Cults
These insidious organisations have torn families apart and left their mark on the nation
of Australia
The Family
In the early 1960s, yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-byrne charmed Melbourne-based parapsychologist Raynor Johnson into believing she was a spiritual being who could see into the future. Over the next 30 years, together with her husband Bill, the two accumulated 500 followers and formed Australia’s most notorious apocalyptic cult: The Family.
Based on a mixture of religions and with the aim of designing a master race, HamiltonByrne thought she could educate the world after Armageddon.
The cult attracted doctors, professors, lawyers and some of the wealthiest and most powerful members of Melbourne’s elite.
Caught in a web of her wicked lies, members handed over their children to be raised in her “school” in Central Victoria’s Lake Eildon. And for almost two decades, the 28 helpless children who were given up and became a part of this disjointed “family” were regularly administered LSD, starved and routinely beaten at the hands of female cult followers dubbed their “aunties”.
They were also dressed identically with matching bleached blonde hair. To avoid suspicion when people visited the school, the children were taught to roll their heads to one side and act uncoordinated, as if they were members of a specialneeds school.
For years this tactic worked, and it wasn’t until 1987 that members were rescued during a police raid. The public was outraged but Hamilton-byrne, surprisingly, was only given a $5000 fine for falsifying documents.
She was diagnosed with dementia in 2007 and passed away in a Melbourne nursing home in February this year, aged 96. Raynor Johnson died in May 1987, three months before the police raid.
While some time has passed since members of the heinous cult were finally freed, many have been unable to let go of this horrific chapter in their lives.