At 7am on 14 August 1987, police raided the headquarters of Australian New Age group The Great White Brotherhood, removing 28 children. The group’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, was believed by its members to be the reincarnation of Christ in female form. But the story of the cult better known as The Family is one of mass manipulation, torture, and abuse. 
Anne Hamilton-Byrne was born Evelyn Grace Victoria Edwards in December 1921. She came from an impoverished background in eastern Australia, the first of seven children born to father Ralph and English-born mother Florence. Her father first left home when she was three years old, and he was in and out of his children’s lives for years. Her mother believed she was a medium who could communicate with the dead, and tried to convince the community in their small town of her gift. Many believed her and would pay for her services, but after she set her hair alight in the street, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and sent to a psychiatric hospital. Evelyn was 20 when her mother was first committed, and she had spent much of her life witnessing the effects of her illness. Florence would continue to be moved from institution to institution until she eventually died in hospital.
Eager to carve out a new life for herself, by 1941, Evelyn had changed her name to Anne Hamilton and married farmer Lionel Harris. Her need for reinvention also saw her have numerous cosmetic surgeries. The newlyweds planned to adopt a child, and set their heart on a baby boy from Barnardo’s adoption agency. It seemed as if Anne’s dream of a new life was about to come true, until tragedy struck. Lionel was killed in a car crash just before they were to finalise their adoption. Losing both her husband and her dream of a baby was something she would never recover from. Alone and in need of respite, Anne immersed herself in the practice of yoga. It had been gaining in popularity, and she said it helped her achieve spiritual peace. She loved the sense of community it gave her and began to lead classes for local women, mostly the wives of wealthy professionals.  She discovered people would follow her easily and so, in 1960, she became a tantric yoga instructor. Her classes blended yoga with philosophical teachings, and were a huge success.  Offering spiritual guidance to middle-aged women, Anne assembled a group of people who were looking for help. Their children had left home, their husbands were having affairs, and they became her family – a group of women who loved and respected her.

But Anne’s need for control and her fear of abandonment were beginning to turn into a sinister plan. She convinced many women in her groups to divorce their husbands, leaving them with only Anne to turn to – she became all-important to them. Unbeknown to the vulnerable, suburban housewives, Anne’s talent for manipulation was about to help her get what she desired more than anything else – children. But she needed to expand her small yoga family, and for that she needed powerful allies who could help her.
In 1962, respected academic Dr Raynor Johnson became her goal. With his help, Anne would be able to legitimise her group and gain influence with respected professionals. She slept with his gardener to glean private and personal information about him – information she could use to convince him she was a clairvoyant. One day, which Johnson would later refer to as, “The day of destiny”, 
she knocked on his front door. She told him she knew he was going to India and that his wife was going to get sick. Both turned out to be true and from then on, he believed she was the messiah. She continued to feed him lies, including convoluted tales about her past, and told him that she wanted to give him eternal life.
Johnson had recently become interested in metaphysics and was particularly susceptible to claims of divinity. In May 
1963, Anne performed her first “miracle”. When one of her clients was involved in a car accident, she injured her eye so badly, doctors told her it would leave her partially blind. Anne immediately organised spiritual help that healed the woman without lasting injury, and Johnson told his wife it convinced him of Anne’s reincarnation as the female Christ. From that point, he began referring influential and powerful friends to her. His rich colleagues quickly fell under her spell, and, in turn, they gathered their friends together for her.  
For the remainder of the 1960s, Anne formed a pyramid structure of professionals, who doted on her and her teachings.  She convinced them the apocalypse was coming and that they were responsible for reeducating survivors.

By 1968, Anne had assembled a 500-strong following. The group was comprised of high-powered individuals: lawyers who could defend The Family in court and forge passports; doctors and nurses who gave Anne access to elderly people who would surrender their fortunes to her, and judges who would sentence anyone who threatened them. Raynor was an invaluable asset, but she’d also made another union that was to prove essential. Doctor Howard Whitaker worked at a private psychiatric hospital that used psychedelic drugs to treat patients, specifically LSD – one of the most potent hallucinogenics in existence. Anne was able to lure Whitaker into getting her illegal prescriptions, which she used in initiations she called “clearings”.   Every new member would be put into a room and injected with LSD, then left. After a few hours alone, Anne would appear in a doorway wearing a white gown, and convince them they were seeing Jesus Christ.
By now, over a quarter of the sect was made up of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, and Anne began using them to 
set in motion her plan to achieve the ultimate dream – she began stealing newborns. The first child Anne stole was Sarah Moore. The doctor delivering her was Raynor Johnson’s daughter, a member of The Family.  As soon as Sarah was born, a pillow was placed over the mother’s head, and she was injected with tranquilisers.  She was just 16 years old, the biological father had run off, and she had been disowned by her family – it all made her a perfect candidate for Anne’s plan.  Sarah didn’t know Anne wasn’t really her mother until she was a teenager.
Anne continued to steal children for years, using the cult’s lawyers, who forged papers for new additions to the family.  Some of the social workers in the cult also created an additional source by bypassing regular legal routes for adoption. Sometimes, mothers even gave their children to Anne in exchange for miracles. She would enlist corrupt doctors to poison Family members who had a young child, then offer to “cure” them in exchange for giving up the child.  When the woman agreed, Anne would order the doctors to stop the poisoning and she’d recover.
In 1971, Anne moved her first seven children to a house at Lake Eildon in Victoria called Uptop. The children were all aged three and under, and thought they were siblings. Uptop was hidden in a wooded area, and other Family members bought property in and around the area. The members wanted to stay close to their leader for fear of the apocalypse – with the advent of nuclear weapons, they were told by Anne the world could end at any moment. She said that, while the rest of the world would be annihilated, the children she had chosen to save would survive. The children were told they had been “given the responsibility of perfect children who would save the world”. Anne was securing what she called the “white master race”, giving them identical clothes and haircuts.

In 1974, they set up a school, but by then, Anne’s interest in being a mother had waned. The children craved her affection, believing she was their real mum, but Anne left the children’s care to three women from within the group. Elizabeth Whitaker, Trish McFarland, and Margot MacLellan were called “aunties”, and were strict disciplinarians who kept the children on a military-style regime. At 5.30am, they awoke and made their beds, followed by an hour of yoga meditation, then they were sent to a school room. The children were punished for any deviation from the regime, and beatings and torture were common. In one incident, a Family member who had come to teach the children art noticed his brushes were missing. When he informed the aunties, they gathered the children together, filled a bucket of water and dunked their heads under. The children were brought to the brink of drowning for hours. Anne seemed to take pleasure in the torture, asking the aunties to hold the phone so she could hear the kids scream as they were beaten. 

In the mid 1970s, the cult built a brick temple across the road from Raynor Johnson’s home. There, they would commune on Sundays and Thursdays for LSD-fuelled sermons. They also began giving the children LSD. When Leanne Creese turned 14, she endured 
the initiation ceremony referred to as “Going Through”. She was injected with LSD, and locked in a room where she was kept dosed up for days. She screamed so loudly during the ordeal, neighbours across the lake called police. The charismatic Anne welcomed them in and served them tea as the children were stuffed into a crawl space covered with plywood.  The children were kept in the hole until the police left – they were too afraid to scream for help.
It was far from the first time the authorities had been called to Uptop. The police had discovered the children on several occasions, but Anne had prepared them with scripts on how to answer difficult questions. She told the children that the police were evil thugs, and if they were discovered, they would be beaten and raped. The children were also starved. They were weighed regularly and if deemed too heavy, Anne would withhold food. As a result, the children would make themselves sick to reduce their weight.
The girls were also taught that pubescent changes were nasty, vile, and dirty.  Anne made all the girls incredibly phobic, and each of them entered adolescence with body dysmorphia. They were told they needed to stay thin for the future of the human race, but Sarah had found a way into the aunties’ room and began making herself toast whenever she could. She was discovered when she wiped the butter knife on a towel, and was brutally beaten and thrown down a flight of stairs. But Sarah was getting older and more defiant. She began to take long walks and one night, she came across a household who had left their window open. She broke in and stole all the food she could, stashing it in the woods. She then began leading her brothers and sisters out at night to break into nearby homes and find food. The starving, miserable and scared children were beginning to rebel.

In 1978, Anne married William ‘Bill’ Byrne, an ex-RAF officer who was rich. Anne had amassed a fortune herself, and decided 
she no longer needed to convince people she was the messiah. Having obtained everything, she wanted; she was nearing 
the end of one of the longest cons ever played. But, in 1987, she did something that would become her unravelling – she allowed Sarah and Leanne to make friends outside the community.
Kathy and Helen were teenage sisters Sarah and Leanne went to school with, and they were not shy about telling Kathy and Helen 
of their unhappy existence, referring to themselves as POAs (Prisoners Of Anne). One night, Kathy and Helen’s mother Erica drove the girls home, and Sarah invited her into Uptop. When Anne learned what Sarah had done, she threw Sarah out of The Family, telling her, “You are no longer our daughter – go and die in the gutter.” Sarah went to live with Kathy and Helen, and after divulging stories about her upbringing, Erica took her to the police. State and Federal police raided Uptop on 14 August, in coordinated raids on the other properties, and found huge stashes of drugs.  But Anne was safely residing at her home in the  
US. The cult began to disperse – Dr Howard Whitaker’s practice was disgraced and Raynor was blacklisted, but nobody was prosecuted. However, in June 1993, Anne and her husband were extradited to Australia to face charges of conspiracy to defraud and committing perjury. The charges were dropped, but Anne pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of making a false declaration. Anne and Bill paid $5,000 each in fines and walked free.  Anne died in June 2019, aged 97.  At the time of her death, she 
had a fortune of $10million.