The night that forgot

A scanning of programs on any streaming service will reveal that the phenomenon of the cult, both real and imagined, continues to fascinate the public imagination. One notorious historical example, and the subject of recent documentaries and a gripping TV series, is a group called The Family, which operated undetected from the late 1960s for over twenty years in a secluded rural property near Lake Eildon in Victoria. What makes this case so unusual is the fact that its leader was a woman: the glamorous, pathologically narcissistic Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Shockingly, as many as twenty-eight of the victims were children who were subject to brainwashing and sustained physical abuse. Discovered and released in 1987, many of those children suffered lasting trauma and some committed suicide. In a stroke of terrible irony, Hamilton-Byrne never faced justice for her heinous crimes because the law judged the testimony of the children to be unreliable.