Fashions today fall out of vogue tomorrow. Trends and crazes in storytelling always change, because nothing ages faster than the zeitgeist.
But far off into the future, in the days when human beings will beam and/or inject narrative experiences into themselves and the word “television” will sound as dated “hieroglyphics”, at least one genre of story will remain evergreen, continuing to shock and compel audiences with tales of batshit craziness: the story of religious cults.
The most notorious case in Australian history is that of the Melbourne-based cult The Family, which was led by the charming and dangerous Anne Hamilton-Byrne: a yoga teacher who claimed to be Jesus Christ reincarnated. Instead of serving wine and bread, Hamilton-Byrne fed LSD to her disciples – adopted children raised as her own throughout the 60s and 70s. She dressed them in identical clothes and haircuts; they resembled the pipsqueaks from Village of the Damned.
This quintessential stranger-than-fiction story was the subject of the writer/director Rosie Jones’s feature documentary The Family, which was accompanied by a book by Jones and journalist Chris Johnston. As a documentary, it was ambitious but not particularly grounded; reviewing the film in 2016, I described it as “structurally higgledy-piggledy” and “less an expose than a tantalising suggestion of the history lesson that might have been”.
Now, a few years later, we have a fuller and more complete version of that history. Jones has refined and expanded her approach, redeveloping the film into a three-part ABC TV series titled The Cult of the Family. It finds a better home in the small screen medium and I like the expanded version more. There is well over an hour of new material, which makes a big difference, but the portion size is smaller, allowing breathing room between each very dense episode.
The first begins with a whirlwind of chopped up sound grabs, archival footage, photographs, newspaper headlines, home video and surreal recreation. Interviewees reflect on the sect and Hamilton-Byrne, as well as her husband, William. It is edited to an inch of its life; one of those breakneck-paced TV info-dumps constructed with a fear that the viewer may change the channel at any moment.
The episode proper begins in Victoria’s Lake Eildon with a police and community services raid, early in the morning in August 1987, with almost exactly the same footage as the film’s opening. The former detective Lex de Man recounts how he became involved in the case, providing a broad overview of the sect before focus quickly turns to the survivors. It seems quite clear, from interview scenes throughout the series, that the psychological wounds accrued from their traumatic experiences may never completely heal. Their courage and candidness is inspiring.
Jones lays the foundation for the series by tracing Anne and her co-conspirator Raynor Johnson (described by one interviewee as “a typical Edwardian English gentleman”) in front of the backdrop of the new age movement, including brief reflection on its connection to occultism. The pair founded The Great White Brotherhood (an ominous name for an organisation if ever there was one), which became known as The Family.
The director and her interviewees attempt to explain the mish-mash of religions Hamilton-Byrne preached and the logic, for want of a better word, of her teachings. There is an inference (explicitly stated by an interviewee in episode two) that evil things can come in beautiful forms, which was also the most interesting aspect of Netflix’s recent series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, in which numerous subjects discussed the serial killer’s handsomeness. Anybody who foolishly believes that “eyes are the window to the soul” should watch these documentaries.
With so many points of access and potential ways to frame this narrative – and so many lives caught up in the sect – the task feels at times borderline overwhelming for the director, as it did in the feature length version.
The Cult of the Family doesn’t have the brilliant, cumulative quality of Netflix’s superb Wild Wild Country, about the followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, which began with eyeball-widening, goosebump-raising impact and kept getting better. But the restructured approach benefits The Family’s reincarnation.
It still feels like an information overload at times, hectic and pressure-packed, buckling under the strain of such a big investigation – but this is unquestionably an admirable achievement. The Cult of the Family will likely be remembered as the defining televisual text of this strange and shocking chapter in Australian history. As Jones has reminded us, doing this story justice is no small task.
• The Cult of the Family is a three-part series that airs Tuesday nights on the ABC, beginning Tuesday 12 March at 8.30pm
