7
SANTINIKETAN
He sat at the desk in the cramped, grey interview room at Melbourne’s St Kilda Road police headquarters with his elbows on the table and his hands in the air. He was careful never to put his hands on the desk and he was careful never to accidentally touch Lex.
Peter Kibby’s epic Operation Forest interview lasted three months, conducted four days a week. He was picked up on each of those four days from his house in the hills by police and driven into central Melbourne. He liked a proper lunchbreak every day. When he had a toilet break, it would be a long wait for him to re-appear in the room because of the obsessive handwashing.
Lex describes Kibby as a Geoffrey Robertson figure: intelligent, courteous, polite, well dressed, and very, very cultured. ‘You could imagine Peter standing up before the Bar in the Supreme Court.’ He had first met Anne in 1964 and by now it was 1990; that’s two decades or more of intimate knowledge of her books. He knew almost everything there was to know about Anne’s methods, her contacts, and the way her mind worked. He knew about her idiosyncrasies and the ways by which she persuaded people to part with money and property and sign documents they were not supposed to be signing.
At first, he was a little tense. But then he relaxed into the process. ‘After the first couple of weeks, I think he started to enjoy the experience — the notoriety of it,’ says Lex. ‘It was a relief to Peter that he was able to tell everything about Anne because he was so angry at what his life had become and what Anne had done to him and what he’d seen Anne do to others that he didn’t hold back.’
For police, it was a coup. There were theories and abstractions about how The Family had operated and thrived — and there were the testimonies of vulnerable young people making allegations that, in many cases, could not be verified — but there was scant evidence about the backbone of it: the financials, administration, and adoption processes.
‘No one had ever had the ability to get so close to the inner sanctum of the sect, and we had the key here — Peter was the key to the door,’ says Lex. ‘Establishing the trust, gaining his confidence — having a banter at times and having a bit of a joke. That was the way that we were going to find out what the hell went on.’
One of the first things Kibby told Lex about was the partially blind boy that Leon Dawes had been present with in the bathroom at Uptop. Kibby had heard about the child before he met him. The boy had been adopted by John Mackay and his then wife, Jeanette, when he was a baby, but he was handed straight to Anne. So first Anne had needed to be appointed the child’s legal guardian, and she had turned to Kibby. Kibby told Lex he went to a Family event at a house in Ferny Creek: ‘They had with them the baby … Anne and Bill were playing the mother and father figures.’
Anne told Kibby to change the boy’s name by deed poll. The adoption papers were signed by senior members of The Family. The deed poll document, Kibby told Lex, had a forged signature on it, of a Family member and mainstream church minister named Jim Armstrong, who was not in Australia at the time of the signing. Another member of The Family had forged it in Kibby’s presence, he said. Anne signed the document too. Kibby went to the Registrar General’s office in central Melbourne with it in September 1974. ‘This was the first of the deed-poll changes Anne had wanted me to do in an effort to change the children’s names to Hamilton-Byrne,’ he told Lex.
The next child’s paperwork was faked in exactly the same way six months later. He was adopted by one of Johnson’s two daughters and named Raynor, after her father, but given to a cult member called Miriam, who had changed her surname to Hamilton. She then gave him to Anne, whereupon his name was officially changed.
Names were a very important cipher in The Family. They were bestowed on people not only to give them a new identity and create the impression that they belonged to Anne, but also to lend status and meaning within the cult. Many of the girls at Uptop were given names beginning with A. Like the hair and the clothing, the names rendered them facsimiles of one another and of their leader. It is strange that Johnson’s own daughter named the child of a faked adoption after her father, and strange too that Miriam changed her surname to Hamilton, as if merely saying she was in Anne’s ‘family’ was not enough, but in the context of the cult’s obsession with names it made sense.
Next, Kibby revealed another effective method the group used to hide identities. In this fraud, an adult member of the cult — in the situation Kibby recounted, Beryl Hubble (Raynor Johnson’s daughter, who was later known as Christine Fleming) — changed her name by deed poll to Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Kibby signed as a witness. He would come to do this often, but the Hubble case, in the winter of 1975, was one of the first. The aim was for Hubble to be able to then sign as Anne in deed-poll changes for the children. Lex showed Kibby copies of documents where cult members had signed as Bill also. Kibby admitted to Lex that he himself had forged multiple signatures.
In January 1976, Kibby told police, he went to England for six weeks. Anne was already there, and he visited her at Broom Farm. She looked pregnant, and she was wearing maternity clothes. She was faking a pregnancy, and she did it often. One of the cult women had the job of making smocks for her — ‘Hundreds,’ she said, ‘in one style. She seemed to be pregnant all the time.’
When both were back in Melbourne two months later, the story went around that she had given birth to a girl. As far as Kibby knew — at least at the time — Anne was 44, but he said he never really knew her age because she lied about it and had had a lot of cosmetic surgery. But he found out later that she was 56 at the time of this apparent pregnancy, and was just pretending to be pregnant. The child she claimed to have given birth to — the tiny girl who would rarely speak and would later suffer psychosocial short stature — was in fact another woman’s child, who was given to Anne. Yet followers were told that Anne had given birth to the baby and that the other woman’s baby was sick and had gone to live in another Australian state for treatment.
Then Kibby began on the property scams. Broom Farm, he revealed, a 17th-century homestead set on three hectares, had been paid for by donations Anne received — so-called ‘loans’ that he believed she never intended to pay back. The two-storey house had five bedrooms, plus there were separate sheds, garages, and stables. There were pretty borders of hedgerow, and fertile emerald-green paddocks. Don Webb flew from Melbourne to the United Kingdom twice to do architectural work on the property.
While the property was being purchased, said Kibby, Liz Whitaker flew out with $AU10,000 in cash stuffed under her skirt to put in the Broom Farm fund.
He detailed an eight-year saga that had occurred in the 1980s, and had led to him being investigated by both the state’s fraud squad and the Law Institute of Victoria, which watches over lawyers. Anne wanted her homeopath in London, Max Deacon, to buy a house in the Dandenongs, in the area that had become a stronghold for the cult. She allegedly told Kibby to organise it and persuade Deacon to give Kibby and Anne control of his money. Anne told Kibby that she and another cult member had loaned Deacon $AU50,000 at high interest. Kibby was soon paying money from Deacon’s bank account into Anne’s to cover the interest she said she was entitled to from the loan.
After the house was purchased, Anne — with Deacon’s consent — gave Liz Whitaker power of attorney over Deacon’s affairs as well. Liz took out a $AU37,000 loan against Deacon’s house in the hills, which was being used by members of The Family. (He was still in London.) But the loan repayments were not met. The money had gone straight to Anne — and Deacon, Anne, and Liz all turned on Kibby and stripped his co-power of attorney while he was under investigation. Liz Whitaker informed him a psychic had told her that two men stole the money. ‘I would say this story, without doubt, would have been Anne’s idea,’ he said.
Anne’s mansion in the hills was purchased in 1976, Kibby explained to Lex. It was owned by a woman involved with The Family who had it under her company, Audette & Co. Anne bought it from the woman for $AU60,000 and renamed it from Bray Lodge to Crowther House. (The law firm Kibby was working for at the time was Weigall and Crowther.) He said that there was no contract of sale, and that Anne merely told the woman that she would repay her in ‘two or three years … I doubt whether Anne ever paid [her]’. Anne bought it under one of her aliases: Fiona MacDonald.
Kibby told police the grand old house was Anne’s main home when in Australia and that she had held spiritual classes there, for a short time, under the name ‘Melbourne School for Esoteric and Exoteric Studies’. He also told police a surprising fact: that in the 1970s the house was a small café, or tearooms, on weekends. ‘Members of the sect would make scones, tea, coffee, et cetera, for the general public. The staff who worked in the tearooms were all members of the sect and working at Anne’s direction.’ It was a nice little earner, and a sideline that stayed essentially hidden from the police.
Crowther was used for weddings among members of the cult too. Leon Dawes was married there; Michael’s second marriage was conducted there. Dinner parties would be held with the cult’s inner sanctum, and all the Uptop kids would be driven to Crowther in Jupiter to spend time with the guests. Anne sometimes wore a distinctive bright red dress to the Crowther parties. Several former cult members remember the red dress.
She got her hands on another lavish hills property, called the White Lodge, in 1979. Howard Whitaker had owned it after it too was bought a company with links to the cult. After Whitaker went bankrupt and left The Family, Anne decided to turn it into a child-minding centre for children of the cult who were not at Uptop. It was renovated to suit, with the bathrooms featuring small hand basins. But the child-care centre never eventuated, and the house lay empty until Anne, according to Kibby, told him to transfer ownership of it to her, under her pseudonym Fiona MacDonald. She then charged cult members $10 a head to meditate inside, he said.
To Peter Spence, these were extraordinary revelations. It was, it seemed to him, a systemic institutional failure. The hospitals had not detected the fake adoptions. The police had failed in previous investigations to get anything done. The government was never interested in probing too far.
He recommended a Royal Commission, the highest government-led inquiry possible for institutional crimes such as corruption and systemic abuse in Australia. The Royal Commission into deep-sleep therapy, which investigated the deaths of 26 patients and 19 suicides at Sydney’s Chelmsford Private Hospital in the 1960s, had just finished. Spence could see that the parallels with The Family were strong: psychiatry, drug experiments, frightened patients. He also knew that many would not speak unless compelled: he had tracked down a psychiatrist with links to The Family based in another state, New South Wales. The man was not implicated in any crimes but had worked at Newhaven and seen a lot of things. He refused to give a statement to Forest but told Spence he would give evidence before a properly constituted inquiry.
Spence wrote a long and detailed report on what Forest knew: ‘The sect, the treatment of the children, the way in which they got hold of the children, the use of the drugs on numerous people including the children … I suggested that the only real way forward was a Royal Commission, where many, many of these people could and would come forward and give evidence of what actually took place over those years.’
Royal Commissions in Australia are put in place by governments, either state or federal. In this case the decision would have fallen to the state government because most of The Family’s activity took place in the state of Victoria. But Spence says that his recommendation never got as far as the government. Even if it had, he now thinks the chances of a high-profile commission being established were always slim: inaction by government agencies would have been embarrassing for any government of any persuasion, and a Royal Commission would have brought it into the open. There was a nagging sense that the cult and the allegations around them were in the too-hard basket for the authorities. ‘I have a theory that [the cult] had enough influence to prevent further investigations being taken forward in the early days, and then it would have been politically embarrassing if we had we had a Royal Commission conducted in 1990 or thereabouts,’ Spence told us.
According to Marie Mohr, the government would have asked itself, ‘What are we going to get out of it?’ ‘Look how long it’s taken for any commission into the Catholic Church. It’s the same reasons. It’s hard. It’s difficult. I think the reason we needed an open investigation was how [the practice of forged adoption] was allowed in the ’60s and ’70s, where children were literally stolen. Senior social workers, doctors, nurses were manipulating the system to take whatever child they wanted. They got passports under phony names. They were sect members doing Anne’s bidding. They had no qualms in making fraudulent statements to the system because the system is nothing compared to their divine one.’
Spence agrees: ‘I think it would have all ultimately been very embarrassing for quite a number of people. There’s no doubt that there were tentacles reaching right to the top.’
Nevertheless, at the time, Spence was floored by the news. To him, the idea of a public commission was ‘totally off-handedly rejected’. What would it take? Royal Commissions had been called for less, but the old adage is that governments don’t want them unless they know what the answers will be.
He called a meeting with police command — the state’s assistant commissioner for crime and a detective chief superintendent. They were told that Forest detectives were struggling with the emotional toll of the case because of the fragile children they were meeting and the allegations they were hearing. The death threats from Adam had also affected the team; police hierarchy feared that some of the taskforce were too close to the case and were losing their sense of objectivity.
Spence also conceded it was unlikely that criminal charges against Anne or adult cult leaders for crimes of abuse or assault committed against the children would stick because there was not much evidence except testimonies, and the evidence, in police speak, was ‘stale’. As witnesses, the children weren’t great: damaged, shy, prone to memory lapses. They had also all been housed together after the raid, which could lead to accusations of ‘contamination’; that is, they could be accused of making sure their stories matched. Also, Spence and his bosses were asking themselves whether the children should be subjected to cross-examination in court — should they be caused any more pain? An internal police report from mid-1990 recommended no, they should not be: ‘Any attempt to bring them into court as witnesses will only further exacerbate their already fragile psychological wellbeing. There are lessons to be learned by those agencies entrusted with the welfare of children being adopted in this state. The main thrust of this investigation should be to ensure that this situation cannot happen again.’
However, the consensus was that the fraud charges — the forgeries and faked documents — would stick and would not require any of the children to give evidence. Plough on, came the order from police command. See what turns up.
Armed with warrants, Operation Forest searched a house in the hills and found two kilograms of marijuana and nearly $AU3,500 in cash; they charged a fringe cult member with drug offences. A shrine to Anne was also found in the house. Police carried out surveillance on other houses in the hills, trying to track the names and finances of those they suspected were involved.
Meanwhile, Anne had issued a writ for defamation against Channel Nine over a television news report and was expected back in the country anytime.
Operation Forest had by now drafted the FBI and Interpol into the investigation. Interpol found out that a person called James Hamilton-Byrne, who had been one of the children Anne claimed as her own, went to an embassy in Honolulu to get a new passport. He agreed to talk to police but refused to return to Australia. Lex found out all about Raynor Johnson’s pivotal role in setting up the cult and secured himself a copy of Johnson’s diary.
Then Liz Whitaker tried to fly the coop. She had been under surveillance, and was arrested while about to fly to London and charged with perjury over forged signatures, based on Kibby’s evidence and the documents to which he had led police. She was let out on bail but ordered to stay in Australia. This led Anne to try harder to stay hidden. Her lieutenants were falling; Anne must have known they were getting closer to her, step by step.
Howard Whitaker was long off the scene, having since taken up various psychiatric roles in Melbourne and in country towns. He had refused to see anyone linked to the cult except patients he considered in dire need. Yet, despite his past, he was a member of the state’s Mental Health Review Board from 1987 until 1998.
Whitaker’s son David had begun to edge himself out too.
Anne had always wanted her group to be self-sufficient. She wanted her own teachers, lawyers, doctors, and nurses, with the kids all educated and tended to medically within the confines of the group. She also believed that they needed to be able to feed themselves because of a looming apocalypse. So — in a repeat of her mistake in sending Sarah, Leeanne, and Anouree to a local dancing school — she sent three men, including David, to an agricultural college two hours north of Melbourne to learn how to be farmers.
David had been living with the cult in the United Kingdom. He first arrived in Britain in the mid-1970s. Already he had learned the best way to get on with his life while still living within The Family networks was avoidance. If Anne didn’t see him, she couldn’t tell him what to do. ‘If she saw you, she’d say, “Oh, bloody hell, we’ve got to do another clearing.” Or she’d say, “You need to do this”; “You need to move to England”; “You need to move back to Australia.” If you didn’t actually see her, she didn’t mess you about so much.’
Sending David to farming college was a ‘fundamental mistake’, he says. It was outside the group’s circle of influence; Anne thought the young men she sent to the town of Dookie were rusted-on followers who would never falter in their beliefs and never, ever betray her. But at Dookie David would mix with ordinary folk in a student dormitory and see life outside the cult — ‘Normal people doing normal things,’ he says.
It didn’t take long for him to see the light: straightaway he met a fellow student called Cathy, whom he would eventually marry, and who would help extricate him from The Family. Cathy saw right through it all from the beginning, David says: she would call Anne’s teachings ‘bullshit, a load of rubbish’. However, Cathy didn’t realise the extent of it — ‘initially when Cathy met Anne, she didn’t realise how significant a person she was in my life. She just thought she was the weird aunty.’
David decided in the very late 1970s, halfway through his three-year course, that he wanted to leave The Family. Anne’s plan to school him in farming for her benefit had apparently backfired. But not for long.
David finished his course, and went to work on a farm in country New South Wales. He wanted to keep away from the hills, as far away as possible, but something was still in his brain — a little of the cult’s magnetism, an inextricable pull towards the people he knew and who knew him. He wanted to betray them by walking away, like his father, but he couldn’t yet. After a year on the farm, Anne rang him up. The power she had over him was still strong. She convinced him to go back to England.
Anne wanted to control David, he believed. She knew Cathy had led him away from the cult and she wanted to draw him back. She never thought that Cathy would go with David to England. David was not yet strong enough to refuse Anne’s orders, but he was strong enough to take someone with him who could potentially stand between him and ‘Big Ball’.
The couple set up in Tunbridge Wells, near Broom Farm, under Anne’s instruction, and David was made to study osteopathy and get a job. They stayed for four years, from 1980. Adam was sent to live with them for a time because he was causing trouble back in Melbourne. David thinks this was also to drive a wedge between him and Cathy because Adam was a handful, and Anne thought it would be too much for Cathy. ‘She tried very, very, very hard to break us up. Did all kinds of wicked things.’
One night after a dinner party at Broom Farm, David tells us, Anne tried one more strategy on Cathy to spoil her relationship with David, and things came to head. She started picking on someone Cathy knew — who wasn’t there — and told Cathy not to trust her under any circumstances. Cathy knew it was a game, a tactic. They left the party, and Anne followed them out to their car, still heckling. ‘Cathy wound up the car window and said, “We’re never coming back to talk to that mad bitch again.” And I thought, That’s probably about the end of it. And I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I saw Anne.’
David and Cathy got married and came back to Australia. David wrote to his mother, Liz Whitaker, who was ensconced at Uptop, and told her he was finished with the cult. Then he bought a farm some way out of Melbourne to begin his new life: ‘To put a bit of space between us and these lunatics.’ He started getting letters from members of The Family criticising his decision and sticking up for Anne, and the letters kept coming, and then, just as Operation Forest was being pulled together, he decided to make a stand. ‘I felt that just walking away wasn’t quite enough. I wanted to attack her power base, which is of course her people, and also I had decided that the only way I would survive the whole thing was to break all contacts, and that required burning all the bridges and slamming all the doors.’
With his brother, who had also distanced himself from the cult, he typed up a two-page A4 document — ‘our thoughts about the cult and what a load of crap it was’ — and took it to the Santiniketan Lodge one Sunday night in 1988 when he knew it would be busy. The cult was in a period of high paranoia and secrecy after the raid and the formation of a special police squad to break them up. David says all he wanted to do was help others get out.
The brothers put the open letter under a windscreen wiper on each vehicle, and then stood at the door handing them out. The letter cited a cult-spotting checklist David Whitaker had seen in The Australian Women’s Weekly and adapted it to ask a series of questions about Anne and The Family. ‘If you believe that Anne Hamilton-Byrne will lead you to enlightenment and that The Family is something other than just another cult, you are either very afraid or incredibly gullible,’ Whitaker wrote.
The questions he and his brother posed were:
The answers to these questions were not as straightforward as perhaps David hoped, but he had still made his point in brutal fashion. He and his brother wrote that if followers of Anne answered yes to more than two of the questions, ‘It is time to stand back and seriously evaluate what you are letting yourself in for. THINK ABOUT IT!!’
Why has Anne not returned to Australia after the Uptop raid, the letter asked. Will her ‘so-called blue light or any other bullshit’ protect her? She lives in the lap of luxury, with expensive cars, while her members’ mortgages keep turning. Does the money go to deserted mothers or lost cats and dogs or the homeless or development projects in the Third World, as Anne sometimes claimed it did? ‘Don’t kid yourself! You are financing Anne’s personal wealth and for what?’
Everything she does is about power, David and his brother wrote. Power and control. She made many cult members change their name not for their benefit but for hers. She made some become nurses and go to England and funnel invalid pensions into her bank account. She made others leave their husbands or wives or, indeed, their own children. ‘What is pathetic is that you are still stuck in the rut.’
The letter asks cult members to do two things: ask questions of each other about their lives and their regrets, and ‘get out now. There is life after Anne and the Family!’
David and his brother copped abuse at the Lodge that night. But David also knows of one cult member who left: ‘probably not as a result of it, but it certainly helped them along the way’. Then a few weeks later he got a letter, which he says was obviously dictated by Anne. It was about betrayal and the grim consequences thereof. David had betrayed Anne spectacularly, but by now he didn’t care because he had allowed himself to believe in the idea that it was not betrayal if it was right. ‘The letter was full of stuff about how if you allow somebody to put out the light in your heart — that is, drag you out of the cult — you’ll be in darkness for ever. All the normal sort of bullshit they went on with.’
He wrote his own letter back, but with an extra ingredient. ‘I went out in the paddock and I got a little piece of cow manure, wrapped it up in a plastic bag, put it in an envelope, and posted it back with a note saying: Next time you want to send someone bullshit, send them the real thing.’
He has never been approached by anyone in The Family since.
After David’s letter, Anne sent her followers a recorded discourse. She knew, of course, that the Uptop children were talking to police. She knew that the police had a taskforce set up to find her, and she knew that a fellow named Lex de Man was leading the investigation. She said that unenlightened people, even members of The Family, had a strong tendency to doubt. She invoked doubting Thomas, the disciple who could betray his God, noting, ‘We become preconditioned before we begin to use the divine power … often half a lifetime has to pass before we can recover and be able to eliminate what personality we assume we understand from our early time in life.’
She said it was natural for people to wonder, but not natural for them to betray. Young people — the children who had spoken to police — had assumed fronts that caused a barrier between the physical self and the enlightened self. Later in the discourse, she refers to one former child who had confronted her after the raid and asked her why the cult was so cruel to children. ‘She is a very troubled girl. She was up there too and she was telling me she saw someone bashing someone and someone else having their face put in a washing pan and she mentioned one of the nurses — I can only say it wasn’t Liz — and another one belting a little boy with a bat, and it didn’t come with the aura, it didn’t come right, so I am telling you she needs prayers.’
Sarah, she said, had betrayed her and had cancer as a result. (Sarah never had cancer.) Anne told followers the disease was karma for betrayal for breaching the cult’s mantra. ‘[Sarah] doesn’t have much time left, and it will happen to Anouree and the rest because, the poor little beggars, they can’t live holding onto this, they are being forced. So naturally, all of us, we have to do what we can in prayer and meditation.’
In the tiny police interview room, two months in, Kibby was not only telling police all about the nuts and bolts of The Family but he was also endearing himself to Lex. ‘Peter liked to have a bit of a laugh and a joke. He’d often tell jokes and talk in very posh tones about a particular individual, but at the same time he knew some great colourful language. You know you shouldn’t, but as a detective I got very close with Peter.’
Kibby tried to explain to Lex the exact nature of Anne’s charisma and why he had been convinced to work for her. Even Lex admits that Anne had a certain magnetism about her: ‘When you look at the early photos of Anne, Anne was what you’d call a stunner in her days. In her early life, she wasn’t too bad on the eye.’ He believes she used her charms on men in the group and men who might join the group. No one ever admitted that to him, but he has a hunch. ‘All Peter used to say was, “God, she’s a good looker,” in his very articulated Geoffrey Robinson voice.’
But Kibby was primarily a deep well of information. ‘You want to do an investigation to find out if any crimes have been committed, so with Peter it was going through each of the various documents for him to affirm his involvement and his knowledge of how the document was created and who was involved.
‘You want to make sure you cover every piece of knowledge he had because he was a solicitor for Anne. It’s not a thing to rush. We were actually able to take our time to get it right, even though we had a lot of pressure on us. I knew we’d get information that people had surmised for years but never had evidence for.’
He talked about Anne’s biological daughter, Natasha, and a property she had bought in the hills enclave right back in 1967: Little Woodford. The house was occupied through the years by many members of The Family, and when Natasha split up with her husband, David Cook, the house was transferred to trustees to hold it for their son, Richard. But Anne, through Kibby, got hold of the property in the 1980s when she gave him a cheque to discharge the mortgage. Then Anne, again through Kibby, took out caveats on the property to keep it away from her daughter: ‘So Anne could annoy Natasha, as they’d had a falling out,’ he told police. He said bags of documents were buried in the garden of Little Woodford, but he didn’t know exactly where.
Kibby’s trump card to Lex was the information he revealed about an alleged set of triplets. This disclosure marked the point where Lex knew he might be close to being able to lay a charge on Anne and bring her to court, quickly. She always claimed she had had triplets in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1970: James, Lyndon, and Sarah Hamilton-Byrne. Sarah remembers that when her birth certificate was changed and she suddenly became a Kiwi, she swapped allegiances when following the cricket and started cheering for New Zealand. ‘We never really knew our age or date of birth,’ she says. ‘It was all about subjugating ego. We weren’t allowed to start letters with “I” or really use the world “I”.’
In fact, Lyndon was born as Mark, in a suburban Melbourne hospital near the hills. Kibby admitted to forging a passport for him — along with other cult ‘witnesses’ and forgers who had changed their names. Mark’s biological mother said that one of Raynor Johnson’s daughters, Beryl Hubble, had accused her of trying to have an abortion because the baby had been born with a wounded head, and then she arranged for the baby to be taken away and adopted out.
Operation Forest found that Lyndon, who had a birthmark on his head, had his name changed to Lyndon Hamilton-Byrne by forgery and was baptised in that name in a Catholic church near Uptop. They also found that Anne made a legal declaration to authorities in New Zealand some time later that he and the other two were triplets, that their births were never registered properly because she took them overseas after giving birth, and that Bill was their father. ‘All three children are living with me and their father in Melbourne and are alive and well,’ she wrote. Liz Whitaker and Pat MacFarlane filed supporting documents. Lex knew they must all be false. Kibby had said as much.
As the triplet scam was being enacted by Anne and her enablers, the grand hall in the hills, Santiniketan Lodge, was being built. Raynor Johnson had bought a house up there, which was once owned by former deputy prime minister of Australia Sir John Latham: Anne told him she had seen it while astral travelling. (Although she told her followers later that she saw a rather more mundane sale advertisement for it in the newspaper.) Johnson was 62. He always thought he and Mary would go back to England to retire, but now he was a student of Anne’s they planned to stay.
Sir John had built a small outbuilding on the property to use as his library. The cult converted it into a place of worship called ‘The Little Chapel’, or ‘The Healing Chapel’, but they soon outgrew it. They could fit only 25 on each floor of the chapel’s split levels, with Anne holding court from a special chair upstairs, her talks amplified down to those below through a sound system. She accumulated the money to buy a block of land over the road, adjoining the beautiful Dandenong Ranges National Park: ‘That’s the ideal spot I’m looking for to put a hall,’ she said.
Santiniketan Lodge still stands. Acolytes of Anne’s insist they use it several times a week even today, but when we visit the site it has few signs of life. Outside are underground water tanks with chains leading down off the corners of the roof to help direct the rainwater in. Someone — presumably an intruder — has plastered graffiti on an outside wall, only partially erased: What Are The Chains For?
Michael, who has taken us to the Lodge, lets us inside its doors. The power is off. He doesn’t want us to linger too long but agrees to allow us to take a look around. We see blue lights lining the long hallway towards the main room, where plastic chairs are stacked up on top of one another. The heavy orange curtains are drawn tight. Anne’s purple chair, with a small table, embroidered tablecloth, and antique lamp, are in place up the front — not that she has sat in her chair for a long, long time. There’s a big crucifix on the front wall.
A laminated order of service from the 1990s, sitting discarded on a table, calls for a ‘silent mantra’ upon entry to the dusty Lodge. Michael fills us in on how a service would be conducted: a meditation tape would play for ten minutes; then there would be five minutes of ‘healing’ before the ‘Teacher’s Tape’, or Anne’s discourse, followed by some meditation, and then ‘Handel’s Largo’, an aria that Anne loved and had ordered be played as she entered the lodge, bathed in blue light, in the cult’s boom period of the 1970s.
A smaller adjoining room is the cult’s library, and the shelves are now full of hundreds of Raynor Johnson’s old books: Swami Muktananda, Robert Browning; astrology, astronomy, theology, history, philosophy, and yoga. The library has plastic roses in vases and cheap prints of Francis of Assisi, the Mona Lisa, and Rembrandt’s Mother and Child on the walls.
Despite these touches, it seemed to us that even the building — the once-grand Lodge — has been betrayed. It seems unloved and unused. ‘The world works its way and people are too busy now, or too tired or too old,’ says Michael. ‘I suppose it happens to every institution or church as people get older. [Yet] it is our privilege to keep it as it was always meant to be.’
Today the Lodge is worth an estimated $AU2,000,000. In 2015, a local real estate agent said: ‘It is an amazing piece of land, very unusual. It backs onto the Dandenong Ranges National Park. Most land around there is hilly with a lot of trees but this is flat, open, and sunny.’
Just after it was built, local men staged a protest outside with placards, apparently angry that their wives were spending long hours at the Lodge doing yoga and spiritual training instead of being home with their families. The building cemented Anne’s group of adherents as a cult because it was a place of worship, a fulcrum, hosted by their charismatic, controlling leader. Members all lived nearby. Johnson was literally over the road, Anne down the street. The Lodge formed a sort of bridge between them, a place to be reassured that this was the right path, that no wrong was being done.
Inside Santiniketan, only the Teacher could speak. It was from here that Anne’s discourses were either delivered or broadcast (from cassette tapes she recorded elsewhere). Johnson described these tapes as ‘the most precious possession’ of the lodge and The Family. To him, they would ‘presumably one day become the scriptures of the new age’.
Anne’s recordings are long. Sometimes in the making of them she was interrupted by cats or dogs (she always had dozens of animals around her). ‘Oh, hang on!’ she says in one, leaving the microphone running. ‘Pussy is going for doggy.’ She might also stop mid-discourse: ‘By golly, I have gone to town!’ On another, ‘Now, folks, it’s getting on, time to — it’s ten to eight, oh golly, yes!’ as if she was chairing a community meeting — which in a sense she was, but no one else was allowed an opinion. Anne had quite an odd accent for an Australian; she sounded aristocratic, as if she had been invited into the parlours of royal families and taught in private girls’ schools — both of which she claimed to be true, but neither were.
Sarah told us she eventually figured out that Anne spoke in circles. ‘It was a kind of double-speak.’ She would trail off and leave statements hanging, inviting listeners to infuse them with meaning. She would refer to her followers, silent in the lodge, by the familiar ‘old thing’ — as in, ‘You don’t want to lose your self-respect, old thing!’ (This comment was during a sermon about the value of silence and how betrayal damages the soul. ‘You still can not talk to anyone besides your Teacher,’ she said. ‘Always keep your spiritual treasure hidden within you. These are not for the vulgar people and the gaze of humanity. You don’t want to lose your self-respect, old thing!’)
The recordings have common themes: I have witnessed miracles and bliss and invisible worlds. I myself am a miracle. I have chosen you and you are special. Say nothing, even though it is amazing. Do not betray me.
‘I started [the group],’ she said. ‘I had to start it. That was divine orders. That was the divine vision. You are the one being rescued. I also have to force you and push you toward meditation. It is the most secret key towards the most secret treasure. All the truly true paths say the same thing, my friends. That to be true we want to reach God and we do need to have a lot of patience and perseverance and help others into purity of their body and their mind.’
In many recordings, Anne made clear that helping others to get on the path is crucial. They were recruitment drives. She always appeared to want more people, more validation, more money, more power. ‘It’s quite an intense spiritual footstep that you have to take to help them. Spiritual grooming, it is called.’
Ian Weeks, Raynor Johnson’s former student, believes Johnson saw Santiniketan Lodge as a benevolent project based on the Indian model of an ashram — ‘a conference-centre kind of place for learning and study. That was Raynor; he did such things.’
Just after Johnson bought his house in the hills, Anne had visited him. She looked sick, and said she had cancer and might die. ‘The thought that She might have to leave us (including the dozen or more souls whom She had called and initiated),’ he wrote, ‘while all of us who were so ill prepared to do her work, distressed Her greatly.’ They meditated and prayed together.
Not long after, she was sick again, and Johnson was told she had died for several minutes overnight but was revived. She was playing with games of guilt and dependency, and fostering loyalty.
She also spoke with Johnson about the looming apocalypse. She said the evolution of the universe had been stalled because there was not enough love on earth, but she had spoken to her heavenly father (‘He is more personal than you know’) and begged for a little more time for the planet: ‘Its degradation and lack of “Love” were holding up the evolution of other planets in the cosmic timetable. The time available for change was now short.’ If ‘flying saucers’ came in spring, they had journeyed from another solar system and carried life much more advanced than ours, and it would be a warning that Earth was godless and that they wanted to take over. Anne told followers that she had flown in a UFO.
Johnson’s biographer, Alan Moore, wrote that Johnson would remain interested in extraterrestrials all his life because he thought they were alien civilisations trying to contact Earth to help the move towards the new age.
Johnson became somewhat overcome by the divine power he thought he was gaining access to. He was humbled when he tried unsuccessfully, by magic, to heal Anne’s nose — ‘which would have avoided the necessity of surgery’. She also told him the Bible was wrong because records and writings from Biblical times had been lost in a ‘deluge’; in fact, she said, Jesus had died on the cross as recorded but then revived himself and lived until the age of 68.
Anne also told Johnson that in a previous life he was a naval officer for Lord Nelson in the Napoleonic Wars. According to Anne, Johnson had drowned while serving Lord Nelson. His daughter Maureen was an ‘attractive debutante’ in love with Nelson, while his other daughter was a ‘young midshipman or lieutenant’. The film star Jane Russell was also there, in Anne’s imaginings, and Johnson, the Napoleonic hero, had been in love with her.
These conversations between Anne and Johnson occurred during the cult’s most formative days, when recruits were flocking in. Michael joined in 1971.
Michael is the one who sits with her still in the dementia wing; his paintings are on her wall. He makes her tea, he plays music to her. He says even though she has physically withered and can no longer speak in her commanding way, she is still magnificent. He appears for all the world to love her and be in love with her. ‘Still perfect-looking, most magnificent even in her walking, Anne has great inner power. When I first met her, everything went through me, and some people can’t tolerate that because of their insecurities and fears and they feel they have to fight and defend themselves. They are easily threatened because they are living a lie. One of my favourite things Anne used to say was, “People put so much energy into being what they are not.” And aren’t they? The world is full of people being what they are not.’
Michael met Anne through Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — the Maharishi — the celebrity Indian yogi who entranced The Beatles during their psychedelic period and founded the Transcendental Meditation movement. The yogi collected Rolls Royces and had a pink private jet. He visited Australia in 1967, when Michael was 19, and this turned out to be Michael’s first formative step towards Anne.
The Maharishi had just held his celebrated first lecture in London. The Beatles, Mick Jagger, and Marianne Faithful had turned up, and then followed the yogi to Wales. (Later they would all stay at his ashram in India, where much of The White Album was written.)
Michael was a law student at Melbourne University. ‘I went to listen to a talk. He didn’t talk philosophy as such but gave a method of meditation which stopped the mind.’ The Maharishi was being put up in an apartment in St Kilda. Michael went and met him the next day. ‘Everything changed,’ he says.
Michael’s family are wealthy, from the upper echelons of establishment Melbourne. His uncle on his mother’s side, Sir Zelman Cowen, would become Australia’s governor-general in 1977, after a distinguished career as a legal scholar. Michael, his uncle, and his father all went through the prestigious Scotch College and then studied at the University of Melbourne. After he met the Maharishi, Michael dropped out of law — which troubled his family — and enrolled in Indian studies.
Michael’s father tried to rescue him from Anne’s group, hiring a ‘cultbuster’ and taking his son on a pilgrimage to Israel to see family and be among the roots of Judaism. He tried to tempt him with a job through family connections in a hospital in Tel Aviv. None of it worked. Michael had found what he was looking for. He told his mother that Anne was his spiritual mother, which didn’t go down too well. His father, meanwhile, was ‘freaked out’. But Michael already saw himself as a true man of God, which in his mind meant he had permission from Judaism to become a seeker.
Another Hindu yogi came to town: Swami Nithyananda from South Africa. Michael had a bushy afro by now; he was, he says, ‘Indianised’. Raynor Johnson invited Nithyananda up to the hills. Michael was invited too, but his invitation came from others not connected with the cult.
He drove up to The Little Chapel with two visiting Indians from Sri Auribindo’s ashram in Pondicherry, in southern India.
Michael says he heard Anne in the forest before he met her, a voice in the trees. Anne greeted Michael at the door of The Little Chapel with the words, ‘I have been waiting for you.’ He said he immediately felt ‘known’, and a physical sensation of what he calls ‘energy’ passed right through him.
After that, he stopped looking for the one who would enlighten him. He had found her. The energy that he says passed through him was blue. ‘The blueprint of life, the goodness of it all. I’d wish that upon everybody, even you.’
While talking with Michael, he often asked questions of us, or referred to us in terms of the cosmic plan he perceives to exist. What do we want for our lives, our children, our film, our book? Is this why he wanted to spend so much time with us: to preach and proselytise?
Before he was initiated into Anne’s group, he worked for a summer in a firetower in the bush. ‘I had a baby fox that I had rescued,’ he says. ‘It had rickets. I brought it back, and [Anne] healed it.’
Barbara Kibby also became engrossed in the cult at The Little Chapel. Howard Whitaker had given her LSD, for depression, at Newhaven, and recommended she do yoga with Anne. Two months later, Anne invited her up to The Little Chapel for ‘advanced yoga’. Anne was, she says, ‘ageless’. She saw her as a mother figure because her own mother was an alcoholic, and in and out of hospital. ‘I didn’t have a lot of mothering,’ she says.
Barbara says the cult always had more women in it than men. Anne also lured in a lot of gay men because she accepted their sexuality and often sent them to London, which, in the 1970s, was more liberated — at that time, homosexuality was illegal in Victoria. The women, she enticed through yoga. Raynor Johnson made sense to Barbara when she heard him speak about Jungian archetypes: ‘We all have a vision of the perfect mother.’
She joined the cult, but could not see Anne as a supreme being or as Jesus. However, she wanted to get closer to make sure. She wanted more of a sense of belonging: more attention from Mother, more care. ‘As I got more involved in the group I really enjoyed the yoga. It kept me fit. I liked the sensation of doing the yoga and the way my body felt. That was a good thing. But I had this yearning to belong to Anne’s group of people, and the more I tried to belong the further away it seemed.’
Anne pushed her away, Barbara says, as a tactic to bring her in. Barbara and other women in the cult found that no matter how much they did for Anne — giving her money, changing jobs and husbands, going on weird diets, working at Uptop and Newhaven — it was never enough. ‘Nothing was. She would say all we had to do was just follow what she said.’
The Santiniketan Lodge was used in part, recalls Barbara, to dress down followers, usually women, who had displeased her. If they dressed in a certain way they would be called ‘sluts’. This was surely hypocrisy from Anne, who was likely aware of the power her own physical appearance had on some men. Some women, Barbara included, took to taking Mogadon from before they entered the Lodge in order to zone out and dull the criticisms they faced.
But despite this, Barbara was sucked into the vortex. So was her husband, Peter. And as Lex de Man was preparing to extract from Peter the finer details of Anne’s strange games and scams, Peter Spence discovered that in 1971, as the Lodge was filling, the then Liberal premier of the state, Rupert Hamer, was given a journalist’s entire dossier on the cult and said he would begin an official government inquiry, but never did.
The dilemma for the cult in 1971 was that they wanted to stay hidden, but once the Lodge was built they couldn’t. It became busy, with streams of traffic going in and out from a narrow, forested residential road twice a week. There were more than 200 members by now. Locals were starting to pry, and starting to wonder.
The first media report on The Family was in the Ferny Creek local paper, the Knox & Mountain District Free Press, in May 1971. Reporters were acting on phone calls from people around the area. Some had told the paper that they were scared after they heard rumours of breeding programs, drugs, and devil worshipping, and the paper called Anne a ‘high priestess’.
At the same time, the television journalist who ended up handing his dossier to the premier, Philippe de Montignie, had taken calls from former followers of Anne, and he staked out the Lodge from the bushes for ATV-0’s (now Channel Ten) Dateline program, showing a full carpark — VW Beetles, Holden HQs — with cult members scurrying out, wrapping themselves in blankets, and driving away. Part of the news footage shows de Montignie hiding in the trees with binoculars.
‘In those days, people who lived up in the hills were all considered a little bit mad, a bit like the Melbourne version of “hillbillies”. But upon investigation, it turned out to be a very interesting story indeed. We went up there, no one would talk, or very few people would talk. All the information that I got came from people who had left. We called it a “cult”.’
‘It was dark and grey and raining, so it added very much to the atmosphere of what we were filming. But the people who were disaffected referred to things like brainwashing, husbands and wives swapping all the time, children who didn’t know who their parents were, just a whole range of really odd things. I think the thing that really struck us was that no matter which way you looked at it, it seemed wrong. I can understand people wanting to live alternative lifestyles — we probably all would like to do that — but this was way beyond “alternative”.’
Dateline ran three stories. ‘The fact that this sect did exist,’ says de Montignie, ‘that there were quite major, major names involved in the sect, that there was probably some form of cruelty to the children at that time [made it newsworthy]. They seemed to all be locked away, you just never got to the kids. In today’s era, I’m quite sure, the police or state authorities would have been in there and cleared it out. The husband and wives changed names all the time too. We found one week we’d be talking to Mrs Smith, and next week she’d be Mrs Brown. It just didn’t seem quite right, and it certainly was not a good thing for the kids. And that was really the focus of our stories.’
But The Family’s first brush with the mainstream media went well for them because through their connections they were able to complain to Channel 0 about the coverage and demand the right of reply in a ‘friendly’ interview with Johnson.
‘I thought Raynor was a really lovely man,’ says de Montignie. ‘He was just charming in the way he dealt with you. He didn’t impose his view onto you. He told you his view, but he told it in a very friendly and charming manner. I can understand people being taken in by him. However, my feeling was that he was an unintended front man for The Family and that in fact the ropes were really being pulled by Anne Hamilton.’
Channel 0’s owner in 1971 was Sir Reginald Ansett, the newly knighted baron who owned Ansett Airlines. He knew Johnson because he had been Ambrose Pratt’s friend, and also the friend of Supreme Court judge and Melbourne University board member Clifford Menhennitt, who sources have suggested was close to the cult. De Montignie was summoned to the Dandenongs to a judge’s house — he says he doesn’t remember whether it was this judge — with two other men, including a solicitor. ‘I suppose pressure was put on, now I think back to it. The main reason for asking me for a drink was supposedly to show me that these were decent, ordinary people, that they would never be involved in drugs or anything like that. So it was probably a bit of propaganda. It didn’t sink in at the time.’
Then came the call from Ansett. ‘It would’ve been maybe the second day after it went to air,’ says de Montignie. ‘Reg used to come [to the TV network office] everyday. He’d fly in, in his helicopter from Mt Eliza, and land on the front lawn there, and spend half an hour with the Board and then buzz off. Well, on this particular day I got hauled in to talk to him, and he didn’t say that he’d been leaned on, but it was obvious that somebody had been in his ear about it. And I got told off … certainly told, in no uncertain terms, that I had to do a follow up, and it had to be a friendly one.’
Johnson seems to have played it somewhere between extraordinary naïvety and bold obfuscation for Dateline. He described the cult in terms of a suburban yoga club; already the message was, very firmly, ‘nothing to see here’.
De Montignie had asked, in the interviews for his Dateline reports, if the cult broke up marriages. Johnson said that marriage as an institution was in trouble anyway, right through society, and the cult’s ‘liaisons’ and splits were reflective of that. De Montignie asked him if there was free love or partner-swapping. ‘By Jove!’ replied Johnson, like the educated, privileged Englishman he was. ‘No.’
There were plenty of children in and around the group, he conceded, but only because they were being looked after, like babysitting, by different adults. He denied any drug use and said the group was made up only of respectable citizens and he threatened to sue anyone who called it a baby-farm.
When the dust settled, de Montignie took his original research, without making copies, to Premier Hamer. He wanted state authorities to find the children and make sure they were safe. ‘We felt a strong-enough case was there for an investigation to do with child abuse,’ says de Montignie. ‘The drugs, well, if they wanted to do that, that really didn’t concern us much. If they wanted to wife-swap, that’s their business, but it was the kids that really worried us, and we felt it should have been investigated.
‘So we contacted him, and he invited us in, and we took all our material. Now I don’t think we even had photocopiers in those days, or if we did they would have been very basic things, so we took all our original stuff. Bit sad, in a way. We should’ve photographed them, I guess, before we took them in. But you can be quite naïve, I guess, at times, which we were. We didn’t think it would get swept under the carpet, but I’m sure that’s what happened, that it was just shoved to one side. He promised that he would investigate further, and there’d be a proper formal inquiry, and nothing ever happened. It just went away.’
After Dateline’s series, The Truth tabloid paid a visit to the lodge painting a glowing account, trying to discredit Dateline, reporting that the group was peaceful and that Johnson, whom they suggested was the leader, was ‘about as sinister as Santa Claus’.