His hair colour didn’t help nor, possibly, his personality. Total obedience.” The children were initiated with ‘huge, relentless doses of LSD’ in trips that lasted for daysĪ few years ago speculation emerged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had grown up in The Family. “That included what to think, what to wear, what to eat, who to marry, who not to marry. “There was only one rule: do absolutely everything she said,” says David Whitaker, a former child survivor. Once they had submitted, she’d dictate every aspect of their lives. Preaching a mishmash of Christianity, eastern mysticism and apocalyptic prophecy, she allegedly forced followers, including children, to take dangerous amounts of LSD and other hallucinogenics as part of prolonged initiation rites. Mother dearest: members of The Family were given this photograph of Anne and one of her 28 children to place on the altars in each of their rooms. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she’d say on first meeting a potential recruit. The glamorous guru used the same tactic on her adult followers, handpicking them from Melbourne’s wealthy professional elite with promises of spiritual fulfilment in the 1960s and 70s when new age seeking was all the rage. “She was offering it and then taking it back. “Anne wasn’t giving love,” says Parker, whose young son was one of Hamilton-Byrne’s victims. To keep her eerie brood under her control, they say she subjected them to vicious beatings, starvation and emotional torture. It emerged that over the years Hamilton-Byrne had collected 28 children through bogus adoptions and “gifts” from followers, dressing them in identical clothes and bleaching their hair platinum. The police, acting on information from two child escapees, raided the cult in 1987. Hidden away in the countryside outside Melbourne, The Family’s motto was “Unseen, unknown, unheard”. One of the few female cult leaders in history – and apparently one of the cruellest – Hamilton-Byrne operated in almost total secrecy over two decades.
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