Cult leader illegally adopted ‘family’
‘‘They were trying to bring [the children] up as perfect and to be the people who would take over when the world collapsed ...’’
Anne Hamilton-Byrne
cult leader b December 30, 1921
d June 13, 2019
If Anne Hamilton-Byrne’s transformation from glamorous yoga teacher to reincarnation of Jesus Christ seemed unlikely, plenty of affluent people in and around Melbourne bought into it. Among her acolytes was the celebrated physicist Raynor Johnson, who, as a selfproclaimed reincarnation of John the Baptist, was her chief prophet.
The progenitors of Hamilton-Byrne’s brave new world were the children who were in some cases illegally registered as her own. Some had their hair dyed peroxide blond and cut into a
‘‘pudding bowl’’ bob as a paean to their ‘‘mother’’. Disobedience was punished with beatings, starvation diets or being locked overnight in a cold shed. When the children reached adolescence they had an initiation involving LSD.
As the leader of the cult known as ‘‘the Family’’, Hamilton-Byrne claimed that the world was facing an apocalypse. Rosie Jones, a co-director of the acclaimed documentary The
Family, said: ‘‘They were trying to bring them [the children] up as perfect and to be the people who would take over when the world collapsed,
which they thought was imminent.’’
Johnson wrote in his diary that he was enthralled from the moment Hamilton-Byrne knocked on his door and cast an otherworldly gaze on him. Alluring and lithe with long blonde hair, she was soon teaching Hatha yoga at Johnson’s home and then meditations: a mix of eastern and western religions based on the principle that spiritual truths are universal.
The cult grew after the purchase of a property by Johnson and his wife near Santiniketan Park, near Melbourne, in 1968. Over the years 28 children were adopted and some were told that Hamilton-Byrne was their biological mother. A few were the offspring of her followers; others were the children of unmarried mothers, manipulated into giving up their babies.
At the movement’s peak in the 1970s Hamilton-Byrne had more than 500 followers. All gave her money, much of which she spent on plastic surgery. Dissent was corrected with a dose of LSD, which Hamilton-Byrne kept on blotting paper in a jar. She would personally guide them through their spiritual ‘‘trips’’.
In 1987 one of her ‘‘children’’, Sarah, aged 17, rebelled and was expelled from the Family and told to ‘‘die in a gutter’’. She went to the police. The house was raided and six children removed.
In 1993 Hamilton-Byrne was convicted of fraud for falsely registering births and fined A$5000. She was not prosecuted for child abuse because the authorities did not believe the children were robust enough to stand in the witness box. The cult continues to this day.
Evelyn Grace Victoria Edwards was the oldest of seven children born in Sale, Victoria, in
1921. Her father, Ralph, a World War I veteran, was often absent. Her British-born mother, Florence (nee Hoile), who claimed to be a medium who could talk to the dead, was in and out of mental hospitals. Evelyn spent part of her childhood in an orphanage.
In 1941 she married Lionel Harris, and gave birth to her only biological child, Judith, who sued her mother, settled in Britain and predeceased her. Hamilton-Byrne’s grief after the death of Lionel in a car accident in 1955 set her on the path to ‘‘enlightenment’’. She changed her name to Anne Hamilton in 1959.
In 1965 she married Michael Riley, a naval officer from South Africa, but the marriage did not last. She later took up with Bill Byrne, a British-born businessman who had been drawn into the Family, but they did not marry until
1978. He died in 2001.
Some of Hamilton-Byrne’s ‘‘children’’ sued for compensation, but most of the cases could not go forward after she was certified as mentally incapacitated because of dementia.
She remained fixated by the idea of her benevolent motherhood to the end, communicating with a doll that she thought was one of her children. Her estate is estimated to be worth more than NZ$35 million. –