Real life:
Anouree Treena-Byrne was raised in a cult until she was 17. Now 46, she tells Debi Marshall about the horrors of the childhood of isolation and punishment she endured.
growing up in a cult and how I escaped
Born in 1970, Anouree was quietly abducted from her mother at birth and spirited away to Eildon in country Victoria where she was raised, along with 17 other children, by Anne Hamilton-Byrne and an army of cruel “aunties”, all obsequious devotees of The Family. That she survived a horrific childhood of extreme physical abuse and emotional deprivation is in itself remarkable. That she survived with her sanity intact, even more so.
It’s been 20 years since Anouree and I first met. Then 26, she’d been liberated from the cult only nine years earlier and her emotional wounds from that torturous life were still fresh and raw. Two decades on, she’s barely aged; her pale skin, compliments of a childhood deficient in sunlight, is unlined and her dark, short hair frames a pixie face. At 46, Anouree is a beguiling hybrid of Audrey Hepburn-esque street urchin and grunge chic, with the gamine look of a waif. And she hasn’t changed: still intense and engaging, her large green eyes are windows to a reflective soul and questions are met with thoughtful pauses before she answers. Re-dressed after the photo shoot into a comfortable, striped, hand-knitted jumper, Indian cotton pants and well-worn Blundstones, she rolls her own cigarettes as we talk, her conversation disarmingly direct even as she discusses being on the autism spectrum. “I was diagnosed with Asperger’s in the late ’80s,” she says, candidly. “Undoubtedly, the environment we grew up in wouldn’t have helped.” Anouree is speaking today about The Family documentary, presently in limited cinema release around Australia, in which she and other former cult children reminisce on their nightmare life with HamiltonByrne and the police investigation, which led, finally, to their release.
Anne Hamilton-Byrne was the mistress of duplicity and disguise.
Yet the truth about her past – and her meteoric rise to becoming the self-proclaimed “one true master” and “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” – was rather more pedestrian than she would have people believe.
Born plain Evelyn Edwards into a humble Gippsland family haunted by mental illness, Evelyn, an overweight child with the nickname “Puddy”, was the daughter of a railway cleaner whose self-obsession led to a reimagining of her reality. She taught yoga in Melbourne before realising financial enlightenment lay in the recruitment of cult members – easily manipulated middle-class professionals, many with medical backgrounds – into the sect she co-founded with spiritual academic Dr Raynor Johnson. Taking the surname of her second husband, Bill Hamilton-Byrne, whom she married in the ’70s, this charismatic blonde held sect members spellbound with her hotch-potch of New Age spiritualism and Eastern and Western teachings, while at the same time fleecing them of their money and assets. A guru – and an empire – was born.
A house of horrors
Anouree’s story starts in that most surreal of places: former Melbourne asylum, Newhaven psychiatric clinic, run by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. It was
here, where many medical staff – some established members of The Family – and vulnerable patients were targeted in a zealous recruitment drive. It’s also where Anouree’s parents, patients Treena and Michael, Anne HamiltonByrne’s step-son, fell in love. “It was a house of horrors,” Anouree says with a shudder. “Anne manipulated her way into ownership of the clinic and once she got it, it gave her power to do what she wished with defenceless patients.”
Here, hidden from the outside world, sedatives and the hallucinogenic drug, LSD, were administered to patients without their knowledge and controversial treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies, were trialled.
Against her will, Treena, a desperately vulnerable woman who suffered episodic bouts of mental illness, was given a range of potent drugs, including LSD, even when pregnant with Anouree at 22. “My father was also given LSD. It was a means of keeping them subjugated.”
Shockingly, it also gave HamiltonByrne, who owned other cult properties, the opportunity to exploit Treena and procure her baby.
“It was a nice little transaction for Anne,” Anouree says. “There was no paperwork required. I was taken away to the sect soon after I was born, to live with the other children there who were ‘acquired’ through the scamming and manipulation of vulnerable parents using false birth certificates. We were then all given Anne’s surname.” There, at Kai Lama, an isolated rural property on Lake Eildon sandwiched between national parks and a lake, up to 22 people were jammed into a heavily curtained, claustrophobic house that reeked of cats. Remote from the world, this would be Anouree’s life for the next 17 years.
The loss of her daughter, whom Treena repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to wrest from Hamilton-Byrne, sent the young mother over the edge into madness. Heartbroken and distressed, she made several suicide attempts until, in 1974, at the age of 26, she overdosed on medication at her family home, dying a lonely death.
Anouree has no memories of her mother and grew to adulthood believing Anne and her husband, Bill, were her parents, not her grandparents. While being Bill’s granddaughter afforded her no special attention, Anouree somehow escaped Anne’s decree of the children dressing in identical outfits and dyeing their hair peroxide blonde. Yet she bitterly
“We were half-starved and had to steal food.”
recalls other ways that she and her “siblings” were controlled. “I shared a small bedroom with up to eight girls. We were home-schooled with a perfunctory education and out of bed every day at 5am with a punishing routine of yoga and meditation. We were half-starved all the time and had to steal food from neighbours to survive.”
Beaten for the slightest misdemeanour and forced to take large quantities of tranquilisers, which rendered them robotic, it was a restrictive and horrific regimen, which enabled Anne to control every facet of their lives. “There was no maternal love, no joy,” Anouree recalls. “It wasn’t a childhood at all, but because we were so isolated, we thought this was normal. I had no comprehension that other children lived differently.”
Imprisoned within the cult and quarantined from the outside world, Anouree withdrew emotionally, becoming virtually mute. “I was timid and shy. It was a way of hiding from the world while still being in it.”
Memories of the extreme violence they endured renders Anouree mute again briefly. “You can’t imagine the horror of being held down and [almost] suffocated in a bucket of water, which happened to all of us about four times. The whole point was to terrify us into absolute submission, but it didn’t work. Regardless of what was thrown at us, Anne couldn’t stop our natural response for survival.”
Freedom Day
Anouree and the other children’s escape from this daily hell – what she describes as “Freedom Day” – came suddenly in 1987, when the cult’s property was raided at 7am by Australian Federal Police and Community Services Victoria. Then
17, Anouree was in a yoga session, which was interrupted by unfamiliar voices and loud footsteps. “One of my older sisters had run away from the cult and had alerted authorities to what was going on at Eildon,” she says. “She flew into the room and announced to us all, ‘You’re free!’”
Herded onto a bus, six of the children were removed to a home where Anouree stayed for three years. Yet, if life outside the cult was liberating, she also found it extremely challenging to adapt to the change. It would take her many years of counselling to unravel the complex, twisted childhood she and the other children had endured. “I didn’t know I had a mother or father until I came out of the sect,” she says. “Sadly, Mum was dead by then, but Dad and
I got on really well when we met. He described Anne as a manipulative monster; a woman who moved people around like chess pieces on a board.” Her dad, Michael, died in 2013, a loss that Anouree still grieves.