can hear her cry on one of the tapes, in perhaps her most remarkable recorded discourse to her followers. She uses the word ‘cult’ in the context of all the sets of beliefs she perceived were competing for her attention. She is at pains to reinforce that it is not a cult member’s job to remove others from practising religion but merely to help them towards the feted end point she had always referred to as ‘the light’. This, she said, was a ‘great adventure’, the great vocation of their lives — to help others live well. Stay strong, sure, and silent, she said. Silent. When others in the circle had not.

‘My dear friends,’ she announced, on tape, ‘there is no church large enough to hold the splendour of the light and the glory of the holy spirit. There is no creed possible for the sublime, wondrous understanding when you touch God. Only love can understand love, and only the God-like can attain to this god-consciousness filling all the spaces, whereas there is no space. Children, we are all children. Many dear old Christians have fallen flat on it, you know. We are here to give, remember that. To love. It is as simple as that. Living that others may feel your love.’

A great teacher does not look like they are teaching, she said, her usually powerful voice quavering. It is difficult to know if the emotion is genuine; it may have been an act, a performance. In any case, this is when she began to cry. ‘They put you in the paper. They say you are false. You dare to be true, you dare to walk and not faint, in a strength that will never fail you. To some, mention of the Christ is so long forgotten, but the voice rises from the depths of your being with the gracious words, my friend. Lovest thou me. Lord, we have loved thee with everlasting love, and he said in the Bible “feed my sheep, help others”.’

She stopped herself to apologise, her voice rising and falling with emotion. But she gathered herself. ‘I’m sorry. It has been a big day today, watching, serving. It is a day of extraordinary cults. Let’s face it; let’s turn with great peace to the all-sustaining life of God and his Christ, in you. It’s a sweet, pure, all-pervading, wondrous sprit. You know as well as I do what we have is a great treasure. It is the end of the quest when you get there to meet the Christ. No one can hinder you but yourself. Every rebuff is a challenge. So I am saying to you — go forward.’

Yet the betrayals against The Family were mounting. What would Anne do — concede defeat or walk on? A New York–based Australian journalist for Melbourne’s The Herald, Michael Gordon, went to Hurleyville and knocked on her door. ‘She appeared at times on the verge of tears,’ he wrote, blaming ‘religious persecution’ for the raid and the accusations. But she admitted to him that she had organised forged adoption papers for children. And that she wanted to start another family of ‘unwanted’ children, this time in America.