THE FAMILY
Australia, 2016, 108 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Rosie Jones.
This is an Australian story, especially from the 1970s and the 1980s, the story of a cult, The Family.
Older audiences may remember the headlines of the 1980s when a number of children from The Family were taken in a raid by the police and the head of the cult, Anne Hamilton- Byrne and her husband, Bill, fled the country. But, the older audiences may not remember the details at all, except in recent years with the stories about one of the best known of The Family children, Julian Assange. However, this documentary with some re-enactments, stays with family and does not mention Assange – the Australian film, Underground from 2012 does provide this background.
Anne Hamilton- Byrne, a yoga teacher and her husband gathered followers around them both in England and in the Dandenong ranges, at Ferny Creek, Melbourne as well as out of Melbourne at Eildon (lots of images of Eildon and the dam). Quite a lot of adults became members of the cult, co-founded by an academic from the University, Raynor Johnson.
Anne Hamilton- Byrne declared that she loved children and gathered a number of orphans as well as the children of some of the cult members, keeping them in the house at Ferny Creek or Eildon, an extraordinarily strict regime, harsh disciplines and punishment, brainwashing the children, instilling deep loyalties as well as fear of the outside (that if the policeman saw them they would be killed), and the motto: unseen, unheard, unknown.
The film has a great deal of testimony from the adults who remember their time in the family, the loyalties, the fact that most of them had to have bleached hair, look similar, wear uniforms – one headline of the time referred to the John Wyndham story and referred to them as Children of the Damned, the story of hostile alien children in an ordinary village. The audience gets to know these talking heads very well as they recur with substantial interventions throughout the film, some obviously badly damaged by their experiences, some having overcome the difficulties and taking strong and critical stances. There are also some older members, amongst them women who were referred to as “aunts�.
The story is also told from the point of view of the police inspector, Lex de Man, who joined the special task force to investigate The Family during the latter part of the 1980s. An actor is seen for situations of the 1980s but the actual officer, de Man, gives a rather impassioned account of his involvement, the effect of talking with the children, discovering the harsh regime they lived by, beatings, food deprivation, use of drugs like LSD as well as something of the madness of Anne Hamilton- Byrne, her glamour, her snobbery, her extraordinary capacity for manipulation, and belief that she was Jesus Christ.
There was encouragement in the 1970s and 80s to take home movies of the children so there is plenty of material incorporated into this documentary showing the children, pictures of the adult talking heads of what they were like when they were little. Plenty of material of Anne and her husband.
The latter part of the film is interesting in terms of the pursuit of the husband and wife, the taking refuge in England, Hawaii, going under the radar in a house in the United States, which was also investigated by the FBI. After extradition, there were hearings, a court case and a sentence, in 1993 which barely touched Anne Hamilton Byrne and her husband, suspended sentence, a small fine.
Throughout the film, we might well be wondering who this woman really is, where she came from – and the film gives a thorough explanation of her background, her family, her mental state and ambitions and their fulfilment. While her husband had died in 2001, the film informs us that as of its making in 2016, Anne Hamilton Byrne (actually not her real name) is still alive at 95 in a dementia section of an institution.
This is the kind of story we expect out of the United States – but here is a homegrown story, from Melbourne and Victoria, with real children and real adults, and the more shocking in recent times with the revelations about the sexual and physical abuse of children.
