From the Back of the Crowd.

My spirit was broken, I had fallen into the gutter and I vaguely hoped she might lend me succor. From the back of the crowd I listened to her oration, articulate and inspiring as ever. Though separated from her by hundreds of adoring fans I could almost feel the heat of her charisma, even bathe in the light she seemed to give off. Her blue eyes expanded with the strength of her argument and, with the crowd, I was eclipsed by them.

After many years of activism she was the progressive Left’s hero, standing up to the injustices of the world, and I admired her greatly, she had been a decisive influence upon my own rebellious life. I had accompanied her on many escapades in our youth and, though it had been my own decision and volition to join her, I had mostly deferred to her direction and leadership, encouraged by her wisdom and bravery in the face of the State’s terrifying power.

As I watched her rousing words uplift the sullen mob I fondly remembered our misadventures so long ago, arrested with her and her gang of gutsy mavericks on issues we held implacably dear to our hearts. There was the time in the late 'Seventies when we attended a Christian anti-abortion "Right to Life" rally in Hyde park, the women dressed as pregnant nuns and myself dressed as a Catholic priest. I handed out sweets, Smarties, to all the children from a jar labelled “The Pill”, driving the Christians into a frenzy of bloodcurdling antipathy, they screamed blue murder and demanded the police lynch us. The police responded by beating us mercilessly and arresting us for “disturbance of the peace.”

Many of us were members of the Prisoners’ Action Group and as such we wanted to bring the barbarous conditions of the jail system into the public’s eye:  prisons overcrowded, the inmates bashed, fed on slops, with no facilities for rehabilitation, akin to the convict era of colonial settlement days. We tricked our way into the Screws’ Union office then barricaded the entrance making the police axe their way through the door and stacked-up office-furniture to drag us out to the waiting paddy-wagons.

When we went to court to face our trespass-charges the women gave impassioned pleas for justice and humanity and the Magistrate looked upon them with bemusement, benevolence and barely disguised titillation for they were, after all, beautiful Amazons from good middle-class families. But when he cast his beady eyes upon me he saw only an ill-behaved, upstart working-class homosexual, deserving of no lenient commiseration.

The State never forgives nor forgets, just waits for its chance to exact a vengeful justice to those who dare to rise above their station and challenge an authoritarian Establishment. Ten years later, when I no longer had a support group and was eking out a precarious existence hustling for arts jobs in between nursing the dying in palliative-care hospices, I was grabbed off the street and framed for an armed robbery. My previous civil disobedience transgressions committed under the guidance of my anarchic Boadicea leader were held as proof that I was indeed capable of heinous crimes. Tortured in the Central lock-up, under house arrest for two years, indicted for armed robbery and going to trial, I was eventually acquitted on a case of false identity. But the damage was done, my career foundered, I had to have psychiatric intervention for suicidal depression, my artist’s life was ruined.

I went to many “leftist” organizations and "friends" hoping to get help, finding most didn’t want to know about it, the mention of police giving my libertarian acquaintances the willies, some even pleased I got my comeuppance for being a loud-mouthed gay. I had dreamed I could at least get it off my chest by telling my story to supposed concerned politicos, my “activist” comrade of old in particular, her of hero status, if only I had the luck of some day meeting her. And here she was before me, inciting the crowd to action against a corrupt State machine.

She blathered on about the misguided activities of the “Corporate State” and how they must be countered by civil disobedience, including sitting on roads, blocking traffic and waving placards, all in peaceful protest, like good Gandhians, to the point of going to jail if they had to. We could all write letters to the money-grubbing pollies, sign petitions, it was even possible to join the System and try to change it from within by standing for elections. Blah blah blah, the crowd politely applauding, till I grew somewhat impatient to hear something truly revolutionary that would have an effect, rile up the crowd in anger and get the pollies to shit their collective pants.

My heart ached, I badly needed to speak to her. It would be difficult to get her attention for as she stepped from the podium she was surrounded by her groupies. I pushed my way through the crowd, waiting for my chance; a few words from her in benediction, as if I were confessing to the Virgin Mary, would go some way to healing my wounds. Suddenly there she was, alone, gazing into her cell-phone, her fans occupied with gossip. I stepped up to her and spoke, softly, like Oliver asking for more gruel, “Excuse me, do you remember me?”

She cast her beatific blue eyes upon me and smiled that enigmatic smile of hers, “Of course I do.” I took a breath and was about to continue, to tell her my life had been devastated by corrupt cops from the days of anarchic action with her, hoping she would give me some sympathy, tell me she felt for me and thank me for putting my career and life on the line all those years ago.

But before I finished the breath a gruff-faced old lesbian stepped from the crowd and, after giving me a dirty look, caught her attention ; she had always been a ditzy dreamer, head filled with a thousand and one needful thoughts and actions, and easily distracted by clamoring supplicants. Not realizing what she was doing, in the full-flight of the moment, she turned her back on me and was led away, not even saying to her friend, “Excuse me a minute” or saying “Goodbye” and apologizing to me for getting way-laid. I wasn’t even worth a minute, not even ten seconds really, she was off to save the world somewhere else, on some other issue with a crowd of feminists cheering her on. I had reminded her many years ago that it was not only about the big political issues but also the treatment of the individual: if he/ she was dehumanized by whoever/whatever then it meant society as a whole would be a tyranny of some sort and not worth fighting for.

Apparently in her crowd's eyes I was worthless, even though few had ever put their life on the chopping block and got arrested fighting for any principles. I’d come up against a small lesbian mafia in the '80s, they made out I was the one who had crossed them and my name was mud in certain circles across the city. (Thankfully some dykes were supportive of me way back when, Julie, Digby, Virginia, Egg and Christine in particular were very kind to me and I'll never forget their compassionate humanity.)

“Fuck them!” I fumed. I was furious. The straight world had tortured me all my life, with bashing, unemployment, loveless drudgery and no chance to realize my potential; and some of my fellow gays had been just as cruel, raping me, excluding me, crushing me in the race for the money, the job, the kudos that was available to very few gays. And here I was, about to blow my top, lost in a crowd that was milling about like stunned sheep, waving their banners and bleating, “What do we want? When do we want it?” I screamed, “To destroy the fucking tyrants! Now!” and pushed my way up onto the podium.

“Come on, you fucking wankers, what’s your problem? Haven’t you got any backbone? Or are you gonna be wimps forever and let the fat-cats who rule you eat you for breakfast?” The crowd gasped and stopped their placard-waving, frozen in mid-stance as they stared up at me, mouths agape. “Here you are bleating like sheep, letting off a bit of steam only to go home and have your cheap-assed baked beans for dinner while your rulers laugh all the way to the bank! Sitting peacefully blocking traffic’s not gonna achieve much. Oh yeah, maybe a few arrests, and a few media commentators moaning that perhaps it's not all gonna go smoothly for the high Cappos. But we'll always be a beaten down morass of self-gratified stupid clowns. Later on they’ll still knock down the working-class houses, chop down the trees and open up the giant freeways for the benefit of the construction companies! I want more, to bring it all down upon their heads. No, you're too scared, like sheep you’ll all be herded into the abattoirs and slaughtered with nary a ripple left behind on the social pond. What gutless wimps you all are!”

The crowd snapped out of their daze and roared abuse, “Fuck off! Douche-bag! Shut him up! Shit-head!” But I laughed maniacally and carried on. “Oh, you don’t like a reality check? Let me remind you. The State has made all the mistakes in the world and got you fools to pay for the mess. They fucked the economy, let their mates take-over with the robots so that there’s few jobs left, then they reward themselves with huge wages, pensions and perks. They hand vast tax cuts to the wealthy, only listen to corporate lobbyists, and throw many of you unemployed off the dole. They cut the pensions and parental allowances, under-fund hospitals and healthcare, trash the schools and allow destruction of the environment, deny climate change and increase green-house gas emissions, all in the name of profit for their crony mates in the multi-national companies.

“They will force all those on welfare to use welfare cards provided by companies who are connected to the ruling party, getting a huge cut of the welfare budget that should’ve gone to you poor and then donate some of the money to that same ruling party as payback, that’s what THEY call recycling! They are controlled by the Billionaire's Media which demands paupers like you be mulched, they’ve got you all under surveillance so you can’t make a move without their Police State knowing and they’ve quashed free speech so we only hear their brainwash rubbish.

“Oh, and let’s not forget they’ll privatize the prisons and then send not only pot-smokers but you protesters to jail, as many as they can, to achieve what? Oh yeah, yet more profits for their money-grubbing investors. And if you lot don’t end up in jail where will you be? Living under fucking bridges and starving because there’s no housing, jobs or welfare for you, you poor fucking sods!”

Now I had the attention of the mob, they started yelling, “Yeah right!” and “Fuck the State!” “On ya mate, you tell how it is!” “Eat the rich!” and “Lynch the tyrants!” I screamed as if it was the end of the world, “And the bastards sell Uranium, to poison the seas and the atmosphere, to fuel nuclear weapons that will one day destroy the whole fucking planet, sure as a nut-case’s fingers will press the red-button, so even living under bridges in rags will seem like paradise!

“You don’t get anything by being spineless jelly-fish, everything we have our grandparents and parents fought for, through unions, strikes, hard work and sometimes riots! They’ve done away with the unions and there’s little viable work available and that leaves only riots. Nothing like a good riot to make the shit-bag pollies sit up and take notice. They might be scandalized, give it bad press, carry on about nasty violence and make lots of arrests but if you keep it going, trashing their property, in time it makes them think things through, they start to make concessions and chill with the harsh cut-backs, allowing more democratic freedoms, especially if the riots keep happening!

“So what do you say? You can’t be limp dishrags forever! Parliament House is only five hundred yards away, let’s march to the front of it and let those dickheads inside hear our screams of displeasure!” The crowd was really riled up, many shouting and waving their placards threateningly, “Yeah, let’s show the cunts! We won’t take it anymore! We’re tired of being walked on and treated like useless shit!” My one last oration yelled so loud it echoed in that Martin Plaza of big banks and designer clothes shops. “We are powerful in our strength, we far outnumber their forces of oppression, we can stand against injustice and throw down any tyrant that dares to stand over us and fuck us! Follow me and we will overcome!”

Across the road six cops on horse-back had been chatting with each other and not paying much attention to the rally, thinking it was the usual benign affair; the same for the twenty cops on foot standing in the bank arcades, they had long considered the people as dumb lumps, easily oppressed and controlled, and were unprepared for any real action. So they were surprised when the crowd moved off as one and quickly marched up through Martin Plaza towards Parliament House. They attempted to rush ahead and push a few of the crowd back but a thousand irate paupers stormed over them like a tsunami, with me in the lead, shouting for the bravest to follow me and stop being wimps.

When we got to the wrought-iron fence protecting the glorious Govt. house I simply climbed over it without hesitation and many followed me. Others pushed through the open gate, the uniform on guard there knocked over, trampled and unable to resist, again taken in surprise by the mob, bound hand and foot and made helpless. Before any other cop could stop us about five hundred protesters had stomped their way into the building while others flowed around the edifice, looking for other ingress, smashing windows along the way.

My mob charged into the inner-chamber where the pollies were having their grand meeting sitting around a long oak table, looking up at our intrusion and going into shock at what it portended. Before they could flee each fuckwit in his and hers expensive suit and tie was grabbed by the mob. I ordered them to be tied onto their precious green-leather bench with their ubiquitous ties. Then all the other furniture in the room, including the table, got dragged over and stacked up to make barricades against the doors. Now we would wait and see what shit-storm would erupt, eventually to make demands of the “Powers That Be” and see how much progressive change we could bring about to this class-ridden tyranny we the poor were suffering under.

We could hear the mob howling curses outside, more smashing of windows and soon the whir of helicopters above. The police started shouting orders through megaphones for us to give up and hand over the captive pollies without harm. We sent a Green senator out to the roiling crowd that had grown larger by the minute, protesters, onlookers, cops, media, and Special Forces Army Personnel. We asked for food, water and a television set to be brought in as we were not ready to leave until our demands had been met; otherwise it was on their conscience if the State’s pollies were thrown through the windows with their asses on fire.

The Green came back wheeling a trolley full of sustenance and the required TV. Most of us had been following the State’s response on our smart-phones but now we could watch collectively as the entire System flipped its wig, the whole nation agog, even international news covering the outrageous stand-off. Bigger crowds gathered outside, to cheer, cry or curse, our fellow protesters were dragged away but we held firm, the precious pollies sweating and begging for release unharmed.

On the television we watched a crowd march on Canberra, our Federal Govt. House, and try to smash their way in, only this time the cops and army were ready and the rioters were rebuffed. The same revolutionary mass-attacks happened in all the other States and in some country towns, at the police stations and town halls. We pissed our pants laughing as the right-wing media pundits frothed at the mouth demanding the immediate destruction of the resistance, by whatever means necessary.

But a few commentators, left-leaning, more empathetic, considered the rebels’ demands, and suggested the State was now made to listen to the “people’s” complaints and not continue with the present status-quo of an overweening, greedy, privileged class structure. We demanded a redistribution of wealth, especially a “guaranteed Universal Wage” in the face of automation and job losses. We demanded the recognition of climate change and the implementation of technologies to counter it. We demanded egalitarian funding for schools and hospitals, the end to the “war on drugs”, the closure of private prisons, the implementation of marriage equality for the LGBTQI community and the full restoration of rights and funding of Indigenous Australians, especially an end to the stealing of their children which has gone on unabated for a century.

The list was long and much spluttered over by “the Powers”; the moneyed tyranny was not going to give up its extreme privileges without a fight, they couldn’t live without their private jets, harbor-side mansions, designer gowns and gold-plated taps. Just as we were sharing a hopeful meal, even spoon-feeding the terrified pollies, the State made its move. They’d been watching us via a miniature camera secreted in the food trolley and knew when it was a good time to attack, the pollies be damned, even those shit-bags were dispensable in the face of the bigger threat, a nation-wide revolution.

Suddenly tear-gas grenades shattered the sky-lights, I saw one pollie's head blown off by a missile, and black-armored SWAT teams swung in on cables, machine-pistols firing, tazers zapping. At the same time squads of the soldiers and cops smashed down the barricades and charged through the doors surrounding the parliament’s inner sanctum. Coughing from the gas I saw pollies as well as rebels drop, blood spattering over us all, some having epileptic fits on their padded bench or on the floor from the tazer-wires sticking out of their backs and bellies.

While many were mercilessly shot down I was quickly surrounded and hogtied, then dragged through the rubble to be exposed to the screaming mob seething outside. The building was in flames, much of it smashed and destroyed, if not by the rebels then by the “savior cops”. I was frog-marched to a waiting paddy-wagon, some rubber-neckers trying to claw me, others attempting to pat me on the back.

All rioting across the nation was crushed and their private prisons were full at last, but the pollies and commentators did indeed discuss endlessly the perceived injustices that had led to such drastic reaction. (As many families across Auz had someone involved, there was a huge outcry so that eventually everybody got released, all of them to continue the struggle another day.) But in an attempt to discourage the mob and any individual who might consider following in my footsteps I was given a public trial, the number one media-star of the moment. The entire nation tuned in to pillory or commend me, the right-wing shock-jocks discussing my previous history as a drug-addicted, cock sucking bum with no discernible saving graces, a trouble-making terrorist who’d caused the biggest upset in Auz history since “the rum rebellion” or “the Eureka stockade”, forget the protest marches against the Vietnam War or the ’78 Gay freedom riots.

A panel of bewigged judges pronounced me guilty in the extreme and the “death penalty” was revived due to the notorious special-circumstances of my violent rebellion. I was taken in an open, motorized cart along crowded streets, people cheering and crying, to the very place where I had first lost the plot, Martin Plaza. Yet there were moves afoot to change the "social order", to improve the lot of the majority, especially the poor, and thus I could go to my death with a smile on my face. As I was led up the steps to face the noose I saw the anarchist, female hero of my youth kneeling at the base of the scaffold, gazing up into my own expanded blue eyes, her spaced-out peepers tear-filled and seeming to beg me for forgiveness. She still came across as Mary to me, only now I was a Jesus Christ-like martyr.

As they put the noose around my neck I shouted to the hushed crowd, “You still have the power, you can overcome any tyranny, if you dare.” When a TV reporter leaned forward and asked, “How do you feel?” I replied, “Fucked! ... Such is life!”

The floor dropped away, I swung in mid-air and a black void engulfed me. Oh, welcome interstellar dust, how glad I was to be shat of that miserable human species on their tiny blue ball lost in infinite space.

Suddenly I felt hands on me, I was rudely shoved aside, a lumpen mob ignoring my tears, and I snapped awake. I’d been fantasizing, it had all been a wank, after the rebuff from my beloved hero I'd been pushed to the back of the crowd again in Martin Plaza. The rally was over and my dear comrade hero was disappearing over the horizon with her friends. 

I did meet her a few years later, still a mover and shaker, and I wished her well, all strength to her. She was sincerely aghast at my story, it having never reached her ears, even though I'd told many politicos in attempting to get help, such is the faux concern of the pseudo lefties that parade around as working-class saviors. In reality they were middle-class careerists, only seeing me as competition, and I was existentially alone. Always alone, boo hoo hoo. My heart aching, my spirit forlorn, still I felt some fight left in me; if I was to find any succor I’d have to create it myself. Surviving and ever productive is an achievement in itself.

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Escape From "The Family".

A hot topic in the Auz media at the moment centers on a cult called “The Family” led by a messianic madwoman, Anne Hamilton-Byrne: a book has been published by Chris Johnson and Rosie Jones and a documentary film by Rosie Jones is doing the rounds in the cinemas, and some in Auz are agog over the horror of it all. It’s a peculiarly Melbourne story, the city I grew up in, coming from the late ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies, of a cult which also nearly mind-fucked me, except I had the fortitude to escape.

I’ve told this story a few times in this Blog, especially in “The Siren Song of Pan” but reading about it again in the media has made me relive it and I feel to get my anxiety off my chest by retelling it. When I spoke of the experience to an art gallery full of people who’d come to a show of mine in 2012 I confessed that I’d gone through four psychedelic sessions with the cult and some cynic mentioned to a friend later, “If it was that bad why didn’t he run away after the first session?” The reason I hung in there was it involved "trust", but I’m getting ahead of myself in this tale of psycho-mendacity.

Sydney is a particularly bitchy city, little mercy is shown to any of the downtrodden, a hang-over from convict-settlement days I imagine. (Melbourne, like all modern cities, is probably just as class-conscious and cruel, but Sydney is older, bigger and the cold superficiality of "mansion by the harbor living" more marked.) Last year, in the middle of the “Gay Mardi Gras”, when I mentioned to a dickhead I’d met forty years previously that I had long been “Out there” he replied, “No, you were never out there!” He himself had worked for the govt as a social worker pretending to care for street people but in reality as hard as a straight Nazi camp guard, preying on the street boys, giving them heroin for sex. I couldn’t believe my ears and said, “What?” and he repeated it, “You were never out there!” I wanted to slap his face but I was in the middle of the gay parade and it would’ve been inappropriate. 

This response is typical of what I’ve had to suffer over the years. A life of torture, unable to hold down a job or even rent a room, toughing it out with the heterosexual anarchist scene, the rock’n’roll mosh-pits, the skinhead-gang attacks, the rednecks spitting in my face, all because I couldn’t hide my gayness even if I wanted to, (and I did let everyone know, "I'm gay, so what?) and then that dickhead told me I was never “out.”

Hamilton-Byrne Playing the Harp.

If you, phantom reader, have read any of my life-stories in this Blog, you’ll know that these writings come from the heart. And there, at that trendy art gallery where everybody gasped when I related how the psychedelic aspect of my art was due to my experience of just barely escaping the clutches of Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her “Family”, I was being questioned for truthfulness, as if I was just mentioning it to gain some notoriety, my bi-polar fuck-up since then be damned. So I’ll start from the beginning.

In 1969 I was 19 and suffering terribly from angst at being gay in a het-supremacist world, where I was told I was a twisted monster who deserved suicide at best. Even my family were ashamed of mr and, to a degree, disowned me. I was a student nurse at a creepy Victorian hospital and an older nurse, Keith, befriended me, ever so solicitous and avuncular. For more than a year he was my best friend who could talk yoga, philosophy and mysticism, revealing “other” world paradigms different to the banality of “normal” family suburbia that stifled me and made me feel worthless. I trusted this guy and never for a moment guessed he was a member of a cult that sent him out into the world looking for likely recruits.

Eventually I opened up to him and confessed I was gay and he convinced me it was a mental illness that needed psychiatric treatment. He then confided that he had once been gay but now was cured, happily married with a child. And it was all because of psychedelic-aversion therapy that he’d received in a private hospital in the inner-city suburb of Kew. The attributes that made me highly worthy of recruitment was not just my psychic vulnerability but my keen intelligence and bright blue eyes, for the whole set-up was ruled by a fascistic Aryan hag, a white-supremacist, high priestess lording it over a pseudo-religion, (which also went by the name of "The Great White Brotherhood.")  

This cult leader posed as a wise shaman type, like a curandera from old Mexico, guiding patients through healing rituals using psylocibin mushrooms, or that's what Hamilton-Byrne, the high priestess, professed. In reality she was more like the CIA using the drug in mind-control programs, only her program was to eventually breed me with one of her cult-members and then snatch the child.

To completely win over my trust forty-year old Keith suggested I needed some time in a retreat, a house in the Dandenongs, and he duly delivered me there after sunset to contemplate my sorry existence while he drove off to do night-duty, or so he said. Before he left he suggested I relax in the bath. I shat myself in this dark, foreboding shack, awake all night in terror that he would show up and try to seduce me as I absolutely was not attracted to him. After some time, without his pasty face appearing, I thought of the lovely hot bath. I lay in a bathtub, revelling as the luxurious warm water lapped over my naked, athletic body. Now when I think back on it there might've been a hidden camera watching my every move, drooling upon that perfect body lolling in the bathtub, surmising its health and ability to produce perfect children. It absolutely creeps me out.

Keith left me alone in that spook-hut, coming to get me after dawn, proving that he was not after my flesh, all of it probably a well-worked out ruse to gain my trust and spy on me, for I have recently learned that “The Family” owned all the houses on that Ferny Creek road in the Dandenong Ranges.

I soon reported to the private hospital in Kew he'd recommended, “Newhaven”, a gingerbread Gothic mansion like something out of Hansel and Gretel. I stepped inside the madhouse with some trepidation yet wondering if I would be privileged enough to receive psylocybin therapy and thus find release from my existential burden, and maybe get some rays of mystic sunshine blasted into my dark soul as well. The shrink who interviewed me, Dr. John Mackay, was ever so concerned and paternalistic and once again I trusted him, he was a doctor, he’d supposedly taken the Hypocratic oath, I’d been led to trust doctors by Society, and he earnestly said he could help me. I was reading “Huckleberry Finn” in the waiting room and he impressed me with the psycho-babble fact that Mark Twain had been born and died when Haley’s Comet passed over the earth, seventy years apart.

Newhaven Clinic, Kew

The good doctor had fine wrinkled skin, like ancient parchment, and I thought it meant he was from a UFO or Atlantis, he came across as “other-worldly”, actually it probably meant he didn’t drink enough water. He commiserated with my queer angst and told me I needed "psychic clearing", cleaning out all the detritus of bad karma from many incarnations and replacing it with a spiritual wholesomeness, (euphemistic crap for replacing my rational critique with the cult's mumbo jumbo.)

 He then booked me into the clinic for the psychedelic therapy, apparently the hospital had a connection with Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, they'd stopped production by then but HamiltonByrme, eith insider connections, had bought a lot of the left-over psycho-drug. I was told ten sessions over a period of three months should do the trick, make me an upright citizen, all paid for by my Health Insurance.

I was quite excited at the prospect of mind-tripping as I’d heard all about LSD from the Beatles, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and Woodstock, and I desired the life-changing enlightenment it heralded. At no time was “The Family” or Anne Hamilton-Byrne mentioned but it is a known fact now that the clinic was used as a recruiting ground for the cult, and innocent, gullible, unsuspecting me was ripe for the grand mind-fuck, or so they arrogantly believed.

I was put into a small room with wire-meshed windows, in my pajamas, and Dr. Mackay shot me up with the drug and, being intra-muscular, it took upwards of an hour to come on. Then I had the greatest bummer of all trips, blood filled the room, dead bodies hung from the walls, I retched and my body contorted and the sweet Doctor suggested I was reliving being sexually molested when I was a child.

A sense of impending doom overwhelmed me, that my separate identity was about to be destroyed, to be replaced by some satanic, H.P. Lovecraftian monster welling up from my Unconscious, and I fought it off. Like pushing down hard on an imaginary brake in a car hurtling out of control down a steep hill, I fought off all the harpies, ghouls, vampires, succubi, ghosts and witches from every horror movie imaginable, all night till the blessed dawn brought fresh sunlight through the caged window and I came down.

For the next three sessions I went through the same shocking experiences but I continued to fight off the impending annihilation of my sense of self until dawn brought me release from the nightmares. I heard screams coming from other rooms and surmised others were also undergoing similar ordeals but I never saw anybody else, I was always whisked in and out of the clinic as if it were some secret club for my benefit alone. Into my room THEY brought kind Keith, the good Doctor and various nurses, (who I’ve now discovered many were not nurses at all but cult members called “aunties”), to encourage me to let go, give in, succumb to karmic cleansing and be reborn to realize my immortal soul in the light of a new world order. Yet I resisted and came out of it just plain rebellious, chip on the shoulder, punk intransigent me.

Hamilton-Byrne with Eyes that " Looked Through You."

On the fourth session I again didn’t give up my soul to the required degree THEY desired, in fact I was showing no “improvement at all” and was starting to control “the trip”, even enjoying the trippiness of the kaleidoscopic brain-waves. So the Doctor gave me a booster shot and brought in the biggest gun of them all, Anne Hamilton-Byrne herself. She had on a false white nurse's uniform to fool me, her hair-do in a kind of B52s bouffant, somewhat like a Wagnerian Valkyrie, (it was a wig, she wore all manner of styles due to the fact that she was half bald and egregiously vain.)
 

She sat by my bed and tried to mesmerize me with admonishments to vomit it all up, all the times I’d been raped, tortured, murdered, and in turn all the murders I'd committed, the blood-letting, the disembowling, in all my past lives, and I retched for her benefit, my body became twisted and misshapen,  but I still didn’t become the pliable fool. I actually thought, "Who is this fucking witch? What a freak, she'd scare the bejesus out of the Devil!" Finally she gave up on me, leaving me to be molded into her clay Golem another day, probably towards the end of the ten psycho sessions I was bookrd in for. Instead I found myself flying up past the levels of Hell, up into many heavens, back through the history of human evolution, to a primordial time when as human-animals still in tune with nature we danced in the garden to the ecstatic song of Pan.

 As dawn broke I could hear again screaming coming from nearby and discovering my door had been left unlocked I ventured out into the corridor. There I bumped into another young man, his hair chopped in a basin-cut, much like the children in the sci-fi movie “Village of the Damned”. We quickly discussed our predicament, he told me he was labelled as a trouble-making teenager and was supposed to be getting "straightened out" but the whole set-up was weird, mystic hoodoo voodoo involving yoga, UFOs, Buddhism, Atlantis and all run by a woman who considered herself Jesus Christ come again.

I was shocked but knew it rang true as all the drugs and psycho-babble I'd recieved were weird in the extreme. An “Auntie” saw us whispering together and yelled for us to go back to our rooms, but when she disappeared I saw my chance to escape. I quickly got dressed and snuck out the back-door, across the garden, and climbed the back fence, never to go back there. Fuck having ten sessions of that nonsense, I'd be a blubbering mess at the end of it, open to any suggestion and direction, like a trained zombie.

Over the years I’ve discovered the truth of the place, the villainous Anne and her amoral culprits that tried to ensnare me, my supposed best friend Keith, (who eventually fled to England, probably to return to a gay lifestyle), the use of drugs to brainwash me, and the involvement of high society in supporting, funding, covering up the cult, such as the eminent physicist Dr. Raynor Johnson, Master of Queens College, Melbourne University, and Reg Ansett, owner of Ansett airline and TV 10 fame, even judges and politicians were in on it. It truly is a scandal, and the fact that intelligent, powerful people could fall for such madness is mind-numbing.

An imaginary connection between Assange and the Children of the Family.

Hamilton-Byrne collected kids whose origin she couldn’t explain, (probably one of them was Keith’s) and she kept them in submission on a farm in the bush, beating and starving them, bleaching their hair white-blond like Aryan kids from a Nazi “Village of the Damned”. As well as her adult acolytes she fed the older kids copious amounts of hallucinogens, possibly flipping them out forever. Her crazed idea was there wouldd be a nuclear conflagration and she was training her psychedelic advanced crew, particularly the children, to rise up from their bush hide-away and take-over the world.

I heard an urban myth that has not been verified in this latest media scandal because maybe it’s just shocking Gothic gossip: that she got blood transfusions from the children frequently to keep herself looking young, and indeed she did keep her Aryan good-looks into old age. There was an urban myth that Julian Assange was one of those blond captive kid as his mother once dated a cult member, but it seems it's simply part of the public hysteria over all this Newhaven madness and Assange's amazing rebellious nature, he's too young to have been an actual "family child". Newhaven is actually the name of the American university sabbatical compound that Timothy Leary and Richard Altman, psychology professors, took over to study LSD by experimenting with it on their students, and finally getting kicked out of the university.

The new-messiah lived on into her late nineties with dementia, dying by inches in a nursing home, not knowing if she was Jesus or Rhesus, (monkey). She had no compunction to destroy lives in her maniacal need for power, adoration and wealth: sadly one of her “children” who was instrumental in exposing her, Sarah Moore, died young, aged 46, from mental distress and possible suicide. Hamilton-Byrne also died, as we all eventually must, messiahs included, in 2019.

Did “The Family” and their drug-induced mind-meltdown ruin my life? I’ve certainly been dysfunctional ever since, with bi-polar swings, committing stupid, compulsive stunts and inappropriate Tourette's-like expletives yelled at the wrong time, (but I've been like this since early childhood.) It set me on the road as a transient bum and bad-arse anarchist, I went on to wander India for 4 years after the Newhaven experience, taking acid on the beaches of Goa from ’72 onward to try to get on top of the bummers, free myself from the Christian duality of Heavenly Father and Hellfire Satan, to dance ecstatic and abandoned, control my life’s path and fuck off any stand-over merchant, cat/mouse game-playing moron  or lynch-mob that accosted me.

Anne with one of her children.

And thus I was made strong, I don’t take shit; when dickheads try to put me down, wipe me off, push me over I stand up to them, I fight back, I’m a warrior. I can't be controlled, cheated, conned, cowed, except when I pretend to be, to achieve my own agenda. Yet I still trust my friends as that's what friends are for, and I rarely see the betrayal coming as I never did grow up and still retain my Hansel and Gretel naivitie. Yeah, bi-polar, a running contradiction. 

For 4 years in India of the '70s I met every Big Baba going, Tatwalla Baba, Maste Ram Baba,  Prabhupad of Hari Krishna fame, Rajneesh (Osho), Muktananda, Satchitananda of Woodstock fame, Devraha Baba, (reputed to be 200 years old and a seer who could see the future), Ananda Mayee Ma, the numinous female saint, even the magician Satya Sai Baba, but I resisted being overly-impressed by any of them, (except Mayee Ma), never joining the club, dressing in orange like a swami, nor giving up my gayness. 

When I crash-landed in Sydney I was a ‘78er, taking on the cops as we marched up Oxford Street and onto Kings Cross to start the famous LGBTQI Mardi Gras parade that comes up again every March. I lived in Pyrmont Squats for 12 years and fought off innumerable dark forces. I’ve taken on corrupt cops, cruel screws, power-mongering pollies and jaundiced junkies. I’ve survived the ghetto of Northcott Housing Estate for 34 years where schizos and ICE addicts run amok. And I've returned to India for the last twenty four years and walked every jungle path and city back-alley and surfed it like a swashbuckling pirate.

      If Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her “Family” couldn’t diminish me, devour me, detain me, NOTHING could. Her cult’s motto was “Unseen, Unheard, Unknown.” That’s not my bullshit. Though I must admit, old age is now causing me to feel somewhat wobbly, for people continue to be cruel, as my Blog stories will attest. I’ve got a bad reputation across this backstabbing, pushy, shit-heap climbing city, for opening my mouth and giving dicks my reality checks, all because I don’t like people wiping their feet on me like I’m a door mat, even though I do say “Welcome”.

I dont regret this experience as it made me strong, courageous improved my art, allowed me to weather and surf the back-alleys and roads of the world, made me an intense individual, afraid of little. It made life absolutely fabulous for me.

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