Insider knowledge
The Cult Of The Family is a threepart investigation into Australia’s notorious cult, The Family. Writer and director Rosie Jones tells DANIELLE MCGRANE how the series, which reveals some new research and interviews with survivors, serves as a cautionary tale.
Fact is often stranger, and more sinister, than fiction. In 1987, police raided a rural property on Lake Eildon in Victoria and discovered this to be the case when they uncovered a cult led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne known as The Family.
The glamorous yoga teacher based herself in the hills above Melbourne where, over a period of about 15 years, she recruited wealthy professionals to join her cult with the intention of raising a master race to survive an apocalypse.
Hamilton-Byrne collected many children for this “master race”. Some were born to cult members, others were adopted, and they were home-schooled in this isolated compound where they were dressed identically and their hair was dyed blonde.
After the raid, the stories of what happened in The Family were shocking.
At least 28 children were held there and have recounted sad incidents of abuse, starvation and being dosed with drugs including LSD and tranquilisers.
For the director of this new series The Cult of the Family, Rosie Jones, there were still so many questions surrounding this sinister sect and a chance encounter encouraged her to dig deeper.
“I met someone who had become involved as an adult and it was while I was investigating another story for a film that she started telling me this story about her involvement with The Family,” Jones said.
“I was fascinated because she wasn’t a woman you would expect to be living in poor circumstances. She’d given her money away and thrown in her lot with The Family. She was a well-educated woman, a science teacher, and she had ended up rather lonely, not very well-off and quite miserable. So I was just very surprised at the combination of someone who was very intelligent and a nice woman.
“She told me about this story and I remembered when the children had been rescued from Lake Eildon and it just stayed with me.”
Inspired, Jones started to look at what had already been reported on The Family in the public domain. Investigative journalists had been working on stories about the cult for years before the raid, and before the children had been rescued.
A name that cropped up in Jones’s research was Lex de Man, the detective with Victoria Police who led the case into The Family.
De Man, Jones says, was keen to talk about The Family again, so that the public would still be on guard and it wouldn’t happen again.
In the three-part series, Jones says the public can expect to hear things they haven’t heard about before in relation to The Family.
“There’s more context, there’s more background around The Family. And we address the issue of justice,” she said.
“Anne [Hamilton-Byrne] essentially got away with it and we go more in depth into Anne’s strategy for control.”
The series also offers some insight into why these welleducated people came to be involved in this strange cult in the first place.
“One woman who has participated in The Family makes a statement about why people get drawn into these things and it’s very insightful.
“She said, ‘There really is no difference between intelligent people and less intelligent people when it comes to emotional intelligence’.”
The Cult Of The Family Tuesday, 8.30pm on ABC
Jones: “Anne [Hamilton-Byrne] essentially got away with it and we go more in depth into Anne’s strategy for control.”