Growing up with The Family: inside Anne Hamilton-Byrnes sinister cult
Growing up with The Family: inside Anne Hamilton-Byrnes sinister cult
Posted by John P. Bradford // November 21, 2016
Cruel and charismatic, Anne Hamilton-Byrne was the Australian leader of a doomsday cult who thought she was the Messiah. Abigail Haworth on the woman behind The Family
Anne Hamilton-Byrne wore pearls and Chanel perfume. She played the harp and sang soprano. She had blonde hair, styled in waves that caught the light. As leader of The Family, the Australian doomsday cult she founded in the 1960s, she claimed to be Jesus reborn as a woman. Much of her power, say her former followers, lay in her grey-blue eyes. In ancient times we hear about enchantresses who could enslave people with one glance, says ex-acolyte Fran Parker. She had eyes that looked through your soul. Hamilton-Byrnes ultimate tool of enslavement, however, was something she pinpointed herself in a rare radio interview after the cults devastating abuses were exposed. It was love. Just love.
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. Hidden away in the countryside outside Melbourne, The Familys motto was Unseen, unknown, unheard. The police, acting on information from two child escapees, raided the cult in 1987. 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. To keep her eerie brood under her control, they say she subjected them to vicious beatings, starvation and emotional torture.
Anne wasnt giving love, says Parker, whose young son was one of Hamilton-Byrnes victims. She was offering it and then taking it back. She broke peoples spirit.
The glamorous guru used the same tactic on her adult followers, handpicking them from Melbournes wealthy professional elite with promises of spiritual fulfilment in the 1960s and 70s when new age seeking was all the rage. Ive been waiting for you, shed say on first meeting a potential recruit. You are special.