Anne Hamilton-Byrne was a yoga teacher in Melbourne who, by the mid-1960s, had persuaded a group of followers — including a significant number of doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, lawyers and social workers — that she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
The group was formally the Santiniketan Park Association. Members called it the Family.
Its distinguishing project was children. Fourteen or more were acquired between the late 1960s and the 1970s, some through adoptions arranged by group members working in the relevant professions, some from mothers within the group who were told their babies had been given to Anne, some through falsified birth documentation. They were raised together at a property on Lake Eildon, isolated from the world, told that Anne and her husband Bill were their parents, and dressed identically with their hair dyed platinum blond.
The children did not attend school outside. They saw almost no one. What they knew about the world was what they were told.
That is the developmental limit case of milieu control, and it is worth distinguishing from every other case in Part 6. An adult who joins a coercive group brings a prior world with them: they have memories of ordinary life, other relationships, a sense of what is normal. Deprogramming that takes work, and it is never complete, which is why people leave. A child raised inside has no prior. The doctrine is not competing with anything.
The regime included beatings, starvation as punishment, and — at adolescence — an initiation involving LSD, administered under supervision by group members with medical qualifications, during which the child was left alone in a darkened room and Anne would appear.
The pharmacology here is not incidental. LSD produces a state of high suggestibility, and administering it to a frightened, malnourished adolescent in an isolated room, followed by an appearance from the figure claiming divinity, is a deliberate procedure.
The attachment structure was the disorganized kind that developmental researchers document in children whose caregiver is also the source of fear. There is no strategy available: the system that drives a frightened child toward their caregiver and the system that drives them away from a threat are both activated by the same person.
The professional membership supplied cover. Doctors signed documents. Psychiatrists at a private hospital referred patients into the group. This is a pattern worth noticing across this part: closed groups that persist for decades usually have professionals inside them.
Victoria Police raided the Lake Eildon property in August 1987 after a young woman who had been expelled went to the authorities. The children were removed.
Hamilton-Byrne was eventually extradited from the United States and, in 1993, fined a small sum for making false declarations. She was never convicted of anything relating to the children. She died in 2019 with dementia.