Twelve Tribes
Twelve Tribes – founded in the US in the 1970s by an ex-school counsellor named Eugene Spriggs – aims to re-create the twelve tribes of Israel and its website promises a “wonderful life” in “a big extended family.”
Cult members live in small, strict communities. Television, the internet, sugar, chocolate and tea are banned. Females must submit to their husbands in the hope of having at least seven children. There are three communities in Australia, all in NSW, at Katoomba, Picton and Coledale.
Children are forbidden to cry or answer back, and if they do, their parents or any “covering” adult must spank them with a long plastic rod. Adults are woken at 6am to the blast of a ram’s horn and after prayers and singing, work in one of the cult’s many businesses.
“The bakery was the worst,” Mark Ilich, a member of 14 years told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. “For the first three weeks we slept on the ground in a shed. We were never paid for our labour either.”
For Mark’s wife, Rosemary Ilich, having to hit their child was something she could never fathom. “I ended up having to hit him almost constantly, for everything,” she said sadly.
The Iliches say they still worry about members not game enough to escape the torture.