12

THE KINGDOM

David Whitaker wanted revenge. The cowshit he had posted to a cult member was just the start. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wanted to tell the truth, and use the truth as a weapon.

His mother, Elizabeth Whitaker, died in 2010. He helped his sister Judith organise a funeral. David tells us that Liz always said she never wanted a funeral, so his sister began organising one for her, to spite her.

When Liz was dying, David’s brother went to see her and they reconciled, to a degree. ‘I think it was very, very good for him,’ says David. ‘I chose not to.’

When the day of the funeral approached, he still wasn’t sure if he would actually go. His siblings told him they couldn’t do it without him.

David decided that a eulogy would be his weapon. The church was full of cult members, but Anne was not there; she had just been diagnosed with the earliest stages of dementia. His eulogy was like a king-hit. He ambushed them. ‘Anne gathered a group of children together, mostly by stealing, and installed them in a house at Eildon. Those children were to be brought up to lead the world to salvation after the holocaust. Elizabeth was one of the Aunties who reared these children. I know this sounds a little fanciful, but Elizabeth did not doubt any of this, for a second. She truly believed that by living the way she did, she would not only save her soul but that of the whole of humanity. A lot of this is denied now, but I was there, I heard it all, and I can assure you, it was exactly what was said and what was believed.

‘So the stakes were very high, and this justified any means,’ he continued. ‘Elizabeth gave up her relatives and her children. She never knew her grandchildren, was convicted of fraud and went to jail, and reared children in circumstances that would now be considered child abuse in the pursuit of this divine, cosmic goal of saving humanity.

‘Drugging children and brainwashing them — a technique she learned from my father — was also part of this process,’ he said. ‘So is there any point to me bringing all this up now? I think there is. The only way to make any sense of Elizabeth’s life is to see it from her point of view, through her beliefs, because absolutely nothing else mattered to her. She stuck to her beliefs and died with them intact. But there is a lesson here for the living: if we are going to stick to our set of beliefs and values to the end, it’s probably wise to pull them out from time to time and have a cold, hard look at them to ensure that they are logical and that they don’t hurt anyone else. Because there was a fair bit of collateral damage to Elizabeth’s beliefs.

‘I know that Mum would want me to say the mantra over her ashes, but like her I must stick to my beliefs, and just say goodbye.’

Michael was at the funeral. He was angry, and accosted David about the eulogy after the service, saying it was one-sided and wrong. ‘He thought that it really wasn’t as bad as that, and that I hadn’t got over the fact that my parents were divorced,’ says David. ‘And I said to him, “No, Michael, it was that bad, and it was that bad then and it’s bad now and it’ll always be bad.” And I told him that if he or anyone still believed in it, it was weak-minded, and invited him to go away before I said something really unpleasant to him. And he did.’

Michael’s view is that David and his brother were ‘terribly traumatised’ — ‘You don’t want to get David going,’ he says. ‘He is rather brusque. I was friendly, but he wanted to argue. The thing is, they were devastated by their mother and father splitting up. It always goes back to that: the destruction of the father who was the godhead for the children. Their mother was crucified for that by them.’

Liz was, of course, also Adam’s cult mother. He stayed loyal to her with unbelievable rigour, nursing her through her dying years at her home in the hills — which he has inherited and lives in. His mental health plummeted when she died; by 2012 he was, he says, ‘suicidal, not eating or caring. Why live on a planet where no one cares about you?’

The talk within the cult was he had brought on his own suffering and would lose the house, but he didn’t, and he managed to summon the energy to pull himself up and seek counselling. His counsellor helped him find his real family, which cemented his already growing self-esteem.

Adam found his birth mother had died in 2000 in Tasmania, but he has connected with his mother’s sister and her family and is starting to spend a lot of time with them. He has met his real sister, and an uncle who lives in Queensland. His reconciliation is a work in progress. He is not in constant contact with his birth family and has found that if he doesn’t call them for a while, they understand. He feels he has moved on from The Family and is happier and more confident. Yet still, there is always the slightest of hooks pulling him backwards. ‘It’s been hard to digest everything. It’s very hard for me to actually show my true, true emotion, which is ecstatic. But there’s a part of me that’s still holding back a little bit. Got the barriers up because it’s all new.’

He deeply regrets never meeting his real mother, even though he knows that he might not have grown up beside her because of her mental illness. In fact, Adam is still torn. Sometimes he even thinks he might have actually been better off raised in the cult. ‘Probably I had more opportunities, even though it had its really, really bad downfalls, but whatever family you are in there’s going to be the good, the bad, and the ugly.’

This is his loyalty speaking. What is family? A group of people who live together, a group of people who share the same values, a group of people from the same blood? A group of people forced together and who survive hardship together? Any or all of those things. Adam doesn’t really know the right answer, although he has begun to call his blood family his ‘real’ family and refer to himself as the newest family member.

He loves Anne fiercely. He calls it a ‘very deep’ love. He is drawn to her, but knows enough to keep a certain distance. ‘I can still see it, still feel it,’ he says. ‘The revering or the adoration or whatever it is. She was a very powerful woman. When she’d walk into a room, the whole room would stop and she didn’t have to say anything. It still feels that she has that power — [there is] that sense of being with the Queen, or Captain Janeway. There is a sense of strength still in her. But at the same time, I think she needs to be held accountable for the atrocities. The buck stops with her.’

He suspects she is over-egging her dementia. After one visit to see her, in 2015, Adam felt strongly that she was playing a game and is much more aware of her surroundings than claimed. ‘When she looked at me, she knew who I was, and just the way that we were able to slip into our bond that we had. She and I had a special bond. There’s a sense that I knew what she was thinking and she knew what I was. I could see she was watching very, very intuitively and carefully. I could see that she was watching her words — a demented person wouldn’t be able to do that. There’s still part of her that’s fully wide awake.’

Barbara Kibby was swallowed up into The Family for a long time. She married into it by marrying Peter; she lost a son. But she survived too, and she recognises that Anne picked on specific vulnerabilities in those she targeted. For Barbara, it was the lack of attachment to her own mother. ‘She was able to tap into something that’s there within every one of us. If you had a childhood lacking something, you carry that into adulthood. It’s like a hole that’s there, and if you meet someone who you think fills that hole, you absolutely crawl to it like a moth to a flame. If you have the lack of a mother figure, you’re always drawn to somebody who is like a mother.’

By the time Liz Whitaker died in 2010, four of The Family’s victims had successfully sued Anne. Two were children at Uptop, and each were paid compensation for aggravated damages. The third was the son of a cult member and the fourth an adult member who sued Anne over an unpaid debt of more than $AU400,000 from two 1980s property deals in the hills. It couldn’t happen now; Anne’s advanced dementia prevents anyone claiming anything from her ever again. In the eyes of the law, dementia is equivalent to death, and you can’t sue the dead.

Anouree was one of those who sued. Her successful claim was based on testimony of starvation and beatings: of being hit with a bat, the metre-long ruler, and wooden canes. She said that she was tranquilised and raised in isolation without a proper education or social interactions, and suffered from ongoing psychological problems as a result.

Anouree had suffered severe depression between 2000 and 2002, to the point where, she says, she was ‘dysfunctional’. She had been teaching English in Japan in the late 1990s and came back very ill, not eating properly and vomiting. The law changed slightly in 2003 to give people more time to begin historical claims for damages, and Anouree says that she was approached by law firms in Melbourne, who had researched other cases against Anne, in 2005. She decided that legal action was a good idea, not only for the money but also to validate these terrible things that she knew happened to her but existed in a kind of vacuum. ‘I felt very relieved at the end of it. It was a wonderful result, and it gave me some understanding about myself, that I indeed had been damaged.’

She is now married with her own family and lives in the countryside near Melbourne. She is an optimistic person and has realised that her Uptop years were only part of her life. There are other parts now, good parts, stable parts. Certainly a lot of the spiritual teachings she was forced into in her formative years were about equanimity and ‘all things must pass’, and it seems true within Anouree; she is positive, despite everything. ‘I would consider my experience at Eildon as a somewhat isolated incident. I find that the people I now know, and the people I’ve met along the way from my journey away from Eildon, demonstrate to me that most of the time, human nature’s pretty good and pretty cool.’

Anouree has two children and initially found it hard to get close to them, especially as babies. ‘The essential link of closeness,’ she says. When she gave birth to both, she couldn’t hold them straightaway. She was frightened of contact, and wary of a baby’s innocence because her innocence had been ruptured. ‘That was so hard for me. I had to make contact with my two babies physically. I was determined to do so, because I knew that would be an investment for the rest of my nurturing for these two children.’

The postscripts for the Uptop children are all, like Anouree’s story, about recovery and degrees of redemption. How to survive damage, how to find redemption, how to live on and walk on. We ask Anouree how she will feel when Anne dies. ‘I will definitely feel relieved. But she might as well be dead now.’

Ben found his redemption in Jesus Christ — the Biblical one. He is born again and heavily involved with a Christian church in Western Australia. But it was a long road. He was reunited with his three half-brothers (from his mother Joy’s first marriage — the cult Aunty he never knew, as a child, was his mother) not long after the Uptop raid, and in the 1990s married and had two children. He also began seeing his grandmother, his mother’s mother.

Joy was still deep within the cult and had been since Anne had, she believed, cured her with a miracle right back in the 1960s. She had obeyed Anne and not contacted her son. But one day, while visiting his grandmother in a nursing home in Melbourne, Joy was there.

‘Providence had allowed us both to connect,’ Ben says. ‘Which was incredible. The conversation I had with her was surreal, it was just like meeting anyone from the street. “Ben, how are you?” “Good, here’s my kids, here’s my wife; meet Joy.”’

Joy was living in the United Kingdom, but she agreed to meet Ben again while in Melbourne. She told Ben who his real father was (he had died) and admitted that if she had her time again and had better information to hand she would not do the things she had done. ‘That’s probably as close as we’re ever going to get to her saying, “I stuffed up and I’m sorry,”’ says Ben. ‘You can’t go back and fix the past, but it would be a travesty of justice to destroy the future for her. Everyone deserves the chance at redemption.’

So Ben set about restoring his relationship with her. ‘My kids, at least,’ Ben says, ‘should have the option of having a grandmother, and if I can see that she’s not going to damage them, she’s not going to fill them with poison, then it’s safe.’

Trust grew between the two. She had given him up as a baby, believing that she had handed him to Jesus, and then she had become an Aunty for a time, overseeing not only him but also a bunch of other kids. So in a sense what she had done was not just give him up but also distance herself from him further by not acknowledging him to be her son. ‘I have a relationship with my mother that is to the level where she will allow it to go, with a level of honesty that she wants, and it’s very painful for her.’

Ben took Joy and his children to Uptop once. The lakehouse at that point was uninhabited, but it is a traumascape for a returning cult child: a haunted place. ‘I showed my kids around. I had always told them what had happened. I was able to do it in a manner where they were able to see it for what it was, able to ask the questions, understand.’

He came to the Christian God through Anne, in a sense, but also because he saw what he calls the ‘intelligent design’ of Him through nature. In simple terms, he was looking for the light after the dark, and this was where he found it. He recognises the ‘beauty’ of Lake Eildon’s landscape and countryside, in a literal and a symbolic sense. He figured there was a divine power looking over him through the years when another elaborately maintained divine power — Anne — held sway. ‘I’d always had a belief there had to be something there, a God in the sky who did have some level of control.’ The fact that he survived Uptop only made this belief surer in his mind.

Ben met some Christians, and they told him they knew this God and He was benevolent, which, for Ben, made a change. ‘[Their God was] a gentleman who wouldn’t force himself upon me. Powerful, and who would interject in life, which the Bible spoke about as miracles.’

Ben has experienced miracles directly, he says. He has persisted in looking for meaning. His cult story began with Anne performing a miracle on his mother; she got out of bed and walked. And what is a cult if not a collection of people looking for meaning under the direction of a charismatic leader? Ben has retained elements of the cult’s supernaturalism about him, but only in the benign, benevolent sense, and in them he has found redemption. He says that he tested God’s power by asking Him to stop rain falling and dogs barking, and God showed him. ‘And then it became clear that, Hang on, there is, wow, this, there is something, there is! There is a power there that is willing to listen to me. I know God spoke to me and said, “You know I’m real, stop testing me. I’ve proven myself, now I want you to get to know me.”’

Ben’s analogy is simple: he found the way from darkness to light. He calls both places ‘kingdoms’. Where darkness lived, darkness was spoken of, he says. ‘Where the truth is hidden, things go on that damage people, constant fear. The end effect on people is one of being bound, and it’s destructive, and it’s not healthy. So it was coming out of the kingdom of darkness into the light and then into an environment where you’re able to be healed and to move on and create a good future. Believing there can be a future, knowing there will be struggles, and knowing there will be a power to overcome all critical things.’

He knows the Uptop discipline was horribly out of proportion: ‘not designed for restoration of relationship and genuine character being built for the better of that person’. With his own children, he is careful to implement ‘loving discipline’. This means that if one of his kids needs to be disciplined — with a talking-to or punishments within the home — he makes sure the child is reassured afterward and the loving relationship is restored. ‘You are saying the love is still there, I still care, this is done out of love. That’s redemptive, that’s restoring, this is necessary to shape character.’

Ben learned the difference between right and wrong beside the lake. He knew, when he was old enough, that what was happening was wrong. His view is that Anne wanted to be a guru much more than she wanted to be a mother. ‘The truth is, we weren’t their [Anne and Bill’s] children. She had to transition us into seeing her as a guru, seeing her as someone who had complete control. You don’t want a mother bond. She had to have people incapable of forming relationships with other people, that craved her affection and her approval, that feared her and respected her. You’re dependent upon her, and she can control. That’s what she had to create.’

For Leeanne, her children are the centre of her belief system. She is confronted by the idea that children could be harmed individually or systematically and, more so, that children could be given up or given away.

Like Anouree, Leeanne’s experience of labour and birth were profound and showed her how strong powers of goodness can be. One of her births was long and difficult, and it illustrated to her that a pure bond is the truest thing imaginable. ‘How could you do that and then give up that child and not even see her? There is no way in the world that anybody would make me do that to my children ever, under any circumstances. I don’t care how bad the circumstances are, that’s my child and that child has been inside me.’ Giving birth triggered strong feelings about her birth mother and ideas around separation. ‘I really hated my mother at that point. I could never come to terms with the fact that she thought it was right to give me up.’

Leeanne is angry that her childhood disappeared to the point where if she had died, she reckons, no one outside the cult would know. Hidden away and abused, given a fake name, the apple of her Master’s eye and Daddy’s Girl. She’s angry that the police investigation didn’t nail Anne or Bill on serious charges: ‘It’s appalling they were never punished for what they put us through as children.’ She’s angry, too, that the safety net for them when they were freed was minimal. ‘Every one of us has been affected in some way, we all have mental scarring.’ But Leeanne says all the Uptop children took one thing from their horrific experience together beside the lake — survival. ‘That’s all we did, we just survived, and we’re lucky we survived. Now as adults with children of our own, we’re still all trying to survive. We’re still all trying to live in the world that we never grew up in.’

In 2016, as this book and the associated documentary film The Family were being finished, Sarah Moore died. She had spoken to us at length over a period of four years but suffered extremely poor physical and mental health, which she always attributed to the cult.

She lived by herself in a unit in suburban Melbourne, near the hills but not in the hills. She was in contact with a close circle of blood family, friends and helpers, but was found dead in the unit. Police said the cause of death was heart failure. She was 46.

Sarah was the Uptop kids’ fulcrum. To them, she was the smartest and the boldest; the others largely followed her lead. After Leeanne escaped, Sarah rebelled one last time and was excommunicated to ‘die in the gutter’. Her outspokenness made her the children’s spokesperson in the media after the raid, and she developed a close relationship with Marie Mohr (whom she lived with for a time) and David Elias of The Age.

She was initially closest to Anne. Sarah found that she could get in Anne’s ear and used that channel to advocate on behalf of the children, as they got older, to try and get them better treatment. Anne would listen to Sarah and take her views on board. ‘I did feel a bit special compared to some of the other kids. She didn’t dye my hair and she gave me that extra time.’

Sarah was initiated into the cult, and rejected the spiritual advances of Swami Muktananda in favour of Anne’s spiritual teachings, but then, as she became a teenager, she rejected Anne. ‘Once I betrayed her, I had fulfilled the role of Judas. Every messiah has to have a Judas, I guess. I agreed to talk to the police, even though I knew that was betraying her. Everything that happened from then on was my fault, whether I was involved with it or not.’

Sarah received death threats from cult members and said her flat was broken into numerous times. Sarah was seen as the person who fed all the lies about abuse at Uptop to the other children after the raid: the ringleader, the provoker. The cult’s line was that she brainwashed them and instilled a victim mentality. Sarah’s telling and re-telling of the Uptop story — including in her own book, published in 1995 — became the established narrative around the cult: the blonde hair, the beatings, the buckets.

‘They keep bringing it up,’ Michael told us, after Sarah’s death and funeral, not talking in cosmic riddles anymore but plainly spoken. ‘Like regurgitating a foul smell from their stomachs. They are on a victim-fuelled rocket to nowhere.’

Sarah’s life, and death, were tragic. After being freed from the cult she met her own birth mother and remained in touch with her, but all those years ago, beside the lake, when Anne wasn’t there, Sarah assumed she would come back to rescue her and the children. When told Anne was overseas, Sarah would look out over the lake and see the other side and think, That’s where she is. Overseas.

‘We didn’t realise that she had set it up. We thought we were in this hell-hole and she’d get us out of it. We’d rock ourselves to sleep at night and get punished for the rocking. Calling out “Mummy, Daddy.” Thinking that they were just over the lake. We’d be calling out for them to come and save us from the beatings and stop the abuse.’

A year after the raid she helped instigate, Sarah enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study medicine, but she found it difficult to proceed calmly with the façade of a normal life. She knew Anne had said she had placed a curse on her, and Anne had also spread the lie — through the lodge — that Sarah had cancer and would suffer horribly for her betrayal.

In fact, Sarah was diagnosed with glandular fever and endometriosis, and was in severe pain a lot of the time. In her first year at university, she attempted suicide and was put into a psychiatric hospital. Then she moved in with Marie, re-started her studies, and in 1993 went on her first elective posting into Asia as a student doctor, working for the American Refugee Committee on the border of Myanmar and Thailand with the displaced Karen Burmese minority.

‘Medicine is about pain and suffering and people sometimes dying, no matter what you do,’ she wrote. ‘It’s about blood and sweat — some of it your own — and about hopelessness and tears and feeling like giving up occasionally. But it is also about smiles and gratitude and love and finding peace and courage and wisdom from other people, no matter what language they speak. Being in the camps taught me about myself. It helped me on the journey to finding out who I am. Sometimes all you could be was a human being.’

The following year she set out again, to India, into the slums of Kolkata with an NGO called Calcutta Rescue. She also worked with the medical unit attached to a Hindu mission. She wrote her book Unseen, Unheard, Unknown, finished her degree, and worked as a doctor at clinics and hospitals in Melbourne. She also studied psychoanalysis at university.

But Sarah’s mental health suffered, and combined with her poor physical health, took an acute toll. ‘That whole combination of having endometriosis and actual real pain combined with stuff that I had repressed from the cult combined into a more or less lethal cocktail.’

In 2004, she began forging prescriptions to get the opiate pethidine for her own use. She was charged by police and went to court and pleaded guilty. The court heard she had bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. She was not able to practise as a doctor anymore, and in 2008 she attempted suicide again, by injection in her leg, but she made a mistake and injected air. Her lower leg had to be amputated and she spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

Sarah maintained that she was poorly treated by police over the pethidine charges and then poorly treated in the hospital over her leg. She always said that it didn’t need to be amputated, but it was. ‘Bit of a let down by society — I hadn’t done anything much more than try and service (society) to the best of my capacity since I left the cult.’

Then in 2009 Sarah got herself involved in a perhaps ill-advised media stunt — with Melbourne’s Herald-Sun tabloid and Channel Nine’s Sixty Minutes — to have a reunion with Anne. Her motive, as she saw it, was to try and make at least some peace. She was by now a Buddhist. The television journalist Karl Stefanovic asked Anne if she was ‘evil’ or ‘a monster’, as she denied the beatings and dunkings and drugs and claimed, once again, to be Sarah’s natural mother. Anne called stories of abuse ‘absolute bullshit’.

Michael sat in on the interview, out of shot, but imposed himself upon it by accusing Sarah of lying about Uptop. He pointed at her and raised himself in his seat in defence of his Master — Anne was wearing a wig and dark glasses, with pink lipstick and pearls, but was slouched in her chair — and said to Sarah: ‘You are living a fantasy of pain and deprivation.’

Anne chuckled.

At Sarah’s funeral, friends, including Ben, Leeanne, and Anouree, denounced Anne by reminding those present what Sarah had been through as a child and as a young woman and also reminding them, despite it all, of Sarah’s compassion towards others, drive to help others, and positivity.

But while she was still alive, Sarah wondered why it was that her Uptop brothers and sisters could not adapt well to the outside world, and why the pain would never go away. ‘Self-loathing, feelings of worthlessness and shame, and irrational guilt were our legacy,’ she wrote. Sarah told us before she died that the Australian government should launch a full inquiry into The Family with a view to compensating victims further. She drew upon a case from New Zealand where a large, communal cult called Centrepoint was broken up by authorities after charismatic leader Bert Potter, a vacuum-cleaner salesman with big supplies of LSD and ecstasy, was jailed for indecently assaulting children. Assets belonging to his cult were seized by the New Zealand government and given to victims, upon application, for counselling, education, or poverty relief.

Sarah’s funeral had a Buddhist theme. Lex de Man and Peter Spence were there, Marie Mohr was there, saying farewell, goodbye, along with Leeanne, Ben, and Anouree. To their horror, Michael arrived — ‘because Sarah insisted I be here,’ he said. It was a stormy Melbourne winter day; Michael told us later that the storm was Sarah’s ‘angst’ gathering once and for all and dispersing to the winds to be gone.

Michael walked away from the funeral before it had finished. He said this was because it was dishonest — the lies about the abuse, the attacks on Anne. Blame the Aunties, he said, if anyone. Anne never did anything wrong. ‘She has been betrayed,’ he said. His final word. ‘But she is inscrutable. She walks on. And that does not mean she will not seek vengeance.’

Anne lives on. Just before Sarah’s funeral, Lex told us: ‘Unjustly, she dies while the cult leader continues to live.’ Dementia renders Anne unable to communicate meaningfully, or to remember. She cannot speak for herself anymore. But she still has thoughts and feelings. What is in her thoughts, and what does she feel? Did she ever feel any better than sitting in her purple chair at the front of the lodge, the place silent in the hills, hundreds of followers wrapped in blankets against the cold, her word as the law? What does she think now of Raynor, of Howard, of Trish, and of Liz? Did you, Anne, ever tell a lie? Did your mother ever take you in her arms? What, in the end, did you want?

We think of that room of Anne’s in the nursing home, in the shadow of Melbourne’s hills — the small, overheated room full of photographs. Photographs of The Family, the kids with white hair, Bill tanned and handsome; Anne looking at herself in a mirror in her spectacular prime, doomed and statuesque, glamour heavily applied. These are haunted objects, and she sits among them and she lies among them.

Anne’s extraordinary haunting remains as well in her buildings and streets: the cult’s grove in Ferny Creek, still largely under her spell in both the real and metaphysical sense — the big houses up there, Winbirra and Crowther House, with their heavy curtains and ornate drawing rooms. Uptop, of course, hidden by the lake with the submerged, wounded trees. The Santiniketan Lodge, fallen in disrepair. Newhaven. Hurleyville. Broom Farm.

Even if Anne wanted to talk or confess or wonder about her choices, as she reaches 100 years old — born in 1921 in a tiny, backroads place — perhaps she can’t. But what we have learned about her is that she wanted to claw her way out of there so desperately, she constructed an entirely new identity. She wanted to surround herself with what she thought was love — the love of adults, children, and the universe. But it was fake, an illusion, a terrible dream.

She invented a religion from a kitbag of delusions and known theosophical tropes at the perfect time in the perfect place, and she appointed herself in charge. She gave herself magical powers. She drove Jaguars and Daimlers and wore sophisticated red dresses and high heels. She plied people with LSD to make them believe her. She said her own spiritual guru could walk through time, that she was Jesus, and that aliens flew flying saucers through Earth’s skies in spring.

Keep close, she told them all, protect me. ‘They want me dead.’