From Yoga Teacher to
Cult Leader

In this exclusive excerpt from The Family, a work of investigative reportage from Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones, we learn of the origins of an apocalyptic Australian cult known as “The Family,” its Yoga-teacher-turned-guru Anne Hamilton-Byrne, and the currents in mid-century Antipodes life that allowed her cult to flourish. 

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Anne started teaching yoga in Melbourne and in Geelong, a satellite city close by, in the late 1950s. This was just as yoga was emerging in the post-war West. The Gita School of Yoga was opened in 1960 in Melbourne by Margrit Segesman, under whom Anne trained and with whom she worked. Segesman was the daughter of a Swiss banker; she lived in Indian ashrams and followed a Tibetan guru. She also claimed to have lived in an Indian cave for five years. Anne’s story was that she met Segesman in the street on a windy, rainy day in Melbourne and helped her pull some awnings down outside her school; Anne introduced herself as a physiotherapist and nurse.

According to Barbara Kibby, who, like many, would become a cult member through Anne’s early yoga classes, Anne was an excellent teacher. Many who crossed Anne’s path say this; that in the very early days, she was wonderful. She gravitated towards teaching middle-aged women in wealthy suburbs. These women were going through a mid-life crisis, Kibby said: ‘Children grown up, husbands having affairs, but it was in the days when divorce was not as normal as it is today. Divorce was a very big deal. There were a certain number of Jewish women and she targeted them, mainly because they were very vulnerable due to their situation in society at that time and because they came from wealthy families.

‘She knew if she could get them to leave their husbands, their families would disown them—he’d have them for life,’ says Barbara. ‘There was nowhere for them to go.’

Anne encouraged such women—and men, though in fewer numbers—to turn their backs on their previous lives. ‘There’s no own family,’ she would say. ‘Only love. Great love.’

Middle-age was the perfect time, she said, to begin their real journeys. ‘It is very important and rather advisable for any individual who is midway through their physical incarnation to sever their ties with old things that they do by erecting a new home which will contain new facilities and furnishings which are symbolic of new life powers and blessings and beauties into which you have consciously entered.’

‘There’s no ifs or buts in that at all,’ Anne told her followers. ‘Also remember making changes like that are going to involve human and financial sacrifice, but it is a small price to pay, remember, for the fullness of the benefit to be gained by living in agreement with that you know. What must come to you before everything else are the imperishable gifts of the divine spirit through your training.

‘I know a tremendous effort has to be made to break the old habits of fear and all the holding back of the self and false economies,’ she said. ‘Where you are now is like a season. It is a season of your unfoldment.’

Yoga, all kinds of yoga, was a booming craze. It was the thing to do in Melbourne through the 1960s for wealthy women whose children were grown. But Anne and her aggressively spiritual—almost occult—approach was gaining attention in the yoga community. At Segesman’s school, she cast a spell on a young man in a class who disagreed with her. The incident caused Segesman to break all ties with Anne. ‘Anne went into the kitchen when they were clearing up,’ says a former cult member, ‘and she muttered, “He’s not going to be here tomorrow, he’s going to be very sick.” And of course the next day the man was. Now you can say that’s coincidence, it probably is coincidence, but she already was gaining that intention and that reputation of having influence over people’s wellbeing, for good or for bad. It made you pretty wary. You stood back. You were careful.’

Three days before Christmas 1962, a Saturday, Dr Raynor Johnson heard the doorbell ring. He was in his study, at his home in the grounds of the University of Melbourne—the academic heart of the city’s establishment.

‘A day of destiny for me,’ Johnson wrote later in a strange, unfinished manuscript that has become a sort of hidden manifesto for the cult.

Johnson, who was 61 in 1962, was the English-born head of the university’s Queen’s College, a brilliant physicist but a most peculiar man. He was something of a marquee signing for the university: a venerable and very liberal English academic with impeccable pedigree. By the early 1960s, however, he was on the tail-end of his career and had moved in his mind from physics into metaphysics. He was the archetypal seeker.

‘A young lady of perhaps 30 to 35 years of age, of fair hair and complexion, of medium to slender build, of clear grey sparkling eyes and a quiet attractive voice, addressed me,’ he recorded.

In fact, Anne was nearly 41, but may have looked younger as she had begun what was to be a long regime of facelifts.

‘I don’t think you know me,’ she said, addressing Johnson by name, ‘but I know you well. My name is Anne ——.’

She called herself Anne Hamilton, but Johnson’s diary is very coy about names; he either doesn’t give them, doesn’t give them in full, or uses just initials. For many years to come in speeches and writings, he referred to Anne as an anonymous male.

He invited her in, leading her into his study and showing her to an easy chair. ‘She said, “I understand you are shortly going on a visit to India?”’

He was indeed to embark, with his wife, Mary, on a six-week trip involving a lecture on ‘science and spirituality’ at a conference, followed by some travel. ‘I think I felt a little surprised that this was known.’

This was one of Anne’s main ploys: to find out about people surreptitiously and then dazzle them with her insight. Two men she was said to know well were in and around Queen’s College at the time and were likely feeding her information about Johnson. One was John Champness, a Melbourne psychologist who had resided at Queen’s. He was a friend, possibly boyfriend, of Anne’s before she first married, and he knew Johnson. Later, she told followers she met Champness while singing at the British Empire Society in Melbourne. The other was Michael Riley, her soon- to-be second husband, a South African ex-navyman who would marry Anne for a year, in 1965. He was in charge of catering and then gardening at Queen’s. He was very keen on Johnson’s increasingly esoteric mysticism, and the two were friendly. Riley later claimed to have awoken Anne sexually, and the two were said to be in a relationship of some sort when he initially told her about Johnson.

It was Anne’s first masterstroke—to court and recruit a man of influence in Melbourne. By 1962, as shown in his academic writings, Johnson was so deep into transcendence, the paranormal, and the promise of bliss that he wanted a teacher—a guru, in the Eastern sense—to guide him. She wanted to be that guru.

Johnson was from Leeds, and he went to university in Oxford and London. His specialty in physics was spectroscopy: the science of radiation and light. He worked in London with Ernest Rutherford, who split the atom and discovered the proton during World War I. In 1934, when he was headhunted, he came to Melbourne with Mary. He was looking for more, more, more, always more to the physical dimensions of life. In the United Kingdom, he had been involved with the Society for Psychical Research, exploring things such as telepathy, poltergeists, and mediums. He was also a poet and had begun to publish arcane books on mysticism. Former student Ian Weeks remembers him as a mischievous, impish man with constantly twinkling eyes, large ears, and buck teeth: ‘Perfectly cast for the role of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. He had a disproportionately large head. His head was somewhat like an egg turned upside down.’

But he was very open. He was a friend to his students, many of whom he invited back to his home on the university grounds for late-night discussions on philosophy and religion. He was known as having very liberal beliefs, and the students called him Sam. ‘Raynor was always very gentle to human beings, to others,’ says Weeks, a Melbourne academic specialising in the history of religions, himself from a family of noted Methodists. ‘Very thoughtful, and always took you seriously, even if you were speaking utter rubbish. He was extremely polite.’

Anne dazzled Johnson that Christmas of 1962 in his study. He found that both he and Anne—this wonderful, attractive woman who appeared on his doorstep and knew the future—were enamoured with Helena Blavatsky, a Russian medium who co-formed the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. ‘Madam’ Blavatsky said she was taught esoteric wisdom by a spiritual teacher in Tibet: she was interested in cosmology, transcendental meditation, and the paranormal, but her main message to followers, who included Rudolph Steiner and Thomas Edison, was of a single ancient wisdom in the form of an energy. Her star pupil, Annie Besant, helped set up the first World’s Parliament of Religions, an organisation aimed at cultivating harmony among members of the world’s different religious and spiritual communities.

Anne had in fact hosted homeopath Thomas Maughan, the head of Britain’s The Druid Order, in her home a couple of years earlier. Maughan quoted Blavatsky in his books. He said he could talk to the dead. The link was so direct that Maughan married a Family cult member, briefly.

This mysticism aligned entirely with Raynor Johnson’s beliefs. Anne also told him that she was making her early followers read a Greek-Armenian guru called George Gurdjieff, who, with help from wealthy patrons, set up an institute in a French chateau. He preached that the universe was created by cosmic matter called Etherokilno, and referred to the god within it as ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endlessness’. Followers said that he gave off a strong blue light, which could be used to cure mental and physical illnesses.

Then she talked to Johnson about India. ‘There will be many on this side—and elsewhere—who will be interested in your visit.’

Johnson later wrote that he suspected right away she had extrasensory perception; that she knew things other people could not. He failed to recognise that all she had likely done was ask around about him and what he was up to. He seized on her use of the word ‘elsewhere’. ‘I formed the idea that “elsewhere” might be conveying something of “beyond this plane of existence,”’ he wrote.

Anne told him that he would need to be careful of his wife’s health on the trip. ‘I can see there is danger here,’ she said.

She had pushed three crucial buttons in just a few minutes: she apparently knew the future, she knew how important India was to him, and she sensed that his wife was in danger. Johnson asked if Mary could join them in the study. Anne told them that Mary would get so sick on their trip they would have to come back to Melbourne early.

‘I asked Mrs Johnson if she believed in clairvoyants,’ said Anne in a recorded sermon, ‘and she said, “Oh yes!” and I said, “Well, look, it comes to me clairvoyantly”—it came to me as a shock in my solar plexus that she would die, when she got there, of eating fish. I said, “It will weaken you for a long time to come even if you stay alive, so if you don’t eat it you won’t get the tummy poisoning.”’

They took the trip, and Mary got acute dysentery.

‘She was in a very bad way,’ said Anne later. ‘It was very, very close. She had to come home and she was very ill. She was not quite herself for a long, long time, as prophesised.’

This event was an important marker in Anne’s power over Johnson. He was her first believer, and he was crucial in building the cult she would head, based in part on the strength of his name. ‘It is scarcely necessary to say that upon our return in February 1963 the person we were most looking forward to seeing again was Anne,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It was for us the beginning of a friendship in which weekly visits were interchanged between our homes—and wonder deepened.’

Anne returned to the university several times to see Johnson. Ian Weeks saw her one day walking in a quadrangle, waving flowers around at the entrances of buildings, in a ritual. He says that she was clearly grooming Johnson. ‘She was a very attractive woman. He was naïve. He did not have a very strong sense of the real nature of evil in the world. I think he was misled by her. She was very capable, very intelligent, with a spiritually active and interested persona, and the combination of those two people came to have considerable force.’

Johnson’s spiritualism, says Weeks, led him to believe he had been invited by a ‘college of spirits’ to widen spiritual beliefs in the world. He thought that he could ‘speak to his generation’, and the fact that he was scientist would make him more influential. Johnson was an Edwardian liberal who questioned organised religion, societal convention, and the aristocracy; his was a generation looking for meaning, even in the arcane. ‘Spiritualism was very widely held at the time,’ says Weeks. ‘People like Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, were interested in it. A number of playwrights and writers, and authors of various kinds, used to go to spiritualist places, and in many homes if you had a dinner party, after you’d had coffee and port you’d have a ouija board, and you’d try and connect with spirits beyond. This was really surprisingly widespread in the upper middle classes particularly.’

By early 1963, Australian troops were in Vietnam but none had yet been killed. The Beatles were about to make their first album. In Australia, there were more suicides that year than ever recorded. It was a time of seeking and questioning. And Johnson was bewitched. Anne had been telling him all about her first husband—Lionel, who had died in a car crash in 1955—and how sad and tragic her life had been. She told him she had lost three children and had contemplated suicide.

Anne also started to tell him a lot more about her own guru, or at least the one she said she had. Johnson was the only person she ever gave his name to: Sri Yugananda. She said he had been in Australia but was now able to ‘prototype’ to her—in other words, to duplicate himself and be in two places at once. When Lionel died, she said, the guru sent Anne a cable saying Walk on. She told Johnson that he was part of her grand design and that what she really wanted for him was what she already had—eternal life, to live and die outside of the restraints of humanity. She had travelled with her guru through the cosmos, she said, and she made it sound beautiful and assured: ‘Once you have a glimpse of these superior ones just with your old eyes it will completely change your life. You could look at them for years and years and not know them, then all of a sudden through your training you see them. You find that the supreme ruler god has manifested and given enlightenment and divine wisdom for all creatures.’

It was time for her first miracle.

Anne had a biological daughter called Judith with Lionel Harris. Judith later came to be known as  Natasha  and  now lives in the United Kingdom, but is no longer involved with The Family and doesn’t speak to her mother. In May of 1963, she was 19, and she rolled her car on the outskirts of Melbourne, fracturing her skull and wounding an eye. Doctors told her she might lose her sight. ‘Her mother immediately organised spirit help,’ Johnson wrote, and a week later Judy left hospital much earlier than expected and in good shape. Johnson told his wife: ‘I think this is the most Christ-like person I have ever met.’

Anne quickly proclaimed herself Johnson’s post-retirement ‘teacher’; she told him to slow down his activities, sit quietly for an hour a day, reduce thinking to a ‘vanishing point’, and avoid food for two days a week. She told him she often fasted for three-week stints.

A group of like-minded seekers would be formed around him, she said. They would receive revelations and the ‘joy and peace of being really on The Path’. The first seven of her followers were soon to be consecrated, and he was one of them.

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Excerpted from The Family by Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones. Copyright © 2018 by the author and reprinted by permission of the publisher, Scribe.