THE FAMILY (2016)

Anne Hamilton-Byrne was beautiful, charismatic, delusional and damaged. She was also incredibly dangerous. Convinced she was a living god, Hamilton-Byrne headed an apocalyptic sect dubbed The Family, which was prominent in Melbourne through the 60s and 70s. With her husband Bill, she acquired numerous children – some through adoption scams, some born to cult members – and raised them as her own. Isolated from the outside world, the children were dressed in matching outfits, had identically dyed blonde hair, and were allegedly beaten, starved and injected with LSD. Taught that Hamilton-Byrne was both their mother and the messiah, the children were eventually rescued during a police raid in the mid 80s, but their trauma had only just begun.

Dylan Welch, "Inside the strange world of Julian", The Age , 15 Oct 2011:

He also confirms the rumour that his childhood involved the religious cult The Family, run by Melbourne yoga instructor Anne Hamilton-Byrne, when his mother took up with a man he names only as R who later reveals he was one of the children adopted by Hamilton-Byrne. R becomes a malevolent presence, beating Assange's mother and spending years pursuing them around Australia when they flee him.

Lyn Bender, "Raising Julian Assange", Eureka Street , 9 Dec 2010:

I encountered Hamilton-Byrne and her brood of stolen children (later revealed to be drugged, starved and abused) at the Melbourne Siddah Yoga Ashram in the 1980s. Her illegally adopted children were eerily obedient and surreal, swathed in white with silvered blond hair that was not unlike the silver hair of the now notorious Assange. These children were imprisoned in thinly veiled secrecy, lies and corruption. The cult was allowed to thrive for many years until it was finally exposed in 1987 and Hamilton-Byrne and her partner charged with conspiracy to defraud. A police raid released the children still being held there. From this thumbnail sketch Julian's life emerges as involving dislocation, disrupted attachments, fragmented relationships and possible abuse linked to the cult and his stepfather. He seems to have been in hiding and on the move for much of his life. With his mother, he experienced, then fled from, a cult of abuse, lies and secrecy.

Julian Assange, "Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography", The Independent , 23 Sep 2011:

My stepfather's place in our family was usurped by a man called Leif Meynell. I remember he had shoulder-length blond hair and was quite good-looking; a high forehead, and the characteristic dimpled white mark of a smallpox injection on his arm. From the darkness at his roots, it was obvious he bleached his hair. And one time I looked in his wallet and saw that all his cards were in different names. He was some sort of musician and played the guitar. But mainly he was a kind of ghost and a threatening mystery to us. ... It would take time for us to understand what the position was, and it was this: Leif Meynell was a member of an Australian cult called The Family. On reflection, I can now see that his obsessional nature derived from that, as well as his egocentricity and his dark sense of control. The Family was founded by a woman called Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the mid-1960s. It started in the mountains north of Melbourne, where they meditated, had meetings and sessions where they used LSD. The basic notion was that Anne happened to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but with elements of Eastern philosophy thrown in, such that her followers beheld a karmic deity obsessed with cleansing their souls.