The Family (Santiniketan Lodge and Ann Hamilton Byrne)

[Magda Hassan]

On the receiving end of the cult's services was Lord Casey, former Governor-General of Australia and the minister in charge of overseeing the Australian intelligence service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Casey,_Baron_Casey

And here is the Coup De Grace from Sarah Moore. Saving the best and longest piece for last. One of the reasons this post took so long to get out was that I had to read the whole book and edit it down to the juiciest details! But I think I got the significant pages. Keep an eye out for Swami Muktanda of "Eat.Pray.Love" fame and for a certain Governor-General Casey, overseer of Australian intelligence back in the heyday of the cult. This really gets into the nitty-gritty of what a living HELL it must have been to grow up in the Family.
http://www.leavingsiddhayoga.net/unseen.htm

Excerpt from UNSEEN, UNHEARD, UNKNOWN
by Sarah Moore (Hamilton-Byrne)
My mother was Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the leader of a small sect in the Dandenongs called the Family or the Great White Brotherhood. I was a small part of her plan to collect children in what she herself once called a "scientific experiment". Later I discovered it was her intention that we children would continue her sect after the earth was consumed by a holocaust. She saw us as the "inheritors of the earth". I didn't know that then. In those days I was just a child. A child of a guru, but a child no less.
Twenty-two to twenty-eight children in all lived at Uptop in its heyday, although the fosters had varying lengths of stay
She used to say that she couldn't remember all the dates very well because she had so many children. Maybe, in retrospect, we should have realised that was weird but then we never thought it was anything out of the ordinary. She decided upon sets of twins and triplets and gave us ages and birth-dates to fit in with that idea. Birthday changes were just something you accepted. It was as if Anne knew so much more about everything than us and she just might be revealing another piece of our life plan if she changed our birthdays.
We were the children of The Family, the children of Anne Hamilton-Byrne. We were dressed alike. Most of the girls' hair was dyed blond, cut into fringes and worn long with identical hairstyles and identically-coloured ribbons. All the boys had bowl haircuts.
…Why did she raise us in almost total social isolation, miles from anywhere, with minimal contact with other humans apart from the sect members who looked after us? Why did she subject us to the bizarre and cruel regimen in which we grew up? Was it to demonstrate that she had the power to create a generation that would be reared with her beliefs and believing in her? I suspect perhaps that there were more sinister motives than these alone. Some of us had multiple birth certificates and passports, and citizenship of more than one country. Only she knows why thus was and why we were also all dressed alike, why most of us even had our hair dyed identically blond.
I can only conjecture because I will never know for sure. However I suspect that she went to such great lengths in order to enable her to move children around, in and out of the country. Perhaps even to be sold overseas. I'm sure there is a market somewhere in the world for small blond children with no traceable identities. If she did it, it was a perfect scam. Many ex-sect members have said that they were aware that Anne was creating children by a "breeding program" in the late 1960s. These were invisible' kids, because they had no papers and there is no proof that they ever existed. Yet we Hamilton-Byrne children had multiple identities. These identities could perhaps have been loaned to other children and the similarity of our appearance used to cover up their absence. One little blond kid looks very like another in a passport photo. I don't suppose we will ever know the truth because only Anne Hamilton-Byrne knows the truth about the whole affair and the truth is something she will never tell.
…I am training to be a doctor but sometimes I think my medical career will be sabotaged because there are still many in the sect who have a lot of influence in professional and academic circles. It may sound melodramatic, but I know that some who were Anne's enemies have disappeared in strange circumstances.
….You would always hear the alarm clock going off upstairs in the lounge room where Aunty Helen slept on guard against food thieves. She would come stumbling downstairs, guided by torchlight, and go first to the boys' bedroom and wake up Aunty Liz or Trish who slept in there. They would lurch out to the bathroom and get dressed.
Aunty Helen would light the gas light in the boys' room, and then go around checking the boys' beds to see who had wet them the night before. The poor children guilty of this would be led by the ear into the bathroom to have a belting administered by Aunty Trish or Liz. Then they would be shoved, still in their pyjamas, under a cold shower, no matter how freezing the weather outside.
Every morning I awoke to the sounds of children howling as they got their first belting for the day. Rare was the day that no-one wet the bed, at least until 1986, and even then the younger boys continued to do so on occasions.
The unfortunate child then had to wash his own sheets out during breakfast, and often had to miss lunch as well. The sheets were piled in a corner of the bathroom until breakfast time and they smelled horrible.
…Also, once a week, or more if it was considered that an individual had a weight problem, we were weighed and the results entered in a book to be communicated to Anne. She had a horror of fatness and was obsessed with body shape and weight. She always insisted that we girls were getting too fat, even though in some cases it was malnutrition rather than extra kilos that caused our bellies to stick out.
Weighing was a very serious business particularly serious for us because if it was considered that we were putting on too much weight we would have our food rations cut down and that was a dreadful proposition food being the most important thing in our lives. We girls viewed the scales with hatred. They made our miserable lives even worse.
Some of the girls also showered in the morning if there was time. We showered every two days in a rostered system, some in the morning and some at night. We were allowed a maximum of three minutes under the shower, and no washing down there'!. We were forbidden to look at our bodies under the shower we were supposed to shower with our eyes shut and also we were ordered not to look at anyone else. Particularly forbidden was girls coming into contact with boys. I do believe that I had not seen a naked male body even in a book , as these too were heavily censored- until HSC Biology. In summer, when water was scarce, we often couldn't shower and had to wash from a bucket or else one bath would be filled and all of us had to use it. The water was pretty dark and scungy by the time it was the turn of the last few.
…After this we had to be on the floor in position for hatha yoga by 6:25 to 6:30 at the latest. Hatha time for lasted one hour, during which we followed a prescribed order of four main asanas (positions) with intervening minor exercises and relaxation.
As we did yoga every day of our lives from a very young age, we were extremely supple. We eventually got given red towels which we had to lay out to do our yoga on; before that time we laid out blankets, which I remember used to slip around on the lino. We lay on the floor side by side, about half a metre between us. The next row was placed in between the others to form staggered rows. Each person had a specific place and one child, who lay perpendicular to the rest at the front, acted as supervisor and directed the pace of the exercise and kept the time.
Hatha finished at 7:20 7:25 and then the girls picked up their towels. Hatha yoga was often the only exercise we got for the day especially during the long periods of time when we were totally confined indoors. This happened when there were people in the vicinity or some suspected media or police interest. It could go on for many months. Or we could be confined simply as punishment.
While we were doing our yoga, most of the Aunties were upstairs having their breakfast. THEY got tea and toast. They also read a daily affirmation from a book called `God Calling'. Sometimes one Aunty was left downstairs to keep an eye on us or would wash our clothes.
….Anne Hamilton-Byrne believed in discipline absolutely. We believed we were her children. She was, we were told, Jesus Christ reincarnated. This was rarely explicitly said by her: it was more assumed by how she referred to herself and acted. Her religion was based on distorted perceptions of the Hindu notion of "karma": that you reap what you sow. Suffering as children was supposed not just to expiate the sins of this life, but also the sins of our past lives. Suffering built up our chances of salvation and redemption. Anne's religion practically called for child-abuse.
Because she travelled so much she left two books of instructions called Mummy's Rule Books'. These books listed penalties for infractions. They had entries such as : "If David rocks or sways during meditation, he is to be hit over the head with a chair" and rules about everything, even about how many hours of piano practice each child was to do. These were signed by Anne. She encouraged the Aunties to belt us.
The guiding principle of our rigid existence was discipline. Discipline was the word used to justify abuse. It was discipline that we had to agree with no matter what.
It was enforced in the early days with beltings and the deprivation of food by the missing of meals almost every day. Later this changed to public humiliation, lines to write, the missing of privileges' and less common but more severe beltings.
We often had to watch others being beaten. If we took our eyes away that would be interpreted as disapproval and if you disapproved that was a worse crime. Public beatings were held to flush out insubordinates. Anyone who got upset or refused to look or appeared to be disagreeing that the person should be punished, got beaten as well.
Punishments came in waves. Whatever Anne considered the best way of disciplining us was enforced until she changed her mind. So I remember harsh times and softer times.
….Megan Dawes once missed meals for a day because she was caught wearing odd socks. We weren't even allowed to go to the toilet until the designated recess time and so of course kids would wet their pants and be belted for that. One time we had a baby called Madeleine staying with us for a few weeks. She was locked in a cot all day with the sides up. She had not reached the walking stage and so couldn't get out of the cot and get to the toilet. However that didn't stop the Aunties. She still got belted when she wet or dirtied her nappy. I remember Trish ordering me to bathe Madeleine in a basin after she had soiled herself. The water had to be icy cold as a punishment and Trish smacked her after I bathed her. She was screaming and I had difficulty holding her still in the cold water.
…We were often punished for rocking. We used to rock ourselves to sleep at night because we felt so miserable, sitting up on our haunches and swaying to and fro, or just rocking our head from side to side.. Often after a belting we would call out Mummy, Daddy' as we rocked to and fro, calling out to a Mummy and Daddy who were not there and did not care. When we were younger a few of us, myself included used to headbang as we rocked: it was a way of seeking comfort. If we were caught, we were punished with another belting, or being put outside on the concrete for the remainder of the night, or getting cold water tipped over us. Rocking was considered to be bad because , even when we were tiny children it was interpreted as a form of sexual gratification.
…For most of my early childhood, I remember being constantly hungry. We were starving and it was Anne's policy that we were. We were so hungry we ate dirt and leaves. We were so hungry we ate grass and scavenged in the rubbish bins. We were so hungry we ate the cats' and dogs' food, we ate bread and seed left out for the birds. We were so hungry we stole anything we could. Vitamin C capsules were considered by us as manna from Heaven.
….The irony was that stealing food was the crime for which we were most often punished. It was a Catch-22 situation: we were so hungry we stole food and if we stole food we were made to miss more meals. In light of this miserable situation it wasn't surprising that most of us were obsessed with food.
Extraordinary measures were taken to prevent us stealing food. The kitchen cupboards were padlocked. There was a chain and padlock around the fridge, and an Aunty was delegated to guard the kitchen at all times. Amazingly, despite these measures, we were sometimes successful in stealing food. But, more often than not, the ever-vigilant Aunties noticed immediately if anything was missing.
…As well as trying to steal, we used to scavenge for what we could. The younger children would crawl under the dining table after the meal, supposedly to sweep up any mess, but their real purpose would be to eat whatever scraps or crumbs had fallen. Others of us would raid the rubbish bins and the compost bin. I only ate leaves and grass to assuage in some way the dreadful emptiness in my stomach. It was a desperation measure. Any edible plants and flowers were dealt with very quickly. I remember the nasturtiums in particular disappeared within minutes of flowering. We also ate the honeysuckle bush, and another type of grass that had a sweet tasting centre.
…The climax of each child's drug-taking came in the sect practice known as going-through'. I describe my own experience of this in another chapter. However during this process, also known as "clearing", we were given LSD and a number of other hallucinogenic drugs. It was a state that was basically a sustained LSD trip. It was meant to clear your soul and take you to a higher plane of understanding, and was perhaps the key to Anne's spiritual influence.
….The end of the massive vitamin doses coincided with the death of a prominent sect member called Joan Villimek, who owned the Newhaven Private Psychiatric Hospital in Kew. We believe that she was supplying the money to buy them; as it was inconceivable that Anne dig into her own pocket to provide anything, other than the occasional bizarre gifts and dresses she bought for us.
Being ill brought few pay-offs for us children. It did not result in appropriate medication or extra emotional support and affection. In fact, it often led to punishment rather than sympathy. For instance, David, who had chronic asthma and a history of other allergies, was punished by the Aunties for coughing and wheezing all the time. He was never given bronchodilators such as Ventolin or steroids the proper treatment for his condition. He was just told that he was a wheezer, as if this was something that was his fault. And if he woke the Aunties at night with his coughing or wheezing, they would often tip water over him and lock him outside the house for the rest of the night, or just belt him. Often he slept in the bathroom because of his noise'. He was even denied meals as a deterrent. Symptoms of any illness were attributed by Anne and the Aunties as all in the mind' or attention-seeking' and if someone were really sick, they tended to just be ignored.
Homoeopathy remedies, prescribed by Anne, were given to us regularly for all sorts of reasons. Anne proclaimed herself an expert on this form of treatment and told us she had studied it for six years in Tibet. For the affliction of disobedience' we were given Stramonium, for shock' (a term meaning either physical or emotional upset) the treatment was Aconite, for thinking wrongly' Pulsatilla, for rocking at night' and for farting Nux Vomica. These homoeopathic medicines were administered in addition to our usual punishments for offences, and in addition to other drugs.
…In an attempt to cure Cassandra of her attacks, Anne and the Aunties began using imported drugs on her. The drugs came from Germany and were meant to make her grow. At the time I thought they were steroids because two of the other kids, Timothy and Arrianne, had been given a course of them once before. Dr Christobel Wallace and the other Aunties called these drugs Timothy and Arrianne were given steroids. Anne wanted Arrianne to grow because she was very small, but she never grew much. I think her growth in height was actually halted by the early doses of steroids given to her.
…Sure, it was much more fun and more exciting than the life Uptop: in America and Hawaii we even got to spend some time with Baba Muktananda. But, from memories of the rest of her performance and attitude towards us, it seems unlikely that she was spending money to take us overseas just so that we could have fun, or spend time with Baba.
I don't quite understand either why or how Anne got involved with Baba. He certainly paid her a lot of attention and treated her with respect. In the end she ended up causing a lot of trouble in the ashram, and several of Baba's close disciples defected to the Family, including two prominent swamis of Baba. So maybe she was in it because she saw an opportunity to establish another sphere of influence. I was present when Swami Tajomayananda got initiated by Anne into the family, and, knowing what a wonderful person he was, because he had come to stay at Eildon with us for a while before that, I am still puzzled by why he would want to join a sect where everyone was so miserable, when it seemed to me that around Baba everyone was so happy.
Whatever Anne's reasons for taking us overseas, life there was much better than that Uptop. We still lived a fairly isolated existence, but when we were in America we had trips every day to Baba's ashram down the road, and interacted with the other disciples in the evening activities at the ashram. We also saw Baba at a private darshan about once a week, when he could come down to our house to see us.
At these darshans Baba was very good to us. In fact, in retrospect, it was remarkable that he gave us so much time and attention because at that time he was very famous and had many thousands of devotees worldwide, and lots of demands for his time and attention. Of course at the time we did not realise that and merely lapped up his affection and enjoyed the fun we had with him. He was very fond of us and would talk and laugh with us and give us chocolates and little gifts. We worshipped and adored him we wanted nothing better than to stay at his feet forever. Once he asked us if we wanted to leave Anne and go to Ganeshpuri and stay with him in his ashram. We all enthusiastically said yes, and were later belted and abused by Anne for being so disloyal. I am not sure if he ever knew or guessed what our life was like: he certainly never criticised Anne and treated her with a lot of respect apart from occasionally playing practical jokes on her, much to our (stifled) amusement.
…Among the many things that Anne told us children was that she was a direct descendant of the French Royal Family. She also said we were indirect descendants of Jesus Christ because, she reasoned, she and thus us as her children, were from the House of David, which was the House of Jesus. The lineage was all set out in the front of the Bible. She told us that we weren't allowed to tell anyone about this, because royalty were no longer popular and we "might get our heads cut off"!
….In fact the sect had come to the attention of the journalist who wrote the articles purely accidentally long before that because he owned land in the Dandenongs opposite Dr John Mackay, a sect psychiatrist. The journalist, David Elias, first realised there was something strange going on when his daughter had been playing with Helen, Dr Mackay's daughter. Elias's daughter said Helen Mackay "didn't just have one mummy, she had lots".
Gradually Elias became more interested in the sect's activities and in 1979, while he was writing a series on alternative religions, he tried to write something on the Family, he was warned off by Dr Raynor Johnson, who threatened to sue the paper. Dr Johnson was at the time a very influential man. He was the retired head of Melbourne University's Queen's College and was a world respected authority on religion. He was also co-founder with Anne of The Family.
After The Age' was threatened with a writ it took another four years before Elias could come up with anything else on the Family because of the incredible secrecy that surrounded them.
The information on Anne Hamilton-Byrne he unearthed came from months of digging. He learned that the woman we knew as Anne Hamilton-Byrne was born Evelyn Grace Victoria Edwards in Sale, Victoria. She was one of seven children born to a railway engine cleaner Ralph Vernon Edwards and his English second wife Florence Louise.
Apparently young Evelyn's mother was known for setting fire to her own curly red hair and for having an interest in psychic phenomenon and talking to the dead. Subsequently other journalists have reported that Anne's mother was mentally ill and died alone in a mental asylum. Her aunts in England were institutionalised and her sister suffered from psychiatric problems as well.
Newspapers have reported that Anne grew up in a large family. After her mother was committed to Ararat Mental Asylum, Anne spent some of her childhood in the Old Brighton Orphanage.
Although she claims to have gone to Firbank Church of England Grammar School, school records show she began at grade one at Sunshine Primary School on February 7, 1929 and that she had come there from the orphanage.
She has said she was handicapped at school but fellow school pupils do not recall any callipers. In fact according to newspaper reports they only remember "an overweight child whose nickname was Puddy'."
She has claimed to have had qualifications in psychiatric nursing, homoeopathy, physiotherapy and a pilot's licence. She also said she had been a famous opera singer, winning the Sun Aria awards, and later studying with Dame Joan Hammond and Dame Joan Sutherland. Journalists who have searched the records find no evidence of any of those qualifications. She also has a number of aliases including Fiona Macdonald, Anne Hamilton, and Michelle Sutherland.
In 1941 she married an twenty four year old RAAF policeman named Harris and had her daughter Judith (who later called herself Natasha). Harris was killed in a car accident in 1955. Newspapers report, though with no substantiation, that Harris's death was predicted to Anne by a Tibetan guru she had earlier met. As with anything connected to Anne, it's hard to know the truth.
Apparently after that Anne disappeared for four years. Some reports say she spent several years in Geelong where she gave yoga lessons for $1 a head in a church hall, then set herself up as a therapist of some sort in Melbourne. It is recorded that in 1959 she enrolled in a yoga class in Melbourne.
She called herself Anne Harris but registered her name as Anne Hamilton. She was asked to leave the class after putting a spell' on a fellow student. In the sixties she married a former Navy officer named Michael Riley and went to live in the Dandenong Ranges, just outside Melbourne.
The marriage didn't last long. But it was useful to Anne in other ways. Riley worked as Dr Raynor Johnson's gardener in those days and this may have been how Anne came to know the man with whom she went on to co-found The Family.
A group formed around Raynor Johnson and Anne. Dr Johnson was known within the group as the John the Baptist figure to Anne's Christ. In the study of his big old house in the hills, they met on Thursdays and Sundays and the talk would be on the principles of yoga and meditation. Finally this group became more formal and developed into the beginning of The Family. They built a place called the Santiniketan Lodge. The Lodge was named after the school founded by the Indian mystic and poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Bill Byrne was an earth-moving contractor from Traralgon in Victoria. In 1968 he took his son Michael to the Newhaven Psychiatric hospital for treatment. This was the hospital that was owned by one of the sect members and staffed in part by psychiatrists, doctors and nurses who were sect members. It didn't take long for Bill to come under Anne's spell and he soon left his wife and moved in with Anne. They married in 1978. Bill had been a local government councillor and was still commuting from Gippsland when the first children were arriving at Winberra.

Key passage coming up and a great line (first sentence of paragraph) to boot. Note that Lord Casey was rumoured to have contributed large sums of money to the cult and was apparently nursed back to health by them.

It has been suggested that Anne would have had no power without a syringe. She claimed a lot of knowledge of medical things. She said she had been the matron of a hospital but there is no evidence she ever did nursing. I can't emphasise the importance of nursing in the sect enough. It was critical to the way she viewed the Aunties and, it was what she planned for the girls' future profession. She said nursing was one of the ideal occupations because it was a form of selfless service' that led to spiritual advancement. We knew that on their weeks off from Uptop the Aunties were either training to be nurses or practised as nurses. Several of the Aunties nursed Lord Casey, a former Governor-General of Australia. Rumour has it that he made a significant donation to the sect.

Lord Casey had great taste in Doctors

Taking a quick break from Moore's book text to supplement her mention of Lord Casey. This is from an Australian biography site and has more detail on Casey.
http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130426b.htm.htm

In public, Casey seemed to be a devoted Cold-War warrior, fervently supportive of Britain and the U.S.A., and deeply hostile towards the Soviet Union and China; he was the minister responsible for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service."

OK, back to the mind control drugs…

I have mentioned earlier the alarming drug dependency of the sect and how we were constantly administered prescription drugs. There was always a lot of medical paraphernalia around Uptop: syringes, tablets, gauges and more. I remember one whole cupboard containing hundreds of bottles of homoeopathic medicines. This cupboard was in the downstairs girls' room, and one summer we broke in and stole lots of this homoeopathy, because the pills were sugar-coated and tasted like lollies.
…Anne was extremely vain. Appearance was all in The Family. Ugly children were treated appallingly, as if they were less worthy. According to ex-sect members, people were even screened by Anne on the basis of their looks when they were trying to get into the sect.
As for us, Anne wanted people to believe we were her children, and she thought she was beautiful, so it was a certainty that she screened us on our looks, or at least screened our parents. We were to be the ones who would carry on the work of the sect we were a direct reflection on her so she was intimately concerned about our appearances. She used to talk a lot about "breeding" and talk about us being from the "right stock".

A very Nazi attitude, obviously…

Anne was always a very rich woman who never spared herself anything. Lately though, she has been crying poor. But judging by all the real estate she owns throughout the world, I estimate she is worth at least A$150 million. Broom Farm, her three-storey mansion and hundred acres or so of farmland in Langton Green, Kent, England must be worth several million alone. She owns at least one more house in England in Crowborough, and, I think, another in Red Hill. She, or her companies, Fafette and Audette, owns at least a dozen houses in Ferny Creek and another mansion in Olinda. She and Bill have or did have a few years ago, a huge property just outside Traralgon. In the United States, there is another large property of hers in the Catskill Mountains outside New York, America with three houses on it. And of course there was Uptop, five acres of waterfront land in a popular holiday area.

.. In The Age' in September 1983 David Elias wrote at length about Anne's methods and about Newhaven Hospital. The Hospital was owned by Mrs Marion Villimek and she was both a director and matron. He was contacted by a former patient, George Ellis, whose case perfectly illustrates the way the hospital was run.

In 1966 Mr Ellis was a patient at Newhaven, being treated for alcoholism. He had been a medical student at Queen's College at Melbourne University and when Dr Raynor Johnson was still head. Dr Johnson visited a patient in the next bed and they recognised each other. Another frequent visitor to this patient was Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who was then Mrs Riley. "This was to be the lady who captivated me with her talk of spiritual things, her knowledge of God and a familiarity with things psychic and her soothsaying.", he said.
Mr Ellis told The Age': "During her visits to Newhaven Mrs Riley became friendly with me even then she had a sort of charisma. She suggested to me that on my discharge, it would be courting disaster to return to my bachelor flat and suggested that it would be a better idea to come and stay with her and another person at her home in Ferny Creek." George Ellis went to live with Anne and pretty soon found he was being "introduced to the mysteries of the procedures of the sect".
He was initiated into the cult and later married another member at Anne's suggestion that marriage has since broken down. He detailed his attendances at "clearings" (also called "go-throughs") where sect members were given drugs under the supervision of three psychiatrists. He claimed the clearings were carried out at Newhaven and in private houses. Sometimes as many as six sect members would be going-through at one time.
He talked about Anne's method which involved having sect members sit with those going through and reporting back to her anything that was said. Anne then used this knowledge to create the impression that she had psychic powers. He and his family were sent to England several times and once to India by Anne.
Later Anne sent him to Uptop as a cook and to look after us children. He talked about how he and other sect members had nursed Lord Casey, after a serious road accident. Mr Ellis was assigned to watch over Lord Casey at night and to give him his medication. All this despite the fact that he had only ever had a small amount of training as a medical student.

You would think the guy who oversees Australia's intelligence service could get an actual doctor?

[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Casey,_Baron_Casey"]
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