Sarah Hamilton-Byrne

Sarah Hamilton-Byrne (born 8 July 1969) is an Australian writer and doctor who spent her childhood in The Family, a new religious movement run by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a former yoga teacher. She was instrumental in getting the group investigated by the police in Victoria, Australia. She later went on to become a doctor and to write a book about her traumatic experiences in The Family. She is now known as Sarah Moore.
Life in The Family
Sarah Hamilton-Byrne's real mother was an unmarried teenager who put her daughter up for adoption in 1969, not knowing that the girl was one of several children who would be adopted by Anne Hamilton-Byrne (AHB from here on). The latter was a charismatic yoga teacher who gathered a number of followers around her and convinced them that she was the incarnation of Christ. The children that she adopted were meant to be the "inheritors of the earth" after a holocaust took place. AHB had many followers who worked in the medical and nursing professions, and who manipulated the adoption process so that fourteen children were adopted by AHB. These children—including Sarah—were told that AHB was their real mother.
Along with the other adopted children, Sarah Hamilton-Byrne was brought up in houses that were owned by AHB, who had several properties in various countries (Sarah later estimated that AHB might have been worth $150 million). Sarah spent the first 4-5 years of her life at a house called Winberra, in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne, Victoria. After that, she was moved to Kai Lama, a group house at Lake Eildon, also in Victoria.
Life for the children at Kai Lama was unremittingly strict and even brutal. AHB herself was usually not there, so the children were supervised by cult women who were known as Aunties. These women disciplined the children by inflicting severe beatings for the most trivial reasons or no reason at all. Another disciplinary measure that was common was food deprivation. The children lived in fear and were deprived of all love and affection. In spite of this, they always hoped for some show of affection from AHB, who they believed was their mother, and who visited Kai Lama from time to time. They were also led to believe that the world outside was an evil and dangerous place, and that they would end up in the gutter (or worse) if they ever left The Family.
Another form of discipline that was commonly used on the children was the administering of prescription drugs that were obtained by the followers in the medical and nursing professions. These drugs were routinely used to pacify the children. When they were older, they could also be forced to take the hallucinogenic drug LSD as a kind of religious ritual. This was known as "going-through", and was supposed to promote self-awareness, helping the person to let go of blocks. Hamilton-Byrne was forced to "go-through" in 1984, when she was 15. The experience took place at a cult property in England, and went on for some days because she was given repeated doses of the drug. She found it a traumatic experience and was later convinced that she had suffered lasting damage from the drug.
As Hamilton-Byrne grew up, she became more assertive and began arguing with those who supervised the children, including AHB herself. After arguing once too often, she was expelled from the cult by AHB in 1987, at the age of 17. Fortunately for her, she was taken in by a family she had met. After a time, she was introduced to a private investigator, known only as Helen D, who had been investigating The Family for several years. From Helen D, Sarah learned that AHB was a fraud and that Sarah herself was not AHB's daughter at all; she had in fact been adopted.
Helen D introduced Sarah to two policewomen who won her confidence; this eventually led to a police raid on Kai Lama on Friday 14 August 1987. A number of children were taken into custody, then placed in care, along with Sarah. A number of Aunties faced criminal charges and were eventually convicted of fraudulently obtaining money from the Department of Social Security. AHB and her husband Bill were overseas at the time; they were extradited from the United States in 1993 and faced criminal charges, but were only convicted of making false statements in regard to the adoption of Sarah and other children. They were each fined $5,000.
Life after The Family
Once free of The Family, Hamilton-Byrne went on to study medicine and become a qualified doctor. As a doctor, she did extensive volunteer work in India and Thailand (where she worked with Karen refugees on the Thai-Burma border), but still returned to Australia, where she carried on a medical practice in the Dandenong Ranges. She also wrote a book—Unseen Unheard Unknown—detailing her experiences in The Family; it was published by Penguin in 1995.
She suffered from a problem with chronic pain, possibly as a result of a wound inflicted on her at Kai Lama. As a result, she forged a number of prescriptions for the pain-killing drug pethidine, but was found out and charged with a number of offences. In July 2005, she avoided a gaol sentence at Ringwood Magistrate's Court in Victoria. She was allowed to give an undertaking to be of good behaviour for four years and to do community service. She had pleaded guilty to forging prescriptions to obtain pethidine between November 2004 and April 2005.
Before committing these offences, Hamilton-Byrne had developed bipolar disorder, suffered a miscarriage and developed post-traumatic stress disorder.
In August 2009, she had an emotional reunion with Anne Hamilton-Byrne, which was covered by the Herald Sun newspaper. AHB, who was then 87 years old, said she was now "ready to die" after being reunited with her "favourite daughter". The reunion took place at AHB's sprawling compound at Olinda, Victoria. AHB said that people who accused her of mistreating the children were "lying bastards" and she would love to "put them right" but could not. She stated that she could have sued her critics but had decided against it. Sarah Hamilton-Byrne said she loved Anne but had mixed feelings about her. She still regarded AHB as being responsible for the abuse of the children, but the cult leader blamed the Aunties. That was as far as AHB would go in acknowledging any wrongdoing, Sarah said; otherwise she was unrepentant. She described AHB as a powerful and charismatic person and thought that the cult leader initially meant well in creating the cult and collecting the children. These acts, she thought, were AHB's compensation and "delusional repair" for her own childhood, which involved having an absent father and a psychotic mother.
She continued to develop her skills and qualifications, which include PhD, MBBS, MA (Psych. studies), Dip. Clinical Hypnotherapy and Dip.Fam.Therapy.
Eventually, Hamilton-Byrne—who by this time had changed her name to Moore—set up an organisation called Barefoot Basics, a charity that aims to provide health assistance to indigenous and displaced people in countries like India. The charity was approved for tax deductible purposes. She does charity work overseas whenever she can afford to make the trip.<ref name="blogpost"/>
Hamilton-Byrne became a Buddhist in 2009 after meeting a Buddhist lama who inducted her into the belief system of Buddhism. She has said this brought her enormous relief and joy and meant that she was now rid of her burden. She felt she now had the support of a teacher/guru (the Buddha), the dharma (a word usually translated as "righteousness", and denoting the righteous or spiritual path) and the community of Buddhists. This new belief system made sense of her life and gave her a perspective on things, particularly where she had gone wrong by taking on too much, spiritually and emotionally. Having found a guru whom no-one could find fault with, she felt that she had a psychological and spiritual support that she had lacked since she was expelled from The Family.<ref name="blogpost"/>

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