Anne Hamilton-Byrne told the small group of children raised inside her cult that she was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She dressed them alike, dyed their hair the same platinum blonde, and had them call her Mother, all while presenting a core group of fourteen to the outside world as her own biological children, a claim made possible only by falsified birth records and children obtained through channels that were never lawful. The group called itself the Santiniketan Park Association, but its members, and eventually the Victorian police, knew it as The Family.
Rosie Jones' 2016 documentary, also called The Family, tells that story through two intertwined threads. One is the testimony of survivors, now adults, describing what it meant to grow up isolated at the group's rural property at Lake Eildon, subjected to strict discipline, daily tranquilizers, and, as teenagers, LSD administered as part of the group's initiation practices. The other is the police work of Detective Lex de Man, the longest serving member of Operation Forest, the task force Victoria Police eventually assembled once investigators learned what had actually been done to the children in Hamilton-Byrne's care.
The film premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival and was followed, in 2019, by a three episode spinoff miniseries that returned to the same material at greater length. Neither production had anything to do with Hamilton-Byrne or the group she led; both are outside investigations built from survivor accounts and a criminal case file, the ordinary means by which a closed and secretive group becomes a subject the public can actually examine.