I see that extensive excerpts from Sarah Hamilton Byrnes book “ Unseen, Unheard, Unknown” are online. This is a most excellent book detailing Sarahs life within “The Great White Brotherhood” cult run by her “mother”. This cult is a most notorious Australian group that hit the headlines in the 80s when it was discovered that medical practitioners were involved in a “church” that, basically, illegally fostered children out to the cult. Some excerpts:
“My mother was Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the leader of a small sect in the Dandenongs called the Family or the Great White Brotherhood. I was a small part of her plan to collect children in what she herself once called a "scientific experiment". Later I discovered it was her intention that we children would continue her sect after the earth was consumed by a holocaust…The fosters had varying lengths of stay. She used to say that she couldn't remember all the dates very well because she had so many children. Maybe, in retrospect, we should have realised that was weird but then we never thought it was anything out of the ordinary. She decided upon sets of twins and triplets and gave us ages and birth-dates to fit in with that idea. We were dressed alike. Most of the girls' hair was dyed blond, cut into fringes and worn long with identical hairstyles and identically-coloured ribbons. All the boys had bowl haircuts…..”
Cultic “uniformity” manifest there. The cult leader “mother”, sought to change the kids into replicants of herself:
“Until we got the electricity connected we had never watched television, except possibly on rare occasions when we were overseas. In fact I don't think I even knew that it existed until after the electricity was connected. We were in complete isolation Uptop. We didn't understand where we were situated, even near what city. We didn't even know that we were close to Melbourne, a city of three million people. We had no concept even of what a city was, or of any other human community other than that in which we existed….”
Cultic “seperation” in the pursuit of information starvation. What you don’t know about, you cant dream about:
“Weighing was a very serious business - particularly serious for us because if it was considered that we were putting on too much weight we would have our food rations cut down and that was a dreadful proposition - food being the most important thing in our lives….”
The old cultic food / sleep deprivation method. A few details about the daily regime:
“Fifteen minutes of listening to Baba or Anne on tape was followed by fifteen minutes of chanting. We usually chanted Sanskrit mantras or parts of the Sri Guru Gita which is a song of reverence to the Guru - the conversation of Parvati with the god Shiva. After the chanting we meditated for another twenty to twenty-five minutes, depending on the time. By 8:30 we were ready to set up the schoolroom. This involved carrying in trestle tables and folding chairs from outside and setting them up in the boys' bedroom and taking our school bags out of a locked cupboard. Then, if we had done all this quickly enough and had enough time before school, we went out to the yard and did exercises for ten to fifteen minutes. These consisted of jogging on the spot, leg raises, hopping, frog jumping and running around the periphery of the yard - probably about a hundred metres. Occasionally we were allowed to run up and down to the gate - also a distance of a hundred metres, but we had to have permission to leave the yard otherwise. It was a serious offence if we were caught outside the yard. It was fenced with chicken wire and then barbed wire on top of that, to a height of six feet .”
And outside the “protective” fence? A horrible world of torture and persecution.
Surely, this girl lived one of the most miserable childhoods on record.