The Family, also known as the Santiniketan Park Association or the Great White Brotherhood, was an Australian New Age group formed in the mid-1960s under the leadership of Anne Hamilton-Byrne (born Evelyn Grace Victoria Edwards; 30 December 1921 – 13 June 2019).
[5][page needed] Children raised in the group studied the major scriptures of these religions as well as the works of gurus including Sri Chinmoy, Meher Baba, and Rajneesh.
[8] Beginning around 1964, Anne Hamilton-Byrne led a religious and philosophical discussion group at Santiniketan, the home of parapsychologist Raynor Johnson, on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne in the Dandenong Ranges suburb of Ferny Creek.
[9] The group consisted of middle-class professionals, a quarter of whom were medical personnel recruited by Johnson via Hamilton-Byrne's hatha yoga classes.
[9] Although Newhaven Hospital had been closed down by 1992, an inquest was ordered that year into the death of a patient in 1975 that was alleged to have been due to deep sleep therapy.
Some were the biological children of members of The Family; others had been obtained through illegal adoptions arranged by lawyers, doctors, and social workers within the group who could bypass normal protocols.
[6][page needed] They were denied almost all access to the outside world, and subjected to a discipline that included starvation diets and frequent, unprovoked beatings.
[18] Doses of the psychiatric drugs fluphenazine, diazepam, haloperidol, chlorpromazine, nitrazepam, oxazepam, trifluoperazine, carbamazepine, or imipramine were frequently administered to the children.
[6][page needed] On reaching adolescence they were compelled to undergo an initiation process involving LSD; while under the influence of the drug the child would be left in a dark room, alone, apart from visits by Hamilton-Byrne or one of the psychiatrists from The Family.
In 1979 and 1981 she took some of the children to stay with Muktananda at his ashram at South Fallsburg, New York, United States, and purchased a nearby property as her own base in America.
According to Sarah, Hamilton-Byrne eventually caused a lot of trouble at the South Fallsburg ashram and some of Muktananda's devotees defected to The Family.
[12] Another former member of The Family, Cynthia Chan, alleged that she paid the sum of $352,115 to Hamilton-Byrne for real estate in Olinda, but the property was never transferred to her.
[31] In later years it was reported that Hamilton-Byrne was living in a Melbourne nursing home and suffering from dementia, and that an internal succession crisis for leadership of the group was unfolding.
[2] In 2016, a documentary on the sect entitled The Family was released at the Melbourne International Film Festival; it was produced by Anna Grieve and written, directed, and co-produced by Rosie Jones.
A companion book, The Family: The Shocking True Story of a Notorious Cult (2017), was written by Chris Johnston and Jones and published by Scribe.