11

LOVE IS IN THE AIR

Anne and Bill Hamilton-Byrne’s trials in the Melbourne courts were remarkable only for their banality. The inquisitions were administrative and brief. It was a false ending — they eventually conceded they were guilty and were not cross-examined. For Anne, this was part of the game. Her voice would not enter the public record, she would not be questioned, and she would stay unheard, and unknown.

No witnesses were required, but that was always the idea; witnesses would be too damaged or too indoctrinated. Mostly the couple sat together in court in silence.

On a Monday morning in mid-November of 1993, they arrived at the County Court immaculately dressed. Anne wore a luxuriant blonde wig and huge dark sunglasses, eyes hidden, neck draped with heavy jewellery. Bill was in a new dark suit and tie with the crispest of white shirts.

Adam was there with them too, in a suit, his hair shaved at the sides and slicked back on top, a gold hoop in his ear. Anne hooked her arms through his and through Bill’s and glared defiantly from behind her glasses at the cameras as they pushed through and up the stairs into the courtroom. Her mouth, in court and with police, always seemed pursed into the beginnings of a smirk.

But inside, very little happened. The charges were read: one count each of conspiring to commit perjury and one count each of conspiring to defraud. Not guilty, they said. The judge adjourned the case. Anne and Bill went back to the hills with Adam.

Adam was in the inner circle again, of his own volition. To Adam, Anne was in trouble and needed his help. This was his idea of ‘family’ — he always came back to the way Anne had constructed hers and included him in it. Family was still the most powerful force in his life, and even though he vacillated between rebellion and compliance, he could not betray her, not now, not at this time.

He would become the contact point for marijuana in the cult. He was selling to his friends, but also to insiders. Adam says this was Anne’s idea, and that his mother in the cult, Liz Whitaker, was also involved. ‘Aunty Anne said, “Why don’t you sell pot to some of the members of The Family?” Some of them needed it. I knew how to get it. And I got it cheap. It always came to the house, and I would divvy it out. If I wasn’t home, Mum [Liz] would invite the customers in and give them a cup of tea or coffee and a smoke, and she kept the people entertained while I was maybe doing a delivery or something, and they loved her. All my mates that bought off me loved Mum. They can’t say a bad word against her. She wasn’t the bitch that she was when I was a kid.’

Cult numbers were plummeting. There was little chance of new recruits now with Anne and Bill arrested and on bail. It was a case of clinging on to the dedicated followers who remained. Leon Dawes’ son Geoff was becoming more important to Anne as his father aged and began to withdraw from the group. Don Webb and John Mackay were still central and had supported Anne in court.

Anne was staunch as her empire crumbled. She continued to give lofty discourses at the Lodge. At times she seemed bitter, but not about the Uptop children being freed or about being chased by police for four years and arrested at Hurleyville, but about her now-tiny flock, as if she had been betrayed not only by individuals but also by the group. Where just a few years before she knew she might be speaking to hundreds, now at the lodge she would look up from her little table and lamp up the front and see ten, maybe twenty.

‘I have done my best, and I’m still doing it,’ she said, in a recorded discourse during this time. ‘Those who are devoted to me realise this and they are united with me, and those who are not devoted, they don’t know me. Wake up! Wake up! It’s worth the effort now, where we are on this planet, for a little time, for a little time. You think about it! You’ve got enough brains, those of you who are left.

‘We are running late again,’ Anne continued. ‘Yes, it is half-past six, running a wee bit late. There are a lot of things happening around us, as you no doubt know. Channel Nine has been at it again. We are over that stuff, that doesn’t worry us too much at all. I just wonder if Geoff Dawes and Christabel [Wallace] would get in touch after class? You can come round, Geoff. Just for a few moments. I’d like to have a wee word with you. A few things to talk about there. We have a very fine lawyer and a very fine man who is about to be a judge talking to me about things. Something must be done. Quite in opposition to the finances we have got to spare on this.’

Adam remembers seeing members of the cult up and leave during this time, but others remained. ‘Some people stood by her through thick and thin. She had her diehards. And I guess I could have been one of them. But mine was for my own security, and my own survival. I had to survive. And I couldn’t survive without them at that time.’ Bill had already promised $50,000 from his will — for loyalty, says Adam. ‘The only way I can describe it, your family, you stick by your family.’

As the judge adjourned the County Court appearance, he also was asked to consider a sticky point of law before a potential jury was selected for a future trial. The question was whether the Victorian court had the right to decide a charge of conspiring to defraud authorities in New Zealand.

Lawyers for Anne and Bill were led by a Queen’s Counsel, John Winneke. This was one of his last cases as a silk before he was made a Supreme Court judge. Both his father and his grandfather were eminent judges; his father was made solicitor-general for Victoria and knighted. Winneke, who had played AFL football for Hawthorn and was an officer in the Royal Australian Navy, went to the same school as Michael — Scotch College. He was very, very expensive.

His tactic was to get the charges thrown out on the basis that a Victorian court had no right to decide them, arguing the conspiracy to defraud count was not designed to infringe a Victorian law or ‘cause mischief’ in Victoria. It was for the New Zealand courts to decide the case, he argued. He cited a British House of Lords decision ordering that a British company, which was alleged to have defrauded a German government department, be tried in Germany. But the court heard that the cult’s incriminating documents were filed in and signed in Victoria, then sent to New Zealand.

The legal seesawing over this took months in the Supreme Court, which eventually found the charges were indeed inadmissible and could not be heard because they were unknown to Victorian law. Police quickly charged the pair with admissible local Crimes Act offences: one count each of ‘conspiring to make a false statement’ about the triplets. And so Anne and Bill’s criminality — their degree of culpability — was downgraded again.

Lex was in an emotional state. He was frazzled and nervous, so much so that by now his friends outside the police force were worried about him. It had been seven years since the school fire in the hills, and Lex was now the only one remaining from the original police taskforce. Adding to the intense stress was the suicide of Detective Senior Sergeant John Hill, who had replaced Spence in the taskforce. Hill was accused, with other police, of being an accessory after the fact to the murder of gangland enforcer Graeme Jensen, in that he allegedly concealed evidence suggesting the police were criminally liable. He died in 1993 in a Melbourne park just a few months before Anne and Bill had entered the County Court in a flourish that first time. He always maintained his innocence, and the charges were dropped.

More than anything, Lex was scared of failure. The charges had been diminished, and diminished again. The top lawyers on Anne and Bill’s side were looming over the case. ‘I was obsessed,’ he says. ‘I would have felt failure. I would have felt a total failure to those kids. A total failure to Peter Kibby. A total failure to the profession of policing.’

The trials came almost a year later, in September 1994, in two sittings a few days apart. Anne and Bill had changed their minds and now decided to plead guilty to a single charge each. Winneke, the QC, argued they were quiet, unassuming people who were known to be compassionate and caring. He told the court that Operation Forest had ended in a whimper, with only these minor charges, and asked the judge to not record convictions. The judge told the court he wasn’t ready to make a ruling on this yet — but he probably wouldn’t send the pair to jail.

The day after the guilty pleas, and just before Anne and Bill were finally sentenced, journalist David Elias, who had been following the case longer than police, wrote in The Age that since the raid ‘not one adult has been brought to account by authorities for the ill-treatment of the children’, despite government and police investigations.

He also revealed that in 1985 Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs was given evidence of faked passports of Uptop children by Dick Wordley, the crusading ‘missing children’ journalist from Adelaide, and an Adelaide parliamentarian, Ralph Jacobi. Jacobi asked the then foreign affairs minister, Bill Hayden, to have a look, which he did, writing back to Jacobi that while the allegations were ‘substantially’ correct, nothing was wrong with the passports. Hayden became the governor-general of Australia shortly after, and still held that position when Anne and Bill faced court in 1994.

David Elias spoke to Sarah, who told him the former children of Uptop were resigned to the fact that nobody would be charged over the regime of starvation and beatings, the physical and mental torture, that had occurred there. No one. ‘The system has let us down persistently,’ she told him. ‘We just ask, what was the point of it all?’

Then, on 26 September, Anne and Bill were sentenced. The law does only what it can. It cannot take into account stories a court has not heard and of which it has not tested the veracity. Judge David Jones was at pains to explain that only one charge each had been presented to him and so that was all they could be sentenced for — ‘not for other actions that might have been thought to have taken place’. Convictions were recorded. The judge noted that the pair had already spent three months in jail in America, and were elderly (Anne was nearly 73; Bill, 72), so he would not order further jail time. Each was fined $AU5,000.

Sarah was in court to hear the sentencing. The miniscule fines she saw dished out, after a quarter of a century of torment and deception, was a deflating experience. The cult’s arrogance, even at that moment, angered her. Members of The Family were in court too — ‘glaring and saying nasty things about us children. It all ended up a farce. She got off.’

And she did; she got away with it. There was no justice. There was no acknowledgement that the children had been mistreated. The children saw the Aunties go to jail for fiddling the social security ‘but they didn’t go to jail for beating us nearly every single day and starving us for three days at a time,’ says Sarah. ‘No one got in trouble for that.’

Sarah said she saw Anne’s grand performance change during these times, in that she feigned poverty and played up the idea that she was being persecuted. But she also lost her trademark steely control. ‘There was less money coming in, and she was getting older and forgetting where the money was stashed. She’d get people to do certain things with money, but it was a spiderweb. People die or leave or lose memories. She wasn’t able to manage her cult as a business anymore. Better to hunker down and deal with remaining members as she had to, and say the rest was the persecution of Jesus.’

Michael maintains that Anne was persecuted: oppressed, he says, on religious grounds. He says human thought is always adversarial and thus Anne’s adversaries lined up to take her down: too much right and wrong, he says, cops and robbers, black and white, bad and good.

To Marie Mohr, opting for minor charges in order to get a quick extradition was a mistake. ‘I was bitterly disappointed. There was no justice. It hurt the kids, and so it should. How could you justify to them, how could you explain to them? They’d all given hearts and souls and statements and worked so closely with the police and others to try and get the community to understand what had happened to them. Then we shut the door and [said] “nothing we could do”. I think it was wrong. I understand why they made the decision, but I think they made the wrong decision.’

She says the children could have fronted court. They had survived much more in their lives than cross-examination. ‘I think it underestimated them and I think it let them down.’

Lex was also unsatisfied with the outcome. The maximum penalty for the offence Anne and Bill were charged with was a $AU60,000 fine and five years’ jail, and it wasn’t even near that. But he got Anne charged, and he got to show what he believed were her true colours rather than the gaudy apparition with heavy make-up she presented when recruiting for The Family. ‘We were able to show that she was no one special. She was basically a very cunning crook. I can argue about the penalty — but the penalty was the penalty the judge at the time could provide. But we got her before the court. She will never be able to think that she got away with it. She is the most evil person with the most evil set of crimes that I have ever investigated in my 18-year career with Victoria Police. If you want to know the definition of evil, you look at Anne Hamilton-Byrne.’

Two weeks after being convicted and fined $AU5,000, Anne and Bill — and Don Webb — went on ABC Radio, the national public broadcaster. It was a long interview with broadcaster Ranald Macdonald, who had been managing director of The Age.

During the interview, Webb called the children ‘cabbages’. ‘They were write-offs,’ he said, ‘they were cabbages. They were destined for institutions.’

Anne’s version of her group’s story here, in the fullest explanation of her actions she has ever given, was that while she was teaching yoga and working at Newhaven in the very early 1960s, ‘some rather important people’ approached new Newhaven matron Joan Vilimek with a bunch of handicapped children that needed adopting. Anne arranged the adoptions among her yoga students.

She denied taking money and denied any LSD dosings, but conceded that the drug was used widely inside Newhaven. She denied ever telling anyone she was Jesus — ‘I’ve never heard such bosh.’ She admitted to using fse passports for children because it was easier to get through airport customs that way.

In fact, Anne talked so much that Bill and Don Webb barely got a word in. In contrast to her quiet behaviour in court, she sounded chirpy and conversational. When Bill spoke, he was more flippant; in answering a question about how many children they had, he said: ‘When we got married, it was almost like Cheaper by the Dozen.’ While talking about one child, Anne interrupted to remind him that the child was ‘dumb’.

Anne said she was not a religious teacher: ‘I do teach yoga. I have a Master.’

‘It’s yoga,’ she continued. ‘My mother was very into it, my father was Buddhistic, Buddhism. I heard lots of religious arguments in our house! It just came. I met the Teacher, of course, when I was about 15. He was literally all around the world. It wasn’t until my husband died in 1955 that I would do what he said I would do. I went through this death experience, this terrible thing. I was three months’ pregnant at the time. By 1956 I was into it, as well as nursing. I taught meditation. Then I started — in 1962, I started publicly teaching hatha yoga, which was most successful. I did eight classes a day for eight years. When the children came — when gradually the children came — we found ourselves with more and more responsibility. I’d already trained quite a number of people for seven years that would take over if ever I wasn’t there.’

When asked whether she dyed the children’s hair to make them look like one family, Anne said yes, that was why. ‘Of course it was. I wanted them to look like brothers and sisters. We never told them that they weren’t ours. We didn’t do that. I only know wherever we went, people said to us what beautiful children they were, what lovely manners they had. They’re wonderful at everything. I wanted them to achieve so that they could achieve to the very highest that they could. Some of them were in music, some of them were in languages. Just being ordinary good men and women, but not to be laughed at.’

Macdonald asked Anne whom she blamed for the cult’s troubles. He put it to her that her experiment had failed. ‘Your plan, your family, has dissipated, hasn’t it,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ answered Bill. ‘But why?’

Anne said she couldn’t blame anyone. She couldn’t blame herself; she couldn’t blame Sarah or Leeanne or any of the children from Uptop.

‘I just think it’s very sad,’ she said. ‘We were told that the children would never be normal. I did everything I could. We all thought, not just myself, we had the best advice from psychologists and welfare workers to let them feel that they were part of our home. That was the only way they were going to feel, one day, to be able to support themselves — knowing they belong to something.’

She ended the interview by saying she had plans for the future: to take in a group of mentally handicapped children.

Just a few months later, in early 1995, Macdonald did another ABC broadcast with Leon Dawes’ daughter, Megan Dawes. Megan was 26, and said she was a nurse working in Hawaii. During the interview, she said her parents split up when she was five and were unable to look after her and her brother Geoff, so they put them into Uptop. She spoke at length about how good The Family was, and is — she used the present tense — and how the children who alleged imprisonment and abuse were led into false memory syndrome by psychologists after the raid; that is, prompted to recollect things that Megan said never happened.

Her line was that the children became greedy and duplicitous after the raid. It is a line that many members of the group, especially Michael, maintain. ‘I notice how incredibly successful these abused children have turned out to be,’ she told the interviewer. ‘You think, My God, you’ve gotta be joking, with some of the stuff they carry on with.’

Megan denied that any drug use took place at Uptop. The punishments were smackings, not beatings. She also said there was no indoctrination of any sort. Instead, she likened the way Anne and Bill took in children to the way they took in dogs. ‘Anne and Bill have a place in America — it’s in New York in the hills, in the Catskills — and people dump animals, and basically when they saw a starving animal they couldn’t leave it there so they took it. And they’ve got to the stage they have 40 dogs they are looking after.”’

Meanwhile, Leeanne had met a young man named Ollie. She met him through Geoff Dawes, who invited her to a Gilbert and Sullivan performance Ollie was in, although Ollie was not involved with The Family, and they wanted to get married. Since Anne and Bill had been extradited and convicted, Leeanne had been to see them, not in the spirit of forgiveness, but as a kind of offering. She was the first to escape Uptop but also the first of that core group to extend any kind of hand to them, beyond Sarah’s occasional contact. But it was vexed and horribly mixed up in the mess of Bill’s betrayal of Leeanne, his favourite make-believe daughter. She was ‘Daddy’s girl’, but she now knew he was not her daddy.

Bill wanted to be involved at the wedding: because he considered himself Leeanne’s father, he felt that — despite all that had happened — he should walk her down the aisle. ‘He was all excited. I thought, I can give that to him, as an adult. So I did.’ They had spoken of this together when Leeanne was younger.

He also wanted to give the father-of-the-bride speech, but this was one step too far for Leeanne. She figured that walking her down the aisle was all right because all he had to do was hold onto her and walk. A speech would mean speaking, and speaking would mean lies and yet more denial of the monumental lie of the children’s upbringing at Uptop. She asked Marie Mohr, who had become something of a sister figure, to give the speech instead. ‘Bill was devastated that I didn’t ask him to speak,’ Leeanne said. ‘And Anne and Bill let me know about it afterwards.’

Although many of the group’s members were not invited, most of one side of the church were members of The Family, either from the inner circle or from the fringes. Leeanne asked Ollie’s parents to essentially chaperone Anne and Bill on the day. ‘They said they’d look after them for me and make sure they didn’t cause any problems and no one would cause problems for them.’

Leeanne had been reunited with her real parents after the raid. But it was complicated on many levels: she found she had a stepfather as well as a birth father. Plus Bill — ‘the father I grew up with’. She initially found it difficult to gel with her birth mother, even though each had been looking for the other. Her brother knew he had a sister somewhere, Leeanne’s mother told her, and that ‘something was missing’.

‘I try and put myself in that situation as a parent,’ says Leeanne, ‘but I can’t because I would never give up a child under any circumstances. I find that very, very difficult. I also found it very confronting at the time when my daughter was born. My mother wanted the baby that she gave up. But she didn’t want or didn’t know how to deal with an 18-year-old who had gone through a horrific childhood. That would have been very confronting for her, knowing what I had gone through. She tried to mollycoddle me and wrap me up in cotton wool, and I’m too independent for that. I used to fight her and argue and it never worked. I found it very difficult, and even to this day we have difficulties because I don’t believe she understands me.’

Marie Mohr’s speech was another remarkable episode in the postscript of this cult: the journalist who pursued Anne to Hawaii and confronted her there, and who worked closely with police and befriended the children the cult abused, speaking for one of those children in front of her captors. In her speech, she said: 

I have known Leeanne for almost ten years now. It’s a relationship that has built slowly from the beginning, one which took us time to trust each other and get to know each other and to open up to each other. And of course once we got through a few barriers in the early days, what I found, which I think anyone who knows Leeanne has found, is a woman with an enormous heart, with enormous energy, with courage, determination — some may say stubbornness, some may say outspokenness, some may say a lot of things — but what I would say is I have seen her blossom into a very caring, very sharing woman, who I know will give you all the love in the world, Ollie, because that’s her personality.

There is not one bitter bone in Leeanne’s body. She is always looking forward and not backwards. I think that’s one of her survival mechanisms and one of the reasons I am very proud of her — because she has never felt sorry for herself. She has always held her head up and her shoulders back and got on with life.

Leeanne and Bill danced together to ‘Love is in the Air’. Anne stood back on the edge of the dance floor, clapping to the music. She wore ivory. When the song finished, she grabbed Bill and danced with him, awkwardly, to ‘I Got You Babe’.

Ben was at the wedding and spoke to Anne. She came over to talk to him and, over the course of their conversation, tried to draw him back into the fold. Ben says it was surreal, but he was able to erect a wall because he had long ago figured out that Anne wasn’t who she purported to be. He was, he says, able to ‘cut her off’. ‘She had her take and her view of the world and continued to try and impose that upon me. There’s no emotional tie, there’s no physical tie, and there’s no spiritual tie, and those three ties were things she very much tried to have, and I was able to very much separate from all three of those.’

Leeanne’s life with her own children became loving and stable, despite a divorce from Ollie. Her children are now adults. She talks about trust a lot. Marie mentioned that in the wedding speech too — that she had to earn Leeanne’s trust. Leeanne remembers the family in the hills with the daughters from the Kenlaurel dancing school: she trusted them, and they trusted her. Cathy and her mother, Erica, helped Leeanne and listened to her. Leeanne found, as she grew into life outside The Family, that she stuck close to those she trusted.

Leeanne continued to see Anne and Bill after she was married, as part of that offering she felt she needed to give to them. ‘I felt invincible. Life had moved on. I thought that I could deal with her, but I really couldn’t.’

On one visit, Megan Dawes, who was still very close to Anne, was at Anne and Bill’s house in the hills. Megan and Leeanne bickered, and Leeanne confronted Anne’s authority once again, as she had done at Uptop before she escaped. They were arguing about the truth of what had happened there beside the lake. ‘Megan didn’t want to face reality,’ Leeanne says.

Anne was sitting in the same room, listening. She asked Leeanne: ‘Who do you blame?’

‘I said, “I blame you. I blame you for everything that you put us through. You were our mother.”’

Anne was downcast, and Leeanne saw her, for the first time, in a new light. ‘I thought, You are a very sad, despicable woman. You’re really going to end up a very lonely woman in life. Guess what, she’s a very lonely woman in a nursing home. She’s got no children around her. She has sect members, but they’re not family.’

Peter Kibby, the cult’s great Judas, was by now a Melbourne taxi driver. In 1999, he went to court to try and keep his part-ownership of Santiniketan Lodge in the hills, administered now by a cult entity called the Santiniketan Park Association, which was registered as Anne and Bill were being charged in America. Geoff Dawes is the secretary.

When the cult bought the prime hills land in 1968, Anne appointed directors, including Raynor Johnson; his daughter, Beryl Hubble (aka Christine Fleming); Anne’s daughter, Natasha; and Peter Kibby. In 1973, Kibby paid $AU14,000 to a cult member as a loan towards renovations, and in 1999, in court, he won his case — the judge found that the association claiming total ownership were ‘nothing more than a fluctuating group of individuals’.

In 2015, as Anne lay in the nursing home, the association (fighting Kibby’s widow, Barbara, and Anne’s daughter, Natasha, for the right to own it) used a legal method called ‘adverse possession’, where primary users or occupiers of a property can try to claim it after 15 years. The case continues. ‘We have spent 15 years paying the rates to get ownership,’ says Michael, also an association member, ‘so it has taken time. It’s very slow-moving, the law.’

One day, we spoke with Michael about Anne dying. We were trying to talk to him about her physical death and explain that she would, to us, cease to be. What happens then? The light of Michael’s life will surely die.

‘To go beyond fear,’ he says, ‘is a pathway worth following. And in that way you then have the courage and the strength to be a sacred warrior. That is our teaching.’

‘Are you a sacred warrior?’ we asked him.

He laughs. ‘It’s a job in progress. As is all of creation. It’s an ongoing thing. But I did stand up to defend Anne against the arrows, didn’t I? Lots of other people didn’t, but I did.’

We asked: Does that mean you are her successor?

‘I’m not to say anything,’ Michael says. ‘I don’t know. All I know is the next step on the path for me. The next challenge. That’s all I want to know. If anything else is further, it’ll be shown to me. The mills of God grind slow. And eventually you become aware of your destiny. I’m waiting for that sign, just like you are. We’re all waiting for the sign, aren’t we?’

Michael was fudging. But, we asked him, are you willing?

‘Are you? Are you willing? Willingness is to do with awareness. And I’m waiting for the awareness. The next moment. Because it’s not necessarily a booming voice from the Heavens. It can be a moment of incredible stillness that only you know. It’s the light in people’s eyes. Anne would always say to us, “Never put out the light in another person’s eyes.”’

In fact, the scenario for after Anne’s death is complex, and mired in the web of betrayals and loyalties she has lived her life among. Money and property still play a large part in dictating the terms.

In 2000, Anne was still named in 20 company and trust documents, all in Melbourne, all shareholdings or directorships. Some were ghost companies, others not. Now, most have been rolled into a registered Australian charity called Life For All Creatures. It is also registered in the United States.

Office holders in Life For All Creatures include Geoff Dawes, John Mackay’s son Tim Mackay, and a woman named Helen McCoy, who says she has never been a member of The Family but runs the charity as an animal shelter in the hills, where she lives.

McCoy and Dawes have power of attorney over Anne’s legal and financial affairs. McCoy positions herself as a friend of Anne’s rather than a follower. She has got closer to Anne as Anne has got older. During the early 1990s, Anne’s worth was estimated at as much as $AU150,000,000 in properties, land, and cash. Now, as she lies in a nursing home, her estate is valued at $AU10,000,000. Significantly less, but still considerable.

Life For All Creatures was largely born out of a company called Hamilton-Byrne Ltd, in 2001. It recently changed its registered address away from Helen McCoy’s home in the hills to Crowther House, Anne’s one-time home, which we hear is now occupied by Tim Mackay, aged in his 50s, and a 73-year-old cult member called David Munroe.

The main former cult companies, now deregistered, were called Saffete and Faffete. Anne or her proxies — some using her name or versions of it — can be linked to at least 13 other active companies, all based in Australia. One of them owns a sheep station in central Victoria, north of Melbourne.

Helen McCoy is nearly 70. She recently retired as the principal of a Melbourne special school for disabled children. Cult documents were alleged to have been destroyed when her former house in the hills burnt down during a bushfire. She has since moved elsewhere, still in the hills.

In 2012, the state government reportedly launched an inquiry into how member of The Family and an architect, who has since died, came to be awarded $8,000,000 in contracts for work at McCoy’s school, an association she said she declared when the tenders went in. The school has also been reported to the state’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission — by parents — after allegedly restraining disabled children.

McCoy told Melbourne’s Sunday Herald-Sun in 2014 that decades ago she learnt meditation from Anne and went to a meditation group she held, where the two became friends. Her association with Anne, she said, has not involved any children.

She would not talk to us.

We ask Michael about her, but he just shrugs and smiles and says he knows little. ‘It is not my business to know. What she does with animals is just saintly.’ He ceased to be a director of Life For All Creatures in June 2014, not long after Tim Mackay was appointed.

Michael is what you might call Anne’s aide, even though he does not have any legal or financial powers over her significant estate. He has always distanced himself from the murky, abusive end of the cult. Michael says that he visits Anne in the nursing home every day even though others around him, and supposedly around her, do not. He makes her cups of tea and sits in silence with the woman he says inhabits the Christ consciousness and does not have dementia.

Michael gushes over her physical state. She fell over and injured her pelvis in early 2016, but has since recovered. She eats very little; when we were there, we watched as she squirted a boxed protein milk, through a straw, into a cup of tea. Despite being very thin and deep in the throes of the fatal brain disease that not only erases memory but also weakens immunity, she seems to be very strong.

‘The people who think she is demented don’t understand where she is coming from,’ says Michael. ‘They come in occasionally, when their diary allows them, and Anne doesn’t want them there or doesn’t want to speak to them, or she withdraws into an inner world where she doesn’t communicate.

‘They think it’s dementia but it is not. It’s another dimension. I can’t understand why some people want to turn her into something negative.’

He tells us without blinking or missing a beat that she once turned back the tide. This was in Hawaii in the 1980s, he says. She and Bill had walked along a beach but were in danger of being caught by the incoming ocean on the way back, so she stopped the tide. Also, he told us, she could prototype herself: she could make a duplicate image of herself to be in two places at once. One time she did it, he says, and one version of her was in a dog’s cage in the hills, sitting with the dogs.

Bill died of liver cancer in 2001. He was 79 and had also developed dementia. We hear that he was physically worn by being on the run and arrested, jailed, extradited, and charged. And we also hear rumours that his enthusiasm for Anne and for the cult was waning as he aged.

Members of the group had two reiki masters treat him as he became sicker and bedbound, at Crowther House. His sister flew out from the United Kingdom in Bill’s final months and, according to former cult members, persuaded him to re-write his will so that his estate — he owned a lot of property near Melbourne — should go to his real children, from his first marriage.

On his deathbed, Bill reaffirmed his Catholic faith. His life, in death, reversed to where it had come from prior to meeting Anne.

Bill once told an interviewer: ‘There was no intent for evil whatsoever. It was only for good.’

His body was kept at Crowther House for several days. At the funeral, in the same Catholic church in the hills that he and Anne were married in, and attended by 200 people and monitored by security guards, Bill’s daughter Melanie argued with a cult member and we are told tried to throw herself into his grave. Bill’s former family had always resented Anne’s treatment of him and the way they say she turned him against them.

Anne was at the service but did not make a speech.

Adam thinks that Bill, though sick, was poisoned — because he had lost ultimate faith in the cult and intended to sign over his estate to his blood family. ‘I think there was something not quite right,’ Adam says of Bill’s death.

Anne’s likeliest cause of death will be the physical effects of dementia as she becomes incontinent and can no longer eat, as her body packs up and parts of her brain die off and she can no longer fight anymore. On our visit with Michael to see her in the nursing home, where she is surrounded by photographs of Bill and the children, and photographs of herself, she falls asleep in her chair. This is not unusual. She wakes and sleeps, wakes and sleeps. Then she wakes fully and those piercing, dangerous eyes dart around the room. There are blue crystals on a table, along with a folded newspaper. Our eyes follow hers to both.

She will die. We all will die. But what Michael thinks he has learned from Anne and The Family is that some things are beyond human, and death need not be the end. ‘People will say, “Your guru is dead,” and that will be true,’ he says. ‘But the lineage doesn’t cut out. There will always be a Great White Brotherhood on this planet. Always.’