My Life in Australia's Most Infamous Cult (Part 1)
My Life in Australia's Most Infamous Cult (Part 1)Update: 2024-06-21
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Ben Shenton grew up in a religious sect in central Victoria called 'The Family'. The children were told that their leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ and were made to dress alike and bleach their hair. This continued until Ben was 15, when police raided the compound. Ben tells us about his life before and after that raid.
You can buy Ben Shenton's autobiography 'Life Behind the Wire' here.
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00:00:00
[MUSIC]
00:00:10
>> Hey, I'm Julian Mogons, and you're listening to what it was like.
00:00:13
The show that asks people who have lived through big, dramatic events.
00:00:17
What it was like.
00:00:18
[MUSIC]
00:00:30
>> Hey, thanks for joining me again.
00:00:32
And thanks for all the feedback on our last two apps on scamophons.
00:00:37
It's a pretty abhorrent situation, and honestly, I don't know what we're going to do about it.
00:00:42
But I guess any solution starts with people knowing that it exists.
00:00:47
So, thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, and if you did, thanks for donating to Global Advanced Projects.
00:00:54
I get the feeling that Judah can use all the help that he can get.
00:00:57
This week, we're starting another two-part saga.
00:01:02
It's the story of Australia's most famous cult, although I should probably use the word infamous because they did some pretty twisted things.
00:01:09
It's the story of a group that called themselves the family.
00:01:15
And I actually grew up down the road from where this cult started out.
00:01:21
I grew up in the Denon Ranges, which it's just outside Melbourne.
00:01:24
And I remember all the kids at my school.
00:01:27
They all talked about this spooky property, this place that had big gates.
00:01:31
And this was where the family started out in the mid-1960s.
00:01:35
And they started out innocently enough as like a philosophical discussion group.
00:01:40
Although by the '90s, the property was mostly empty.
00:01:43
And if you peered through the gates, you could just see these shabby, portable-type buildings.
00:01:48
And it was all getting a bit overgrown and covered in moss.
00:01:52
And I remember looking through these gates up this long driveway that just kind of wound into the fog, and giving myself the heebie-jeebies.
00:02:00
I didn't know what a cult was back then, but I just knew that this place had a bad vibe.
00:02:06
I wanted to do a story on the family ever since.
00:02:11
So it was here at this place at this property that a woman named Anne Hamilton Bern first started teaching this really eclectic, hodgepodge of Christianity and Hinduism.
00:02:22
And she claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, of course.
00:02:27
And just like all the other cults, she claimed that a nuclear war would bring about the end of times, at which point the family would inherit the earth.
00:02:36
But something that was unique was the way the family claimed to be just a literal family.
00:02:42
As you'll hear today, Anne claimed that all of the kids in the group were her own.
00:02:47
Between 1968 and 1975, Hamilton Bern acquired 14 kids.
00:02:53
And some of them were just members' kids that she adopted.
00:02:56
But a lot of them were illegally adopted, via the help of a high-profile doctor who joined the group.
00:03:02
And this guy, he drew up false documents to alter their identities and give them all the same surname, Hamilton Bern.
00:03:09
And then just to cap it off, all of these kids were made to dress the same.
00:03:14
You might have actually seen photos of the family.
00:03:16
And they're all dressed in this identical Von Trapp style clothing.
00:03:21
But I think one of their most famous traits was the way that they bleached their hair.
00:03:26
And you've probably seen photos of this too.
00:03:27
It's like all of these kids with the same platinum blonde hair.
00:03:31
It's all like being bleached.
00:03:33
And it basically all just matches their mother's wig, you know, like the adoptive mother's wig.
00:03:38
And again, it was all about affirming their lineage to Hamilton Bern and reinforcing this idea that they were a family.
00:03:45
Today, we're going to hear from a man who grew up in this environment.
00:03:49
His name is Ben Shenton.
00:03:51
And like the others, he thought that Hamilton Bern was his mother.
00:03:54
And the family, it was a pretty abusive environment.
00:03:57
And he talks about the stress that he felt from a young age.
00:04:00
And the things that he saw, the beatings, the waterboarding, and the older kids being forced to take intravenous hits of LSD.
00:04:09
And finally, he's going to describe the morning of August 14, 1987, when the police rated a property on Lake Ylden and forcibly removed all of the children from Anne's custody.
00:04:22
I think in many ways this is kind of a sad story, but I think that Ben's story of rebirth, you know, back into the world.
00:04:30
It's pretty inspiring.
00:04:31
And I think it's a really interesting personal account of a story that many of you will already know.
00:04:37
You know, this is not the first time that this thing about the family has been told.
00:04:41
But seeing it all unfold through Ben's young eyes makes it feel very real and personal.
00:04:46
Just as a lake, I'll find a little FYI.
00:04:49
We're going to hear from Ben.
00:04:50
And then next week, we'll hear from the police officer who brought down Anne Hamilton Bern.
00:04:55
So in this way, we're going to cover the whole story from the beginning right to the end.
00:04:59
Okay, so now I bring you Ben Shenton.
00:05:03
Hello, Ben.
00:05:06
Welcome to the show.
00:05:11
Thank you very much, Julian.
00:05:13
Wonderful to be here.
00:05:15
So let's start with an introduction.
00:05:18
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
00:05:20
Sure, my name's Ben Shenton.
00:05:23
I grew up being called Benjamin Hamilton Bern.
00:05:26
I grew up in a cult court, the family.
00:05:29
And some would say it's one of the more notorious ones around the world that was situated in Australia, but had tentacles that went out through to America and England.
00:05:39
And at the age of 15, I thought I was 14, but as actually 15, the police came and rescued us.
00:05:46
And I began a process of integrating in the society.
00:05:51
I'd never been part of it.
00:05:52
And fortunately, I can look back on a situation and life that's very, very different to how it started.
00:06:01
Okay, well, that is a fantastic synopsis.
00:06:04
You know, you've basically just condensed the whole story.
00:06:07
But let's get into some details.
00:06:10
So you grew up in this cult.
00:06:13
Were you adopted by them?
00:06:16
Did you ever know your biological parents?
00:06:18
You know, set the scene at the right at the very beginning.
00:06:20
Okay, I was handed over.
00:06:24
So while the cult did, as you said, it adopted.
00:06:29
So it had professional doctors, nurses, social workers, lawyers that were actively looking for children and adopting them.
00:06:38
My mother, as I found out, was one of the unit's sanctum members.
00:06:43
And it literally just changed her name and my name to give it Hamilton Bern.
00:06:49
She stepped into the background and I grew up believing that the leader of this cult, the lady called Hamilton Bern and she married a guy called Bill Bern in 1977.
00:07:02
I believe them to be my biological parents.
00:07:04
I didn't meet my biological mother at all until I was about 12.
00:07:10
And then we connected later on in life.
00:07:15
So my earliest memories was in the cult, not at its headquarters, but at the location where I brought us up a place called Lake Yildon.
00:07:24
I was handed over when I was 18 months and then up until I was 15, there, all the time, very, very little opportunities to leave.
00:07:36
I know Lake Yildon really well.
00:07:39
You know, it's quite a pretty place.
00:07:40
Are your memories of childhood, do they feel happy to you?
00:07:46
It's a great question actually.
00:07:50
My earliest memories were one of isolation and one of fear.
00:07:57
So I remember standing outside the schoolroom, also double it as where I slept.
00:08:06
I was outside in the playground and I'm looking up through the gate and just by myself totally alone, that's my very first memory.
00:08:17
And then the next memory is lying in bed looking out across into where the school cup it is with all the books, knowing that I forget how to bed.
00:08:28
I'm going to get into trouble.
00:08:29
So I'm aware of this control.
00:08:33
And then there was a lot of fear around.
00:08:37
If someone broke the rules, we were all brought into a room, punished, filtered, and there was dunkings that went on.
00:08:47
So yeah, the more I believed, the more I realized, it's very similar to people growing up with abuse in a home.
00:08:52
Yeah, that's constant.
00:08:54
That wise you would have been a weird way to survive.
00:08:59
Did you feel like you're always tiptoeing around on eggshells?
00:09:02
Yes, 100%.
00:09:05
You were waiting for someone to blow up.
00:09:08
So whether it was one of the kids to go up with not obeying the rules, and knowing what's going to happen, so constantly watching them, or whether it was a case of one of the kids give us a week or two weeks off blowing up,
00:09:26
or whether it was Anne, which we'd constantly asked if she was in a good mood or a bad mood, when she came up and spent a weekend with us all week, all hell could break loose very quickly,
00:09:36
and it was brutal when it happened.
00:09:39
I mean, it sounds really tense.
00:09:42
Sometimes you go to an event like a dinner party, or just some sort of social event where for whatever reason it's tense, people aren't having a very good time.
00:09:52
And I feel like there's often one or two instigators for that.
00:09:56
It's a sort of top-down experience where if there's one person with a bit of power, a bit of sway in an event, they can really sell the rest of it.
00:10:03
So I guess what I'm getting at is, was this a sort of top-down deliberate culture from the guru, from Anne Hamilton Bern.
00:10:12
You've hit it on the head, it was driven top-down, so it's interesting.
00:10:17
You should do it deep died on Anne and how she grew up.
00:10:20
It was a very fractured life.
00:10:22
Her mother was in and out of mental asylum.
00:10:26
She was connected to the occult.
00:10:28
Her father was absent and had returned from World War II, was often travelling away, not around a lot.
00:10:35
And Anne was sent to boarding schools.
00:10:37
And her idea of an idealistic family is what she was trying to create, but almost around the thought of a boarding school.
00:10:47
So you had the matron, you had people where she set rules, and literally there was a rulebook.
00:10:53
She would ring in to check those, when she was there, she'd write those rules.
00:10:57
And then people looking after us in force loads.
00:11:02
And Anne would ring in checking that that was happening to make sure to cure it.
00:11:05
So she was very controlling.
00:11:08
And that's one of the things that often happens with cult members, or in cults, is there's always a power structure.
00:11:16
Someone's in charge, and I was the compliant one, and there were others that were defined.
00:11:23
And so you then, better, I was the class snitch.
00:11:28
And I'm struggling to work out life.
00:11:31
And what it does is it creates dividing conquer.
00:11:34
So it's very easy to control people when everyone's segregated.
00:11:38
It's when they join together and collude that you can control them.
00:11:42
So Anne affected that of dividing and conquering and setting people against each other, and then they're controlling those individuals.
00:11:50
Yeah, okay.
00:11:52
Something that you said before, which I thought was really interesting, was that you didn't meet your mother, your actual mother until you were 12.
00:12:00
But you thought your mom, you thought your mother was this woman, Anne Hamilton Bern, who it doesn't sound like you were particularly woman loving towards her.
00:12:10
Or maybe she wasn't towards you.
00:12:11
There was a kind of maternal vacuum there that you, I don't know, this is just what I'm hearing.
00:12:17
Does that sound right?
00:12:18
Yes.
00:12:19
So growing up, I didn't know how mothers and fathers are supposed to allow to their children.
00:12:24
You just, you just experienced it.
00:12:26
So mum and dad were absent.
00:12:30
We were seeking to be connected with them.
00:12:35
And then when they were there, I was one of 14, up to 28 different children.
00:12:40
So when someone's with you all the time, in a large family, and they're connected, they make time for you.
00:12:48
It's very easy when you're disconnected.
00:12:51
You're running an empire, and Anne claimed I'm doing God's work to be very disconnected from them.
00:12:56
That's just what ends up happening.
00:12:59
So my constant experience with her was trying to be loved, not knowing how to, and then trying to do things when you're absent, when she's absent,
00:13:09
that would be reported back to her that she would then praise you and same with Bill, same with her husband.
00:13:16
So you're getting these minute amounts of time with them.
00:13:20
We are trying to build a connection, but there's no day, day, into action that happens.
00:13:25
We didn't have parents.
00:13:29
Yeah.
00:13:30
Ben, I'm sorry, mate.
00:13:32
I've got a young daughter.
00:13:34
So I've been thinking a lot about parenting in the last few years.
00:13:38
And I know kids are just wired to look for love.
00:13:41
They want to be reassured that it's going to be okay.
00:13:44
They're tiny little people, and they're acutely aware of how vulnerable they are.
00:13:47
And so they're always looking for reassurance and safety and love.
00:13:50
And to just create an environment where you're just denying kids this thing that they just sort of live in this emotional starvation all the time.
00:13:59
That's so cruel.
00:14:01
It's so awful.
00:14:03
It is.
00:14:04
And one of the earliest memories was actually one of the arts reading books to us.
00:14:09
They said out front she was not one of the constant ones.
00:14:13
She ended up leaving shortly after and just being invited to sit up on her lap and read the book in front of all the others.
00:14:20
Is actually my memory is a very pleasurable memory, a very good one.
00:14:25
Probably because it never happened again.
00:14:29
So yeah, it's just such a normal thing for a parent to do, which I did hundreds of times when my kids sit up in my lap, read a book with them, do they reading with me or sitting beside my arm around them?
00:14:41
It was so absent.
00:14:44
So yes, yes you are.
00:14:46
It was cool.
00:14:47
It was designed, as I said, to wire us to hunger for affection and being willing to do anything to purchase it.
00:14:55
Like holding that over kids, like using that as a mechanism to enforce power, that's pretty evil.
00:15:05
Indeed.
00:15:06
We can dig further in some of the other things she did, but yeah, that was just my perspective of growing up.
00:15:12
It got a lot worse than that.
00:15:14
Okay.
00:15:14
Well, let's follow the chronology here.
00:15:17
So I think one of the things that the broader public is aware of the family.
00:15:22
When you talk to people about the family, sometimes people go, "Oh, is that that cult we're like, all the kids had blonde hair?"
00:15:27
And I'm just curious, what was with the blonde hair and did you ever have to bleach yours?
00:15:31
Yes, so if Anne had a blonde wig, Bill was dark-haired.
00:15:39
So the claim was we were her biological children, and so there was some dark-haired, most blonde, and some were allowed to be red-haired.
00:15:50
So mine was, yes, one of the kids that were blonde-haired, and there's an iconic picture that I think, as you say, there was a movie put together by Richard Jones.
00:16:01
Now, the cult of the family, I'm one of those blonde-haired kids in that up until just before I left.
00:16:07
So was this a monthly thing?
00:16:09
Was this just part of your chores that you're like out?
00:16:13
It's the middle of the month.
00:16:14
Got to bleach the hair again.
00:16:16
That's right.
00:16:17
So there would all be lined up.
00:16:20
The bleach product came out, painted on your hair, and then it'd be washed off your hair.
00:16:25
So that was done for my earliest memories up until I was 14.
00:16:29
What was your perception of that as a child?
00:16:32
Did it strike you as being weird?
00:16:34
I mean, was it itchy?
00:16:35
How did you feel about it?
00:16:37
So yes, it is itchy, but it was already ever known.
00:16:41
So once again, if you do something and you don't know anything different, that's just part of what you do.
00:16:46
Looking in on it, 100% weird, and I look back on it going, I know why it was done.
00:16:54
Once again, it was the level of control.
00:16:57
It was a vanity forge throughout, in essence, and part of the charade of control that she had to bear to say, if ever we were seen in public, we were hurt children.
00:17:07
We had blonde hair like her blood weeks.
00:17:09
As you got older and you approached adolescence, and I'm guessing you started to think about it more, you sort of develop your own sense of autonomy,
00:17:20
your own identity a little bit more.
00:17:22
Can you walk me through how that transition was as you got into maybe like 10, 11?
00:17:27
As I said earlier, Julian, I worked out in life how I was going to navigate this world.
00:17:35
And probably the starting was the first time I remember being pulled into room with all of us.
00:17:43
Someone had done something wrong, and it was like, if whoever doesn't contrast to the crime, you're all going to get punished.
00:17:54
What was the crime?
00:17:54
And I just, I can't remember, I was probably five years old.
00:17:59
Someone might have taken something, someone might have answered, someone back, whatever it would have been.
00:18:05
A fee was so big for me, I just said, I did it and I knew I hadn't.
00:18:09
And I can't remember if I was punished or not, but the pressure, it led out the pressure valve.
00:18:16
And I met up in my five year old break from that moment forward, that I was never going to do that again.
00:18:21
If I knew who did it, I was going to tell that this is the person who did it.
00:18:26
Because why should I suffer for someone else's choice?
00:18:29
So I had an inner sense of these are the rules, whether I agree with them or not, they just are.
00:18:35
I'm powerless to better overcome them.
00:18:38
Because those in control are bigger and stronger than I am.
00:18:42
And how I'm going to do is I'm going to be compliant and curry shade it from them.
00:18:48
And that's how I functioned in lush.
00:18:51
So it worked as far as I was concerned.
00:18:57
Help me to understand what a day in the life of the family looked like when you were around the age of 10, you know, like were you going to school, like where did you sleep, what did you eat?
00:19:07
Okay.
00:19:08
So it's a two-storey wooden holiday house.
00:19:12
And stairs was the pump room, which pump water up from the lake.
00:19:19
So this is Lake Ylden.
00:19:21
This is Lake Ylden.
00:19:22
We're living on the edge of Lake Ylden, a place called Kaya Lama.
00:19:25
You spent most of your time there?
00:19:26
I would say 95% of their time.
00:19:29
At one point, we'd occasionally go down to Anne's property in a down-to-no ranges for a week or a couple of days.
00:19:36
So apart from that, I was there pretty much all the time.
00:19:40
So the boys room was doubled up as the classroom that we were all educated in.
00:19:49
And that was seven days a week.
00:19:51
We'd convert the boys room and push our beds off to the side to healthy yoga and meditation.
00:19:57
That was the first thing as soon as we got up.
00:19:59
That would happen.
00:20:00
It was around about five o'clock in the morning.
00:20:03
Meditation and healthy yoga was about 6.30.
00:20:07
Have it get ready, have a quick run.
00:20:10
And then education.
00:20:12
We'd have a break about halfway.
00:20:14
We couldn't go to the toilet when we needed to have to wait till that happens.
00:20:18
There was many accidents and punishments for that.
00:20:21
Lunch went to meditation.
00:20:23
Just before breakfast was a fruit tide.
00:20:25
Lunch was vegetables.
00:20:28
It'd go through until about four o'clock, pack everything up, shower, to dinner, and then homework.
00:20:34
So we had the vegetarian diet.
00:20:36
We were very regulated, very constant.
00:20:39
The weekends would be a brunch, which would be musely, nuts, fruit.
00:20:44
It's pretty healthy.
00:20:45
It was.
00:20:46
It was fairly healthy.
00:20:47
I really ate meat.
00:20:49
I would say that we were constantly hungry.
00:20:52
One of the dogs was fed better than we were on meat.
00:20:55
Then we'd crave his food.
00:20:57
Not allowed to touch it.
00:20:59
Do you eat meat these days?
00:21:00
Yes, I do.
00:21:01
So yeah, it was very regulated.
00:21:04
We were in bed, you know, between 7.30 and 9.00 and at what age you were, homework was involved.
00:21:11
So very, very regulated.
00:21:13
As weekends, occasionally went to TG or I've done video, we'd watch very controlled stuff.
00:21:19
All of the books and all the TV programs and all the newspapers were edited, controlled.
00:21:24
There'd been newspapers and books and pages missing.
00:21:27
So I got a very stark understanding with newspapers with articles cut out with holes in the newspaper.
00:21:35
You look in this hole there.
00:21:37
Okay, well, that's been censored.
00:21:39
Not allowed to look at that.
00:21:40
It's such a rigorous upbringing.
00:21:42
I like so regimented.
00:21:43
It makes me think that that's a monumental job for the people who are running this show.
00:21:51
Sensoring newspaper articles and pulling pages out of books and making vegetarian meals.
00:21:56
This just sounds like a really heavy lift to me.
00:21:59
They must have been as busy and as joyless as you were.
00:22:04
Yeah, Julian spot on.
00:22:06
So the term used and there's an ideology behind all of this that I was able to get this level of commitment to call it Guru Sada.
00:22:15
It's service to the master.
00:22:18
So when you have received the forgiveness of all wrong you've ever done in every lifetime in the millennials that you've been coming back to worth as part of karma.
00:22:29
You've found a Guru who's paid for that.
00:22:32
And then if you serve them, you're going to have God consciousness directly after and you're never going to have to come back again to go through this pitiful life.
00:22:41
You owe that person a lot.
00:22:44
Service to the master.
00:22:45
And everyone needs to love and be loved.
00:22:49
God's wired us this way to belong to something bigger than ourselves to have meaning and purpose when you create an ideology that you set it up so that people allow you because of what you're doing for them.
00:23:02
That's where you can abuse it.
00:23:05
Hey, we're just going to stop here for a quick ad break.
00:23:10
But stick around, we'll be right back with more what it was like.
00:23:23
So within this highly regimented environment where you're sort of eating food and going to bed at the same time every day and you know this sounds like you weren't having a whole lot of fun.
00:23:33
I want to hear about two extremes.
00:23:35
I want to hear about like what was the best moment did you ever have like a Christmas or something that was really good.
00:23:41
And I also want to hear about like what was the worst.
00:23:44
Did you receive a punishment that was really awful?
00:23:48
Did you see something that really stayed with you?
00:23:52
Okay.
00:23:52
So it's great asking the left and right.
00:23:56
Let's try it out.
00:23:58
Yeah, yeah.
00:23:59
So one of them was when I was in actually at Lakefield.
00:24:06
We called it Kay Alama up top all the concentration camp.
00:24:10
So it would have been a Christmas and it was set up I think mainly one by Bill.
00:24:17
So he'd grown up with quite a normal family.
00:24:20
He'd been married, he'd had children.
00:24:23
So his file for this had been in England, come over to Victoria, been a council member down at Tarellgan and just function as a normal human being.
00:24:34
So I think he's far for creating a wonderful Christmas.
00:24:37
He did.
00:24:38
So it was the lead up to it.
00:24:39
It was setting the Christmas tree up.
00:24:41
Sanders going to come, go to bed, come back to bed here, you know, the leave cookies out from.
00:24:48
So it's what you everyone would go.
00:24:50
That's the classic Christmas.
00:24:52
So we experienced that lot of fun.
00:24:54
You know, the cookies got each and the bits and pieces were missing.
00:24:59
The glass and milk's half junk.
00:25:01
Slay marks out on the driveway.
00:25:03
I mean, everything, the presents, the whole lot, some of them left outside.
00:25:07
We had a proper fireplace.
00:25:08
So we do all of that.
00:25:10
So all the the mistake in the pleasure and the joy of it all to me was a great memory.
00:25:16
And you know, that was not a one-off, but it wasn't constant.
00:25:20
There'd be other Christmas's when nothing happened.
00:25:22
So it went from that to the other.
00:25:23
And everything in life, it can be very easy because there's so much that's been written about the cult that every single moment was evil.
00:25:31
And that's not reality.
00:25:32
Yeah.
00:25:33
And in defense of them, and there were times when money, effort was put into to make our lives as good as what they knew how.
00:25:40
Then there's the other swing side with one of the most.
00:25:43
And I'm going to pick two events just to give you the first one will be in the cult.
00:25:46
And then I'll give you a second one that actually happened over in England.
00:25:49
So Anne came up with a statement that she was sick and tired of the line.
00:25:59
The only way to control this was corporate punishment.
00:26:04
You cannot murder a child or you know, you can't murder a backside.
00:26:09
So buildings were required.
00:26:11
They would happen.
00:26:11
So one of those, a decision was made that if anyone broke, did something wrong.
00:26:20
They would be dummckings and buildings would be handed out.
00:26:24
So a bucket, your head would be put in the bucket and what happened.
00:26:27
So an event like that had already happened.
00:26:29
This was the second event.
00:26:31
And probably why this one stuck in my mind so much was the unchainers around it.
00:26:36
One of the boys was a piano player.
00:26:39
He was doing learning and very good at it.
00:26:43
He would actually go down to Danny Long, Steadford.
00:26:46
It was a yearly thing.
00:26:47
He would quite regularly get to do well there.
00:26:51
And he would practice hours and hours and hours.
00:26:53
So he was fascinated with musical stuff and very good at it.
00:26:56
The musical teacher, I don't believe it, would come up on a Thursday night.
00:27:03
I think no, a Wednesday night, stay over and teach us all music and then head back down on the Thursday.
00:27:09
She took up violin lessons.
00:27:11
He was fascinated by this and her violin rest went missing.
00:27:15
And when she was on the property, because it was quite small, there were two cowavans that were there and the extra key, give it the answer.
00:27:22
There wasn't room inside the building, but would stay at the cowavan.
00:27:25
And that's often where she would, she would be, when she went there, she'd go into the cowavan and her bed was made up for her there.
00:27:31
So anyway, the violin rest went missing.
00:27:34
They assume this boy James had stolen it.
00:27:37
And we were downstairs where they were trying to extract the truth of him was directly above us in the piano.
00:27:46
And so there was a three-color plastic cane that was, he was being used to beat him up.
00:27:54
He was yelling to say, just try and extract that he'd done it.
00:27:58
He refused to say it was him.
00:28:00
He snatched it off and threw it out the window.
00:28:02
We heard it then come down, grab it and you'd imagine the fear that's in there.
00:28:06
We've already been to this once.
00:28:07
We're feeling this again.
00:28:08
I wish you'd just say, done it.
00:28:10
The only one know where this has gone.
00:28:12
No one.
00:28:13
So this went on for about an hour.
00:28:15
He refused to fess up.
00:28:16
March downstairs.
00:28:18
He was dumped in water trying to extract the truth.
00:28:20
And it was all of our turn one by one by one.
00:28:22
I'm one of the younger ones, one of the last ones.
00:28:25
Often the delayed punishment fear of it is as bad as actually going through it.
00:28:29
But this was probably equal.
00:28:31
And your head held under for about 10 seconds.
00:28:34
Was it you pulled up?
00:28:36
No, it's not back under three or four times.
00:28:39
And then in there.
00:28:40
So we're all, we had a mixture of kids that and claim to be her children.
00:28:45
And then others were called foster children.
00:28:47
And they were actually cult members.
00:28:49
So they would come up.
00:28:50
They'd some of them live their full time for a period of time.
00:28:53
Others went back and forth to see their own parents on weekends.
00:28:56
So a group of them took a trip down to see their parents all the way there.
00:29:01
Do anyone remember who did it?
00:29:02
We'd take them to try and find out if it had happened.
00:29:05
And then two weeks later, we got told the violin rest had been found.
00:29:10
And did it fall on the caravan out of the caravan on the steps.
00:29:14
And no apology was ever given.
00:29:16
So I think what stuck with me were that was the untrainers of it all.
00:29:20
And no apology given.
00:29:22
But just really, I thought this is evil.
00:29:24
That stuck with me.
00:29:25
That only happened the Dunkings twice.
00:29:28
But it, I mean, it broke something in me and all of us were just, you know, just, just, just, who winged us.
00:29:37
Yeah.
00:29:37
I mean, waterboarding, you know, waterboarding is a Guantanamo Bay torture technique.
00:29:42
100%.
00:29:42
Yeah, it's banned for a reason.
00:29:45
Yes, it absolutely is.
00:29:47
And if you hit it on the head, I parallel it to it.
00:29:50
While I haven't watched what the waterboarding was done, I think what we went to was fairly similar.
00:29:56
Okay.
00:29:57
So what happened in the UK?
00:29:59
Well, this was probably what I watched, probably not so much what happened to me.
00:30:08
So I won't go into too much detail.
00:30:10
But one of the girls was the youngest.
00:30:12
She hadn't spoken for many years of her life when she was very young.
00:30:17
She had delayed growth.
00:30:19
And as an adult, she has no memory of her childhood.
00:30:22
Sounds like she was just petrified.
00:30:24
Yeah.
00:30:25
Yeah.
00:30:25
So her body just shut down.
00:30:27
It's called psychosomatic dwarfism.
00:30:29
So when it was our coming back.
00:30:31
So I have to gather myself sometimes.
00:30:40
Absolutely.
00:30:41
It's awkward.
00:30:42
Sometimes it's awkward.
00:30:44
Sometimes this affects me and sometimes it doesn't.
00:30:47
I just don't know.
00:30:47
So anyway, where due to head back, we had some two caregivers that were fairly good to us, that lived off the property.
00:30:58
They'd visit us, we'd go see them.
00:31:00
It was anti-Island and Uncle Albert.
00:31:03
Albert had very little awareness of what was going on in the UK.
00:31:09
So just a very kind English gentleman.
00:31:11
He'd married a cult member, one of the kinder ones.
00:31:14
And we would go overnight and spend time with him.
00:31:17
So this girl who, in Sarah's book, unheard, unheard, unheard, unknowing.
00:31:23
So Sarah was one of the girls that is now dead, but she she wrote a book.
00:31:29
So when her book she would cause this girl Cassandra.
00:31:31
So I'd keep that name just because this lady doesn't like her name to be used.
00:31:35
She's going on in life.
00:31:36
So just out of respect for that.
00:31:38
So Cassandra went missing.
00:31:40
She would have been about 11 years old.
00:31:43
And we were terrified she'd been and then would often speak about this burnt weight, whatever else going on.
00:31:50
So I lived searching for her for you for something that happened to her concerned.
00:31:55
And we later found out that she'd hitchhiked to the 11 years of age, Dan, who I went to, and she I leaned.
00:32:01
And at that place, thinking she should be safe.
00:32:06
So as an 11-year-old, she's worked out.
00:32:10
She's going to be safe in living with these people when she is going back and she's made this choice.
00:32:16
The thought that she was able to hitchhike, that she was just enough to do.
00:32:20
She'd never been with anyone outside the cult before.
00:32:23
I think highlights probably the level of abuse or what we were going to not even aware.
00:32:29
And of course, she was returned and continued on giving growth hormones and on and on it went.
00:32:35
So that witnessing that happened.
00:32:37
And I think retrospectively, thinking back on the level of fear that it induced in her.
00:32:42
Paul girl.
00:32:44
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:46
It sucks that she made her run at freedom and then just cut returned.
00:32:50
Yes.
00:32:51
And during that, that's probably what affects me the most.
00:32:56
Yeah.
00:32:56
Yeah.
00:32:56
And there were others, you know, we eventually, we rescued and you can ask that but similar, there was an older girl that did the same.
00:33:02
They eventually got treat.
00:33:03
Oh, God.
00:33:04
I mean, the other thing that's so frustrating about this is that the cult is essentially this like convoluted mechanism to give and just constant doses of like power,
00:33:16
this sort of dopamine hit of like, I am the Messiah or I am the guru.
00:33:21
You guys all look up to me.
00:33:22
I'm amazing.
00:33:23
That's all it is really.
00:33:25
And so I want to know like, did you do you look up to her as like, this is, I mean, she claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus or something.
00:33:32
Did you look up to her as this magical being or were you a bit skeptical about that whole thing?
00:33:38
It's a great question.
00:33:42
Growing up, she was the master that everyone revered.
00:33:46
She was my mother.
00:33:48
But what was running on the side is that she was also trying to take over city yoga, which is a massive organization in Australia.
00:34:00
No, in America.
00:34:02
Okay.
00:34:04
So she purchased a property over in New York upstate in the cat schools, right beside Swami Mukta Nanda's ashram.
00:34:11
Okay.
00:34:12
So between probably 1978 and 1982, which is four years.
00:34:19
So six between the ages of six and ten.
00:34:22
Swami Mukta Nanda was front and center.
00:34:25
His teachings, some of the swamis would come and stay up top, but we were Kailama and took most of the girls over to the ashram.
00:34:36
Some went to Hawaii to meet Swami Mukta Nanda's ashram as one of those and two other girls.
00:34:43
And so there were photos of him.
00:34:46
And we listened to a lot of his teachings and went and the other girls came back from Hawaii.
00:34:52
They turned the player we had outside into an ashram with paths, being swept.
00:35:00
Things were basically repeating.
00:35:02
And in Sarah's life, that remained up until, you know, right through her life, the impact that he had on it, probably the first time a spiritual person had showed her love.
00:35:13
So I grew up with a lot of his teachings, with the punishments, with a lot of his stuff.
00:35:20
And his teachings had very little impact on me.
00:35:24
I hadn't gone through any clueless.
00:35:26
I was still too young.
00:35:28
I was aware of the concept of karma.
00:35:31
I was aware of the concept, but not her position.
00:35:34
She hadn't initiated me.
00:35:36
I hadn't transitioned her being a God, Jesus Christ, while she'd laid the framework for that.
00:35:43
And I'd been sitting in certain meditations when she'd been high on either acid or magic mushrooms.
00:35:51
And claiming that one of my brothers was an apostle and other one was, so I got the entrance that she was claiming to be Christ.
00:35:58
I'd never made up that mind that she was.
00:36:03
I hadn't made my opinion.
00:36:04
I had some spiritual experiences growing up that gave me pause to think about this and they weren't good ones.
00:36:11
Spiritual moments as in you were like, I don't think you're Jesus or the other way.
00:36:16
So one of those was Anne asking all of us to.
00:36:22
So when you meditate, part of that is you clear your mind and you open up to guiding forces to take you through the different parts, transcendental meditation concept where you're having your taken spiritual guard,
00:36:36
you open up to meet one and be taken clear mind and have a spiritual experience.
00:36:40
So Anne asked us all to do that.
00:36:43
Then I felt like I'd fallen asleep and my eyes are shut.
00:36:46
She yelled at me, being how dare you shut me out of your mind.
00:36:49
And I felt as if someone had slapped me on the back of my head, jolted awake and she yelled that out at me.
00:36:54
So this was my first experience.
00:36:56
I'm probably no more than eight years old.
00:36:59
And then probably within six months or so after, I'm sitting at the dinner table and she grabbed me by the chin and stared into me for a couple of minutes.
00:37:07
And after that experience, whenever we got into trouble, I get this horrendous feeling of depression, suicidal fear.
00:37:13
And the only way for it to lift off was to actually tell what had happened.
00:37:18
I'd either write a letter or I'd doble on them.
00:37:20
This was controlling.
00:37:22
Unless you've suffered from depression, it's hard to explain to people.
00:37:26
It's the black dog of depression that arrives that you can't lift it off.
00:37:30
You can't predict when it comes to.
00:37:32
This wasn't just me being scared.
00:37:34
I'd grown up scared.
00:37:36
This was this was spiritual stuff going on.
00:37:39
So for Anne to claim to be the benevolent Jesus Christ, who shed his blood and died for us, who went through a relationship with us.
00:37:44
But for servant later, she was not.
00:37:46
So when I got pulled out of the cult, it was very easy for me to align that individual up with what people outside of the cult said.
00:37:57
And what all the doctrines said that she was afforded and the fake.
00:38:00
Yeah.
00:38:00
I mean, it sounds to me like your intuition was telling you actually that she was a dark force.
00:38:06
Like she was claiming to be this beam of sunlight.
00:38:10
But it sounds to me like she was actually this this evil gravitational force in your world.
00:38:15
Well, Julian, she meditated.
00:38:19
She dialed into demonic stuff.
00:38:22
Yeah.
00:38:22
I mean, many people when they have acid tricks, magic mushrooms, they take drugs and they take on passengers.
00:38:30
They end up being controlled by things.
00:38:32
She actively sought this.
00:38:34
She wanted to wield spiritual power that controlled people out of just not just conversations.
00:38:39
When you're not around, you're wielding spiritual power to get an outcome.
00:38:43
She was heavily involved in the occult.
00:38:46
So when you say that she was tapping into like dark forces, she was interested in the occult.
00:38:50
Like was she hosting sayonsers and stuff?
00:38:54
Yes, as well.
00:38:55
Absolutely, as well.
00:38:57
So it was sayonsers.
00:38:58
Very often I remember there being sayonsers upstairs when we weren't there.
00:39:03
She would we were downstairs.
00:39:05
She would she would do that.
00:39:07
LSD ampules of the stuff.
00:39:09
We're not talking a micro dot.
00:39:11
We're talking people being injected with this stuff.
00:39:13
But her taking great joy if people had experiences of watching snakes come in and out of their ears and mouth and eyeballs.
00:39:20
That was a good experience that they had.
00:39:22
So she oh yeah, it's it's this was heavy demonic stuff going on that she was channeling that she was she was making happen to control controlling spiritual forces.
00:39:34
I mean, dosing up kids with LSD in particular strikes me as particularly evil.
00:39:39
And also particularly criminal.
00:39:43
Was she doing this the whole time or was this a development?
00:39:46
Was this a sort of thing that started to happen in lady years?
00:39:50
No, this was from start.
00:39:52
So my older half-brothers, one of them would have been 13, 14 and other one would have been I think maybe 17, 18.
00:40:00
They were going through these one ankle clewings that were done in the New Haven hospital in Q and on sect properties.
00:40:07
And they happened at Lake Yield and I remember three of my older sisters going through this physically watching them.
00:40:12
Sarah wrote the book that happened over in England.
00:40:15
In Brune Farm where I visited and it forever fractured her personality.
00:40:20
So Anne had always done this.
00:40:23
This was and you think of it like gactic acid landing in the frontal power of the brain is it still being developed.
00:40:30
That also never leaves the body that you're right.
00:40:34
It is a wicked.
00:40:35
And then use that slip depriving people.
00:40:38
She would get people to work on them.
00:40:40
She'd try and extract confessions out of people.
00:40:43
And Sarah, she doesn't write at all.
00:40:45
She intimates this in her book.
00:40:47
But Sarah gave some statement to what was done to her and she was going through it.
00:40:52
And Anne should have been incarcerated in solitary confinement for the rest of her life for what she did to Sarah and many others.
00:41:00
It was horrendous.
00:41:01
It wasn't just dark wounds.
00:41:03
There was stuff that was done that's straight out of the most wicked, occultic things you can read.
00:41:11
So you were you were never drugged.
00:41:13
I was never given LSD, but I lived under given psychotropic.
00:41:18
So Mogadon, Ligactyl and many others.
00:41:22
In fact, one of the tablets I was given.
00:41:26
I first time I had whiskey went that's what I was given.
00:41:30
That's what it tasted like.
00:41:32
And yeah, it's exact same taste, which is not well done.
00:41:36
It's something else that's bad.
00:41:38
And I'm not sure what it is.
00:41:40
One of the guys I knew across, but we were constantly fed psychotropic.
00:41:45
So I grew up in a hay.
00:41:46
It's very photosensitive.
00:41:48
It impacted how we functioned, how we thought.
00:41:51
I have no clue what the whole mixture was, but we had doctors, psychiatrists that could prescribe stuff.
00:41:57
And there was a constant box full of this stuff that we were afraid all the time.
00:42:01
So do you remember a particular time of watching kids around you getting dosed on, I guess, LSD in particular?
00:42:11
Yes, and they were two or three of the girls that wrote statements, the police that end up getting us out.
00:42:19
Two of those I watched both of them go through because it was upstairs at like Ealdon.
00:42:23
Can you walk me through it?
00:42:25
What did you see?
00:42:26
Well, so they were taken upstairs.
00:42:29
They stayed there for at least two days.
00:42:34
What known was allowed to go in.
00:42:35
How old were they?
00:42:37
They would have been probably 14.
00:42:39
Okay.
00:42:40
Actually, no, actually, they would have been 16.
00:42:44
It goes with 16 boys for 14.
00:42:45
So they would have been 16 years of age.
00:42:48
Okay.
00:42:48
And were they willing?
00:42:49
Were they excited?
00:42:50
Or were they like, I don't really want to?
00:42:52
Probably very apprehensive.
00:42:55
This was considered part of the initiation into the cult.
00:43:00
Okay.
00:43:00
So this was the beginning phase.
00:43:02
Once this happened, you were being initiated.
00:43:04
The next thing would be down at the lodge, satoketan lodge, and you'd go to the initiation thing.
00:43:09
So this was part of that process.
00:43:11
So it was almost the coming of age, passage, right, very nervous, and kept very quiet.
00:43:17
What you experienced when you were in it, but we'd heard stuff like other people and being excited that they'd had these hallucinations.
00:43:24
It snakes coming out of their mouths, eyes, and ears and stuff.
00:43:27
So you could imagine 16 year old.
00:43:29
They were not looking forward to it.
00:43:32
It was something that happened, and they had to go shoot, and we saw many people go shoot.
00:43:36
So I didn't actually watch.
00:43:38
I'd never was allowed into the room.
00:43:41
It was just dark, and then when they came back down after a couple of days, they were very spaced out.
00:43:50
Yeah, to say the least, they were different people.
00:43:54
Yeah.
00:43:55
Did you overhear any screams or thumps or upstairs?
00:44:01
I mean, tripping hard for a couple of days.
00:44:03
That's going to be?
00:44:05
Yes.
00:44:06
Yes.
00:44:06
I can't remember the Julian of the things I was not in.
00:44:10
I've only heard here as a count, and then we'd let's put it this way.
00:44:16
All three of these girls had been silished when it came to knowing that our turns next, because we were 14, 15, 16, and was overseas.
00:44:28
They were willing to go against the moche, however, and seeing unheard, I'm not willing to go to police, which were being bought up, were to be feared, that would take us, put us in the bag and train us in the lake.
00:44:39
It would put us in prison.
00:44:40
They were willing to go to them to make sure it didn't happen to us.
00:44:44
That's probably the easiest me looking in to be able to see how it happened.
00:44:52
So they were kept quiet.
00:44:54
It wasn't loud, but yeah, we knew what was going on.
00:44:57
Hey, we're just going to stop here for a quick ad break, but stick around, we'll be right back with more what it was like.
00:45:09
So I guess that takes us to the next stepping stone in this story,
00:45:22
where at the end of the 80s, the cult was raided.
00:45:26
Do you remember that day?
00:45:28
Extremely well.
00:45:29
Yes, very, very close memory.
00:45:32
So Julian, obviously walk you through that one, eh?
00:45:34
I'd love to hear it from the start.
00:45:35
Okay.
00:45:38
So a little bit of the backstory.
00:45:40
So what what had happened is, as we got older, the girls, as I said, they were all planning on getting us out.
00:45:47
But what they'd been to the police, they needed now a proof that what they were claiming was accurate.
00:45:56
So Anne kept a rulebook.
00:45:57
She signed the rules with her signature.
00:46:01
So that then becomes undeniable proof that's happening.
00:46:06
So they were admanaged to stay in contact with us through the phone and through coming visiting at night when they shouldn't be with some of the girls that were a bit older than me,
00:46:17
but with, you know, similar age.
00:46:20
And they asked for the rulebook to be stolen, pages to be taken out and to get it to them.
00:46:27
So that process, and I explained that a depth in the book had gone through.
00:46:32
I was the class snitch.
00:46:33
We all got into trouble.
00:46:35
And suddenly Anne and Bill realized this is getting out of control.
00:46:39
If that's gone missing, there's pages going, what's going on.
00:46:42
And so they begin to realize we have to be a little bit more caring and loving.
00:46:48
We have to stay connected a bit more.
00:46:51
And so Bill had come back, he'd bought a video back in the van.
00:46:55
And that's the classic one that you'll see in some of the, the documentaries being done advanced, sitting down outside, boring farm and singing and all the rest.
00:47:03
It was her charm, offensive, with looking forward to seeing you and stuff.
00:47:07
So Bill came back to us, direct message from Mum.
00:47:09
He spent about six weeks with us.
00:47:11
He'd been away on trips with him and he was coming up for a final picnic and we were going to go on a houseboat, probably only the third time in my life that day.
00:47:22
So that's the day he's set up.
00:47:23
It's going to happen.
00:47:24
He's going to be traveling back to England two or three days later.
00:47:28
And this is the final one.
00:47:30
So to classic, seven o'clock in the morning, we're all out of bed, we're doing hathor and yoga.
00:47:35
None of us are actually doing it.
00:47:36
We've affected the art of not doing it nine way to go.
00:47:39
We'd listen to here if the ants were coming.
00:47:41
Know where we were in a car to disappear under the beds.
00:47:45
You know, assume the appropriate position, the appropriate spot.
00:47:48
Then we kept to look at and all of a sudden we hear and we know Bill's awake.
00:47:53
He's come overnight.
00:47:54
The ants have gone up to have the morning cup of tea with him and something there's running on the steps and normally they creep down.
00:48:01
We quickly assume the position and then people I don't recognise suddenly burst into the room.
00:48:08
And then one of the girls see her and then the others suddenly appear.
00:48:13
Who are you with them?
00:48:14
What's going on here?
00:48:15
One of the older girls, Leanne, who was very instrumental in getting us out, she'd run away from the couple of times being sent back at 18 and ran away successfully.
00:48:25
She's there as well.
00:48:26
So it's all one, it's all happening.
00:48:30
And Bill's there and we're slowly being removed, suddenly realise the police have arrived and we're believing there were lots of them around.
00:48:38
Were they in uniform?
00:48:40
When you say that people burst into the room and you didn't recognise them, were these police officers?
00:48:45
Yes, I mixed police officers and that were not in uniform.
00:48:52
I claimed clothes.
00:48:54
I think it was very purposely down because the police uniform would have freaked us out.
00:49:00
We're within taken out one by one.
00:49:03
When I say one by one, we're going to be leaving.
00:49:06
There's a bus to see, we'll take you out and then it was my turn and I got where we were, was downstairs, taken up the steps and you'd go do it quickly from the steps at the front door,
00:49:16
on the veranda, and up into the waiting bus.
00:49:18
Where everyone was bit by bit being put into lots of tears, what's going on, confusion and just as I'm leaving the final step, I cling onto the banisters and what I'd leave,
00:49:33
leaving for me was going over to England, which I'd been to before, on a boarding school and I'd said in my mind this was going to happen and this has interrupted that.
00:49:47
So as far as I don't know these people, I already have an extra strategy.
00:49:52
I want this under my control and so I fought to stay.
00:49:55
And then after probably a couple of minutes, I let go and I just go with it.
00:50:00
And then as I'm being driven away, we all get in there, they find a couple of our tours to help comfort us, you know, some soft tours that we have, whatever else.
00:50:09
We take them with us.
00:50:09
We go down, stop off at a lake yielding.
00:50:13
Actually, in the yielding thing, there's a guy there sit savage who when the petrol station he had often to come up and give us the oil and gas we needed.
00:50:22
He fixed things around the place we knew him and was just a kindly non-spoke member, had no clue what was going on.
00:50:29
He'd take us out on his, but his houseboat, I'd been at once or twice before, so we knew him, so we're shelt safe going there.
00:50:37
Then they drove us, went to the tour that had something to eat and then we went down to a halfway house, kids care, I think it was and that's when the debriefing began to happen.
00:50:48
We all had lunch, police began to talk to us, what had happened, what had gone on, what do we remember, just very briefly trying karma fears.
00:50:56
And then we were sent to drop off at a place in Melbourne called Elgar, a land where it was sectioned centre.
00:51:03
So it's all no longer there, but that was 1987.
00:51:07
Thanks to the unit, we were put in and given food, got to wash dishes, which I'd never been allowed to be foresight about doing that.
00:51:15
What a thrill.
00:51:15
Oh, absolutely.
00:51:16
I realized very quickly that that's not a thrill, but it was, yeah.
00:51:20
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:51:23
Had our own food we could eat, they were all of the toothbrush, I mean, a bunk bed, never been able to be in one before, and then come would have been around eight o'clock.
00:51:33
And online, they're thinking back to everything I'd said that though.
00:51:38
And the habit we'd been bored up with is you never tell anything to anyone who's a non-cult member and you better be very careful what you said is accurate and correct, or not accurate and correct,
00:51:49
isn't what on topics you're not allowed to speak about.
00:51:52
Right.
00:51:52
So I'm doing that check as I'm so used to doing it and realizing I'm free, I don't have to do this again.
00:52:00
And I made up my mind then I was never going to go back.
00:52:04
Whatever it took, I was never going to go back.
00:52:07
And that was the end of the first day of realizing I'm in bed.
00:52:12
I think I'm free.
00:52:13
There's a sort of slightly cheesy saying about it's the first day of the rest of your life.
00:52:20
Did it feel like that?
00:52:22
Well, actually, what was interesting to you and is that as we were driven away, probably no more than 10 minutes from the property, I actually made this statement and it was along the lines of it's the end of one chapter.
00:52:38
The last page has been written down about start of a new one.
00:52:42
That must have been exciting.
00:52:46
It was.
00:52:47
I think I realized very quickly.
00:52:49
This was case and all I began to get was evidence that this was it.
00:52:53
This was happening.
00:52:55
So it's interesting how much is subconscious in life.
00:52:59
You really don't know them.
00:53:00
You suppress things for so long and you've got your own what you want, what you don't want.
00:53:06
And I guess it began to come out.
00:53:08
I was able to put words around what you've been going on inside of me for a long time.
00:53:14
Very quickly.
00:53:15
How old were you when after the raid?
00:53:18
Well, I thought I was 14.
00:53:21
I've been told my birthday was August 31st with another one of the girls, supposedly a twin of mine.
00:53:28
I found out within months that it was actually July the 23rd, not nine chains, 2nd, 3, but 1972.
00:53:36
So I gained a whole year very quickly.
00:53:39
Very quickly.
00:53:41
Yeah.
00:53:41
Yes.
00:53:42
I grew up fast.
00:53:43
I grew up fast.
00:53:44
Okay.
00:53:45
Okay.
00:53:47
So tell me about the next few months and the next year or so.
00:53:51
You're sort of trying to scrub out all this indoctrination.
00:53:56
You're doing some deep programming.
00:53:59
And what was that like?
00:54:00
What was necessary was to acquire experiences that could connect with people my own age.
00:54:11
I had none.
00:54:12
As in, you didn't have any friends?
00:54:13
Yeah.
00:54:15
Or ability to have friends.
00:54:17
So all the normal things of having, I've been bored up hating people my own age.
00:54:23
You get into trouble.
00:54:24
Being a class niche, trusting in people older than me to decide everything.
00:54:28
And suddenly that's not the world I'm in.
00:54:31
It's turned upside down.
00:54:34
So for me, it was trying to work out how to fit into life.
00:54:38
I found out who my mother was.
00:54:40
They did a deep dive when that happened to be a cult member.
00:54:44
It's the worst one of the worst days of my life.
00:54:46
Why was it one of the worst?
00:54:47
The leader.
00:54:48
Sorry.
00:54:49
She was an inner sanctum member called Ancienjoy.
00:54:52
She looked after Anne's property in Melbourne called Winger.
00:54:58
And when Anne would tell us that she would like to take one or two of us down to spend the week with her, she went Ancienjoy and then Ancienjoy would say, no, she didn't want us to be with her.
00:55:07
She was busy.
00:55:07
She was doing this.
00:55:08
Well, that wasn't what was happening.
00:55:10
That was Anne saying that.
00:55:12
So we all had an inherent hate to Ancienjoy.
00:55:15
So to find out that she's my mom was, this isn't good.
00:55:18
And then shortly after she rang me saying, don't bother turning up on my doorstep.
00:55:23
You're an embarrassment to me or shut the door on your face.
00:55:25
So that shot that possibility of relationship down very quickly.
00:55:30
Yes.
00:55:31
Okay.
00:55:32
What a horrible mom.
00:55:33
Exactly.
00:55:35
So that shot that dude.
00:55:37
I met my half-brothers and still to this day get on have relationship with them.
00:55:42
Get on very well.
00:55:43
So began to connect with them, began to do school, began to do life.
00:55:46
Loathe what it was to get on a bus and off the bus.
00:55:48
I'm a train and off the train.
00:55:50
Got lost.
00:55:51
Started by a crowding.
00:55:53
Started trying to play sport.
00:55:55
It's hopeless.
00:55:56
It had no little experience.
00:55:58
So all of that, you know, desperate for connection with people older than me, trying to form friendships with mine.
00:56:04
At school there was a group of boys that did a year or eleven English assignment, which was basically trying to help us simulate me, trying to teach me to be normal.
00:56:15
That was part of their English assignment.
00:56:17
And they were just good-matured kids just trying to do what was best for me.
00:56:20
But it was an absolute mess.
00:56:23
I just, you know, a ball in a china shot.
00:56:25
My name was Psycho.
00:56:26
I just couldn't connect with people.
00:56:29
I was unpredictable.
00:56:31
It was a disaster.
00:56:33
It was hard.
00:56:35
I was suicidal.
00:56:37
I worked out ways to kill myself.
00:56:39
Couldn't connect.
00:56:40
Couldn't fit in.
00:56:41
Life was against me.
00:56:42
Melitated.
00:56:43
So it was tough.
00:56:45
It was very, very tough experience.
00:56:47
And then the kid to grow up with my cottage parents.
00:56:49
We had got sacked.
00:56:50
I was absolutely destroyed.
00:56:52
I got very close to them.
00:56:54
And so I got a foster mother.
00:56:55
She happened to be a born-again Christian and never told me about chooses.
00:57:00
Again, obviously you're starting asking questions about life.
00:57:03
What if it didn't, how come I grew up and what I grew in?
00:57:05
What do you think?
00:57:07
And eventually I had an encounter with Jesus Christ.
00:57:10
We've been 17 and a half like when Baptist youth pastors office.
00:57:15
I met the real Jesus.
00:57:16
And that to me was the beginning of okay.
00:57:19
This plays my theology.
00:57:22
And I used to ask God to make it rain and stop rain and it did for about six weeks.
00:57:28
And my foster mother told me God had made the world have the power to intercede to called miracles if we ask him he can do it.
00:57:35
So I went okay.
00:57:36
I've grown up with the supernatural.
00:57:38
I've got a file for this.
00:57:39
Let's see how this works and it did.
00:57:42
And as I said, I explained that in depth.
00:57:44
But I then began to investigate God.
00:57:46
Who are you?
00:57:47
How do I know you how can I be right through?
00:57:49
And that was in June.
00:57:51
He took me to about 18 and a half.
00:57:53
Okay.
00:57:53
Moved on, got a certificate in information technology after traineeship and did a degree.
00:57:59
Kids came and I was 26 to 28 and then we moved on.
00:58:03
So it's been a process of just decision by decision what's the framework?
00:58:08
How am I going to do live now?
00:58:10
Yeah.
00:58:10
We're just working through it all.
00:58:12
So that was the deep programming.
00:58:15
More it was just trying to live life and work out that how I was on that wasn't working.
00:58:22
I needed to change that.
00:58:23
Yeah.
00:58:23
I mean, it feels to me, although it sounds hard.
00:58:27
You've reented society pretty well.
00:58:30
Whereas I know kids who grew up in the family, they're no longer with us.
00:58:36
I think there's been a few deaths over the years.
00:58:40
There's been at least one.
00:58:42
And then others have struggled with major addictions, mental issues that are very genuine.
00:58:47
Others have done well.
00:58:48
But there's a package that's there.
00:58:52
Some have married and stayed married and had kids.
00:58:55
Others have there's a mixture of everything.
00:58:59
So I would say I'm in the column of one of those that have done well told.
00:59:04
I mean, just in society, Julian's older marriage and for nearly 32 years and kids at the other end, educated with a degree.
00:59:12
And yeah, the professional jobs both married.
00:59:15
It's an achievement that I'm very proud of.
00:59:18
It's good.
00:59:19
Yeah.
00:59:20
Working at, you know, working at IBM, working at IBM for a long time, that's pretty impressive.
00:59:25
Yeah.
00:59:25
It's been a while.
00:59:26
1997.
00:59:27
So I think I'm almost in a month.
00:59:29
It'll be 27 years or something.
00:59:32
So when you look back at all this thing, when you look back at this experience, how do you feel about it?
00:59:38
Is there a part of you that's still angry that these were the cards that you are dealt through no fault of your own or have you kind of come to terms with it?
00:59:49
Are you at peace with it?
00:59:51
Julian, if I was to write what I wanted to happen, it'd be very different.
00:59:56
Yeah.
00:59:57
So getting angry at something, you can't change it.
01:00:01
Yeah.
01:00:02
So I can wage in anger with my mother.
01:00:04
I can dance a, you know, a cheek on anger.
01:00:08
I can get angry at the enables.
01:00:11
What's that going to do for me?
01:00:14
Yeah.
01:00:15
I mean, you know, and you've known a lot of people who have been sucked into a cult.
01:00:22
Do you think that cults prey on a sort of vulnerability in our human brains?
01:00:27
Could anyone, like, could I get sucked into a cult?
01:00:32
I think you've got to look at what each and how we're made.
01:00:36
Why?
01:00:37
Why do people worship?
01:00:39
Now, when I use the word worship, we all think religion, but how many people go along and their cultural icons, sporting heroes?
01:00:49
What's in us that looks at someone going, I want to emulate you.
01:00:54
We function as people that have this inbuilt desire to love and be loved, to have relationships that are meaningful and to belong to something bigger than ourselves, done in a manner and in a environment where that's holistic and healthy,
01:01:08
then we're good.
01:01:09
Strip, though, is away from an individual and there's still this craving.
01:01:16
And so when a family fails to give a cheek, when society fails to give a cheek or you don't trust it because you've been violated, you can very easily have someone stepping in with spiritual aspects or even political aspects or wider gangs function.
01:01:32
How did the hell's angels get coming?
01:01:35
And the only thing between a good and a bad culture, cult, C-U-L-T, the community's underlying legal tenants, is the mole component to it.
01:01:46
Servant leadership, because we all desire to follow, to be led to any group of people will look for a leader.
01:01:52
So you can very quickly subvert this deep need in an individual on those areas and exploit it.
01:01:59
So all of us, if we don't have these, a balance with these things in it, are looking for this to be met, and it's not in a healthy manner, are then open to it because it's a deep human need that God's wired us to have.
01:02:12
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
01:02:14
We all want to be loved.
01:02:15
We all want to feel like we belong.
01:02:17
Yeah.
01:02:18
And in the absence of belonging, yeah, you can fall for charlatans.
01:02:23
100% you can, that offer things.
01:02:25
And that's what I indeed, she offered love acceptance, she offered eternity, she offered solving problems for people, financial problems, give it all a look after you.
01:02:36
I mean, that's, that's the danger, isn't it?
01:02:39
Yeah.
01:02:39
And that's where so many of them do this.
01:02:41
I mean, she offered a purpose as well though.
01:02:43
Maybe there's a bit of a, like, yes, come join me.
01:02:45
Here's a divine mission that sort of elevates you above the mundane.
01:02:50
The plebs.
01:02:50
That's right.
01:02:51
Yeah.
01:02:51
You're special.
01:02:52
You're part of the unseen, unknown, unheard.
01:02:56
You know, you're, you're chosen by God.
01:02:59
And so think of this for my mother, believe that and asked for me to be handed over.
01:03:05
God asked for her child, what an honor.
01:03:07
I mean, sick though it is.
01:03:10
That's sick.
01:03:10
You buy into this stuff and it's like I get it.
01:03:13
And my mother's completely responsible.
01:03:16
Don't get me wrong.
01:03:16
I'm not dissolving over the guilt of that.
01:03:18
But so it says to you, Julian, what you believe matters.
01:03:21
I think that's absolutely true.
01:03:24
Yeah.
01:03:25
Well said.
01:03:25
Tell us about your book.
01:03:28
I understand it's available very soon.
01:03:30
Very true.
01:03:31
I've just finished the epilogue and put it up on Amazon last night.
01:03:36
Oh, congratulations.
01:03:37
Thank you.
01:03:38
Awakened listeners follow along.
01:03:41
And what's your book called?
01:03:42
So the book is called Life Behind the Wire.
01:03:47
It will be on Amazon as a digital book.
01:03:51
Okay.
01:03:51
Well, Ben, I have absolutely loved talking to you.
01:03:54
And thank you so much for sharing your story.
01:03:57
It's been an amazing journey.
01:03:58
Thank you for the opportunity to share and talk to you.
01:04:02
Today's episode was produced by Rachel Tuffrey.
01:04:07
It was mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our theme music.
01:04:10
Evie Atkins is our intern.
01:04:12
Our cover art is by Naomi Lee Beverage.
01:04:15
And this whole thing has been a super real production.
01:04:25
(upbeat music)
01:04:28
[MUSIC]
01:04:38
Thank you for bringing this story to your attention on your podcast. Not only is it a fascinating insight into the depraved machinations of a truly evil woman and her co-conspirators and the loss of childhood but the story of how powerful the love of Christ is for the lost. Ben is a survivor who despite the incredible trauma suffered has found the true redeeming power of forgiveness in Christ. Anne's deeds have not been forgotten and will be accounted for but Ben has brought beauty from ashes.