Original subtitles

I love children.

At the weekend, six children

were seized from a property owned by the sect

under care and protection applications.

You stole them from sect members?

Got doctors to organise the adoptions?

I was just handed over.

The legal system goes, "Where is this baby?"

Yesterday, seven members of Anne Hamilton-Byrne's sect

pleaded guilty of defrauding the Commonwealth.

Auntie Anne sucked

as much money out of people

as she possibly could.

I believe that that's why Anne was there -

to be around him, to learn black magic.

Anne cursed me because I betrayed the cult motto

of "Unseen, unheard, unknown."

She told us that she came from some royal family.

They definitely did have friends in high places.

There was a lot of talk about ruling the world

and having a perfect world.

We used to call the place a concentration camp.

What was going on was wrong.

Someone had to do something about it.

I was in the zone. I needed to finish this case.

Then came the breakthrough.

# Waiting for redemption

# Like a dog expecting their reward

# Is this the endless void of nothing

# Or the coming of the Lord?

# Come on, give me a sign

# Show me my love is real

# Oh, Saint Valentine

# Is this part of the deal? #

We heard that the sect solicitor, Peter Kibby,

I felt the key to the activities of the cult

probably laid in the brain of Peter Kibby,

because he had done all the documentation on the transactions

for all the houses the cult had bought for Anne,

on some of the births and so forth.

The golden rule is a document doesn't lie -

people lie on the documents.

And we found a crime where he'd falsified a statutory declaration.

For a solicitor, that's a pretty serious offence,

because they can lose their practising certificate.

Myself and Lex De Man travelled to a country town

and spoke to this gentlemen who was a practicing solicitor at the time

and charged him with perjury.

And we said, "If you wish to talk to us about the cult and about Anne,

"it may well assist in the court proceedings in the future."

A week or two later, the phone went in the office.

This really animated and, I have to say, delightful voice

was on the end of the phone

saying, "Lex, Peter Kibby!"

"Yes, Peter."

"I'd like to have a cup of coffee with you!"

There you go, Peter.

Thank you very much.

There's your glass of water.

He was so angry at what his life had become that he didn't hold back.

I've been shown a legal document...

We arranged for Peter to be picked up every morning at 8:30,

and we'd take him down to the St Kilda Rd police headquarters

and took his handwritten statement.

And it took around about three months.

Peter was a victim, like many of the people who were in the cult.

Peter suffered from a disease of compulsive obsessive disorder.

It would take him, to have a shower, sometimes two to three hours

and three or four bars of soap.

And, so, he never got to the office.

He was desperate to get rid of this affliction

and Anne told him all he had to do

was just obey everything Anne told him to do

and he would be cured.

And at one stage,

Anne actually arranged, and had him have, a leucotomy -

surgery on the brain through the eye socket.

And I think he had frontal lobe damage, actually, after that,

which made his behaviour even more bizarre than what it was before.

Peter was not a bad person,

but he'd been deceived, through his illness, to commit crimes for Anne.

By then, we were building a dossier and a profile

and a whole range of documents.

With Peter, it was going through each of the documents

to affirm his knowledge of how a document was created.

That's alright.

Even though we had a lot of pressure on us to wrap up the investigation,

it's not a thing to rush.

Peter was the key to the door.

He broke the code of silence within that sect.

I look at Peter as...

..as someone who had the guts to actually stand up and say,

"No. What we did was wrong."

OK. Righto. Thank you.

Once we were in possession of that substantial statement,

I put in a request to return to my original position

at the Major Crime Squad as officer in charge of operations.

I was confident in Lex De Man and the other members

to finish what needed to be done.

I first met Lex De Man and the others

with a view to going through the enormous amount of material

to ascertain if they could charge any of the sect members

with any offence.

And it was relation to abuse of the young people in their care.

And I found it very difficult, as did the police,

that it was going to be almost impossible

to have sufficient evidence to prove the physical abuse

that these young people complained of, which I've no doubt was true.

But there was a lot of dishonesty in obtaining children,

so we focused on that.

Anne had, years earlier,

provided advice to the New Zealand authorities

that she'd actually given birth in New Zealand.

But at the time...

"Sorry - I actually gave birth to triplets

"but I only told you I gave birth to twins.

"I forgot to put the other one there."

And they just accepted it.

And Peter, of course, did all the documentation.

She made me a twin with Simon for a while

and then we got birth certificates and passports from New Zealand

and it was said that we were born there.

So, two boys and me were made into triplets from New Zealand.

All of a sudden, we changed nationalities as well.

I thought that was quite neat, being a triplet.

I wasn't so sure about being a New Zealander

because by that stage, one of the Aunties

had started letting us watch some cricket,

so, um, I had to change sides from Australia to New Zealand.

The police had birth certificates

to prove that each of those of children were born in Victoria,

to people other than Anne and Bill Hamilton-Byrne.

You don't need a witness. Those documents spoke for themselves.

I loved the thrill of the chase.

We knew we were that close,

and we just had to get Anne and get Bill back to Australia.

We knew Anne was moving between England and America.

We established liaison with Interpol, New Scotland Yard and the FBI

so that we could track her down.

I received a teletype.

Lex called me and filled in a lot of the blanks.

This was a mission for him

and he was determined to right a very horrible wrong.

Hurleyville and Sullivan County would be optimum locations

if someone wanted to be under the radar, for sure.

A lot of the property in Sullivan County

is owned by religious movements.

You don't have people living next door to you for the most part,

so that gives you a lot more opportunity

to do whatever you want to do without being observed.

I got up there early enough

so that I could go out with the postal worker who had that route.

In those types of communities,

the postal service usually knows exactly what's going on.

My concern was the two people we were interested in arresting

actually lived in the house.

The home run would have been for one of them

to come out and pick up the mail while I was sitting in the van.

But that didn't happen.

Nobody picked up the mail as I was there.

The Kent Constabulary started to do

some surveillance around Broom Farm.

They put you in the paper, they say you're false.

We wanted them to know

that we were looking at them, we were watching them.

Whatever it is I've gone through,

whatever it is you'll go through,

don't be frightened.

This...is your mission.

I remember one night,

Anne made a fundamental mistake and rang Sarah.

And Sarah came to us and said, "I think she's in the United States."

Our goal was to take these two people into custody

with the least possible problem.

We were up there on an early, cold morning -

early enough to put them at a disadvantage almost immediately.

William opened the door,

Anne appeared very quickly.

I kept telling her, "We have to move, we have to leave,

"let's hurry up.

But she was very, very concerned about how she looked.

Hilda Kogut rang and said, "We've got the bitch."

Bang! And I exploded.

And I remember picking up chairs in the kitchen

and throwing them against the walls,

an emotional outburst of tears.

My whole life was wrapped up in this investigation.

I got a phone call from

Special Agent Kogut

that the two of them had been arrested up in the Catskills

and to prepare for their arrival in court.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne and her husband, William,

were arrested at their home in upstate New York.

The Hamilton-Byrnes are being held in a state prison.

Police hope to have the pair extradited

to Melbourne state prison.

They plan to make a bail application on Monday.

I've still got a photo that I cut out of The Age

of her in chains,

looking very dishevelled,

which would have bothered her big-time.

I was devastated when she was put into jail.

I thought, "How the hell could you do that?

"It's like putting Queen Elizabeth into jail."

Their attorneys made a full-throttle approach

that they should be released on bail,

that they were not a danger to the community,

that they had health problems.

When they said, "She's got a bad heart,"

I said, "We'll bring a doctor."

There was no way known that she was not gonna come back to Australia,

as far as I was concerned.

While he was still being held in custody,

one of Bill's cellmates was murdered.

You know, it frightened Bill

and, finally, Bill put his hand up and said, "I've had enough."

Four of us ended up going to the United States

for the extradition.

I looked evil in the eye that day.

And even today, it affects me when I...when I talk about it.

I'm deeply ashamed of my grandmother.

The havoc and the cruelty.

She's hurt so many people.

How could I feel any other way?

The mind boggles at the damage done,

and I'm still trying to work out whether she meant to do it

or whether it just kind of took on a life of its own.

God clearly speaks about there being

his power and then powers from the Devil.

When I look at everything that Anne touched,

you trace suicides, marriages split up,

kids destroyed, drug addiction, on and on it goes.

So, I look at the effect of that power

and I have to say it is demonic.

"To thy last supper,

"let me be allowed to stay, O son of God,

"for neither have I betrayed any secrets to thine enemies,

"nor have I given thee the kiss of Judas.

"But like a thief, I pray unto thee.

"Remember me, O Lord,

"as I enter into thy glorious kingdom."

Just before nine o'clock this morning,

Victorian Police had Anne and William Hamilton-Byrne

back on Australian soil.

Detectives took the couple straight to the Melbourne Magistrates' Court,

for what all thought would be a brief, unopposed...

Bail wasn't opposed.

The Hamilton-Byrnes were each released with a $25,000 surety.

Their solicitor says they will be pleading not guilty.

There was no two ways about it -

she and Bill were going to get bail.

But we wanted to make sure that they had stringent reporting conditions,

which they did have.

At that point, that was a sense of achievement - "We've got her."

When she was extradited back,

it was all, you know, mad chaos.

I mean, I loved her to bits but, jeez, she was a bloody troublemaker.

What can you do? They're your family and you stick by your family.

Lawyers for sect leaders Anne and William Hamilton-Byrne

have challenged the jurisdiction of the charges.

Defence counsel John Winneke QC

said New Zealand courts must decide the case.

There was a decision made

that there had to be clarification of the law.

And then we had to wait in the list

to proceed before the Court of Appeal.

I think I was 25 or 26 when Anne and Bill came back to Australia

and I guess I formed

a little bit of an adult-type relationship with them.

I invited Anne and Bill to my wedding.

I wanted Bill to walk me down the aisle.

He had always dreamed about it

and I thought, "Well, you know,

"I can give that to him, as an adult."

I'm sure that it confused a lot of people, my decision,

but the man that brought me up was Bill

and he was the one that ultimately got the job.

I don't know what it was, but I adored him.

We looked alike.

We both had black curly hair,

except mine was blonded, had blue eyes.

You know, he was my father.

I had two mothers and three fathers -

my stepfather, my father and my father I grew up with,

so I differentiate them when I talk to people.

My anger was never towards Bill.

It was always towards Anne,

because she was the one that controlled everybody

and everybody was a puppet on her string.

I felt sorry for him because, you know,

he was an extremely successful man in his own right.

He was captivated by her charm, just like everybody else was.

The matter was three or four months

before the Court of Appeal,

because it was really quite technical.

I appeared for the Crown led by Queen's counsel Robert Redlich

and Patrick Tehan appeared for them,

led by John Winneke QC.

Clearly, the Hamilton-Byrnes were prepared to spend a lot of money.

It all ended up like a bit of a farce,

because she had such good lawyers.

The law takes it much more seriously

if there's money or documents involved,

than...than child abuse.

They were very angry about the system.

They saw us dressed in robes and wigs,

talking about esoteric points of law.

It wasn't about what really happened to them.

Many people have asked me,

"Why wasn't she charged with anything else?"

Once you extradite somebody from...from another country,

part of the process is that you give a commitment

that you won't slap them with further charges.

You can't just say, "Right, now I've got you back on that,

"I'm now gonna give you this charge and this charge and this charge,"

because that goes against the whole agreement of the extradition.

In the Hamilton-Byrne sect case,

the full bench of the Supreme Court has found

the charge of conspiring to defraud authorities in New Zealand

cannot be heard in Victoria.

Mr Winneke said the offence was trivial.

He said the Australian authorities

had made a mountain out of a molehill.

After a long legal battle in the Supreme Court,

one charge was dropped.

My friends, we are winning through

by the power of the Holy Spirit,

after years of trying to fight evil,

only to be put in jail for no reason.

Oh, yes, it hurts,

but if we remain steadfast

and know and say,

"This is the Lord God's battle - I will trust him wholly..."

Anne Hamilton-Byrne had an enormous hold on people.

And it was admiration, adulation and fear.

It's a little like an organised crime syndicate.

They would never, ever give evidence against her

or make a statement against her.

Today, sect leaders Anne and William Hamilton-Byrne

will be sentenced in the County Court.

They face up to five years in jail and a $60,000 fine.

I remember walking to the County Court,

the feeling that, "This is it.

"This is the Day of Judgement."

I went to court the last day

and she had all the cult members all around her

and all, you know, sort of glaring

and saying nasty things at us children.

Anne and Bill Hamilton-Byrne appeared confident

when they arrived at court.

Their case attracted a huge media contingent.

72-year-old Anne and 71-year-old Bill Hamilton-Byrne

had pleaded guilty to making false statements.

Whilst a large part of me didn't want to see her suffer...

..I still wanted there to be justice

and for there to be some sort of acknowledgement

that...that something bad had happened to us children.

I recall sitting in the court

and I well remember before the judgement,

just a sick feeling in the stomach

that, "This is it.

"This will be the end of the police case."

People were looking at us.

Were we going to get an outcome

that was going to be the right outcome?

The founder of The Family religious sect and her husband

have been spared jail terms for faking documents

which claimed three children were their own.

$5,000 fines were imposed on the couple

and outside the court...

The Hamilton-Byrnes escaped

a maximum five-year jail term and $60,000 fine.

They had nothing to say about the decision...

In sentencing, Justice Jones took into account

the couple's ages, the fact neither is in good health

and the three months they've already spent in an American prison.

I was angry that after all that work,

the system had let us down.

She got a paltry monetary penalty.

I was wild. I couldn't show it.

They should've been going through another door.

They should've been going to the door to the cells,

not the door to freedom.

Well, I'm not going to stand here and bewail

the inadequacies of the legal system.

I think that goes without saying.

What I would say is I'm very glad it's all over

and we can get on with living our lives.

They didn't go to jail

for beating us nearly every single day and starving us,

and she didn't get anything, nothing.

And we all have mental scarring.

It doesn't matter whether we show it and whether we survive normal life,

we all have suffered and we all have something

that we take with us from the childhood that we survived,

'cause that's all we did, we just survived that.

There was no justice.

It hurt the kids and they'd all given statements

and worked so closely with the police

to try and get the community to understand what had happened to them

and then we shut the door and said, "Nothing we can do."

Was justice ultimately done?

Was she...?

Did she face court for all the crimes that we alleged that we had,

that we knew of?

No.

It's gonna be with me for the rest of my life.

- I need a break. - I need a break.

The police investigation into the Hamilton-Byrnes's group,

called Operation Forest,

lasted four years and cost more than a half a million dollars.

11 officers worked on the case full-time,

which included six overseas trips seeking information.

When Operation Forest ended,

there was a lot of criticism about what we'd achieved

or, more so, what we hadn't achieved.

We did our best.

We had recommended a Royal Commission at the start of it,

but were knocked back.

Our hands were tied.

But we brought her back, we put her up before the County Court

and she said the words - we didn't say the words -

she said the words 'guilty'.

This is Lakshmi. Isn't it, Lakshmi?

Little Lakshmi.

Hey? Why don't you talk to them, yeah?

Little Lakshi. You've gone all shy, haven't you, sweetheart?

Here's Murdagh. And there's Murdy.

Aw.

Pussy noise...

She needed things to love, little things.

And the children were taken off her,

so she went for animals.

And we all know that animals give unconditional love.

This idea that you can...

..bring a group of children together from all sorts of backgrounds,

all sorts of different families,

and then ram a type of ideology down their throat,

I don't think it would have ever worked, OK?

You can't muck around with kids,

physically, emotionally or any other way.

I couldn't believe that adults didn't know what was going on.

When we were children, people around the lake would hear us screaming.

A couple of times, police did come up.

I remember at least once that we were interviewed by them.

The Aunties were there during the questioning

and I do remember one question and that was,

"Are you being fed properly?"

I was surviving, I was alive.

"Yeah, sure, I'm being fed properly," you know?

Well, how much are you supposed to have?

You know, I had no idea.

I would never have dared to say anything at that time,

to anybody, about what went on.

We were all very protective of our parents.

They put on a show for the Education Department

and actually got it registered as a school.

The Education Minister came,

the school room was dressed up to look like a real school room.

There were these wonderful equations on the board

to make us look advanced and sophisticated.

The people up there had convinced themselves

that they were doing what was, in the long run, good for the children.

Powerful people didn't really want this known about,

and even people that left the cult that knew about it,

they were so terrified of Anne's retribution,

that they didn't say anything.

I blame myself

that maybe I could have stopped this many, many years ago,

but I didn't.

Being your mother, I didn't want to report it.

I didn't know where to go or what to do.

Belting them and locking them in cupboards when they're babies

for wetting the bed.

That's...

Like, it's just inexcusable.

It's just not something that a normal human being does.

Had I gone to the police in the early '70s,

how much sorrow could I have stopped?

How much heartbreak for these poor, little, defenceless children?

But it wasn't Anne doing it, right?

OK, she might have been up here

and, in that sense, she has responsibility

as the ruler and the leader of the sect, OK?

You gotta understand and be in control of your disciples.

Unfortunately, she had people running around,

doing shit I believe that she didn't know about, you know?

You can't have your...

If you're not there in the room with the person 100% of the time,

how do you know what they're doing?

They could tell you anything.

After my son, David, was brought back,

I did say to Elizabeth Whitaker,

"He was not treated well," or something like that.

And she said, "He was the same as everybody else.

"They were all treated the same."

I said, "That's the problem.

"They were not people, they were numbers."

I said, "What number was David? Was he number 7 or number 15?"

No individual mothering, no hugging, no anything.

She said, "No, that was what Anne wanted,"

and that it was good for the children.

We had a very, very, normal upbringing, as little children.

It was Mum and Dad and three kids living in a house in Melbourne.

My mother was never violent, never abusive.

I never saw any sign of, um... of what was to come.

How my mother got sucked into such a thing

and demonstrated such monstrous behaviour later

is an absolute mystery to me.

I've pondered it long and hard

and I really don't understand how professional, well-educated people

could be sucked in by... such nonsense.

Intelligence really has nothing to do with

people's emotional vulnerability,

and Anne somehow knew that,

and Anne was able to target people

who were very emotionally vulnerable.

In my case, I didn't have a lot of mothering,

so I came to adulthood searching for a mother figure.

Lots of people are like that.

They have some sort of lack in their personality, I suppose.

So, she presented herself as this, um...

..a person who sort of could fulfil this void in their life.

My father saw through it relatively early.

He left in 1970.

He made a conscious decision to leave the cult

and to sever all ties

with anybody that had any connection with the cult.

That, unfortunately, included me,

so he never had any more contact with me.

For a long, long time, I was very bent out of shape about it.

Um...

I'd like to think I'm over it now.

There's probably not a lot of psychiatrists

who have shifted a whole heap of patients into a lunatic cult,

and then seen through it and just up and left.

Personally, I think he had a moral obligation to his patients

that he chose not to fulfil.

To be honest, I know he's my father,

but he really should have been reported to the Medical Board.

You and Dr Whitaker

are both on record as having been members

of the group called The Family.

Mm-hm.

How did that relate to your practice as a psychiatrist?

Were you always able to keep that barrier between the two?

Um...

Did one spill over into the other and vice versa?

Well, at times you had, um...

..um, members of that group

who were patients.

And at times, you had patients,

uh, who went into yoga classes

and then meditation classes

and became members of that group.

Um...

And the fact that your practice

had a spiritual bias -

it wasn't used as a method

of recruiting or anything like that.

In fact, um...uh...

But you would have steered the odd patient

into the direction of that group.

I would steer the odd patient

in the direction of yoga, yes.

Our society needs to understand

where the instrument of government failed.

It failed at the hospital end.

It failed at the Department of Health end.

It was slow to react at the Victoria Police end.

You have to remember, this is the 1970s and early 1980s,

and there was still a sense of trust in people of professional status

and there was still a sense of trust in institutions.

Victoria was different

from most of the other States

in that it had a really strong non-government welfare sector.

The first legislation in Victoria is 1928.

It gives a lot of people the right to arrange adoptions,

including doctors and lawyers.

So, you've got a whole lot of approved agencies

as well as the major hospitals.

So, yes, that meant if you wanted to go shopping,

you could move your way around,

and people did.

And then, when you get to the Hamilton-Byrne scenario,

well, here's someone that's really manipulating the system.

Even what she's doing is not illegal.

What she's doing is using a weakness in the system

to exploit it for her own purposes.

In the past year, 18,000 illegitimate babies

have been born in Australia.

1 birth in 12 is illegitimate.

So, you had this big nursery of crying babies

that had to be fed.

For the hospital, a major crisis.

They've got so many to process.

They're just processing adoptions over and over again.

That pressure on the hospital to get it done, get it done quickly,

meant that nobody's questioning the practice.

The other thing was that there was no paper trail in terms of adoption

with regard to Anne and Bill,

because Anne and Bill didn't adopt anybody.

They instigated adoptions

with the intention of taking the children eventually.

The law wasn't up to it.

It wasn't enough.

And neither was the investigative power

of, um...of the police.

I remember, when Uncle Bill died,

that they embalmed the body for a period of time

and the body was in Crowther until the funeral.

I think we were all a little bit dumbfounded

that Uncle Bill was gone.

I was there, at the funeral.

There was a lot of people there.

I think Auntie Anne did hire bodyguards

because it was thought

that she might have been assassinated, going there.

She was always afraid of being in the public eye.

Uncle Bill had no gravestone

because of the motto, "Unseen, unheard, unknown."

When you leave your body at the time we call death,

the Master steps out into other and higher worlds.

He proved that death is only an appearance,

an illusion,

that everybody can overcome.

Everyone had suffered the most enormous amount of loss.

After my son's suicide,

my method of coping was just to shut down.

I couldn't feel anything

and I was just like that for a long time.

And it's taken me years of therapy

to just be a sort of open, or moderately open, person.

I didn't know how to stop my anger for many, many years

and then I started learning about the amygdala

and the primitive area of the brain.

If you're abused as a child, there's a good chance that

that area of your brain is primed,

it's set to a higher level than most people's,

and you are more easily triggered.

Now I know the rev-up signals,

so this part behind my ears starts feeling, like, pain

and I might start stuttering.

There's different signals that make me go, "OK, I need to get away."

I have to go for walks to release cortisol - very fast walks.

Just whatever it takes to calm down.

Talking about experiences doesn't heal anything, to be honest.

All you do is you open up what happened and speak through it.

The heart's still wounded, the lack of love's still there.

I had made a decision to get to know God.

I was praying, and I remember having a...a vision.

I'm standing on the edge of a cliff.

It's completely black. I have to jump into the unknown.

I jump and I get caught by a man in white robes,

long beard, long hair - Jesus.

He's holding my hand, walking me out on a moonscape.

And immediately, I'm...I'm back up top,

in this experience, with all of the fear.

Jesus picked me up, put my head against his chest and said,

"I never meant it to be."

And I guess many a question would be,

"Why did God let these things happen?"

But he's rescued me, he's pulled me out.

And that was a major turning point for me.

One of the ways I tried to obviate

the effects of my childhood

was to dedicate my life to helping others.

I became a doctor and I spent a lot of time overseas...

..going to remote places and war zones

and helping, volunteering, and doing all sorts of things.

Were the children ever hit?

Of course they weren't.

Because... They were not beaten.

Never? Never.

You would have to be pretty good to see through that bullshit.

It's absolute bullshit. It's lies.

All the children made all of this up, did they?

Could be. And they were paid for it.

Well, I'm asking you that. They were paid for it.

- I'm asking you that. - No, we weren't.

You were paid a lot of money. We weren't paid any money, Michael.

You were certainly paid.

Michael, you're living in a fantasy!

No, I'm not. You're living a lie.

I am not living a lie, Michael.

As far as I'm concerned, you're living a lie.

Because your entire life is a network of lies...

You're suffering for it.

What I've suffered in this life is because of what happened up there.

There's...a lot of pain.

As long as you blame others, you're nowhere. You're nowhere.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne's brain

has been slowly eaten away by dementia.

She now spends her days in this aged-care facility

and has completely lost touch with reality.

That's the opportunity her former followers needed

to start carving up and selling off her once great real estate empire.

It was so hypocritical.

The disciples that attacked me

and anyone else that they thought had betrayed her

and were so self-righteous and angry and...

..they're just so hypocritical.

Really, it wasn't to do with religion.

It was to do with power, money and control.

Loyalty is huge in Auntie Anne and Uncle Bill's minds.

Auntie Anne's never been able to trust many people.

Anybody who left The Family, "Don't ever come back."

Life for All Creatures was set up over a decade ago.

Auntie Anne set up that organisation

to put all her assets from Hamilton-Byrne

into Life for All Creatures,

so that when she does die, none of the kids can get any money.

I think when she dies, what will be interesting

is the fighting over the money between the sect members.

Because this has always been about money.

I mean, to me, that's been the real driving motive,

has been money and power.

It still lives with me till today.

I still get inquiries from mothers

who gave up their children for adoption in the late '70s,

and they track me down and they ask,

you know, "Was one of the children one of mine?"

Um, and you can't say no.

Even though I'm no longer in the police force,

you do what you can to help.

To you, the mothers, who were betrayed by a system

that gave you no choice

and subjected you to manipulation, mistreatment and malpractice,

we apologise.

We say sorry to you, the mothers,

who were forced to endure the coercion and brutality

of practices that were unethical, dishonest

and, in many cases, illegal.

For the loss, the grief, the disempowerment,

the stigmatisation and the guilt,

we say sorry.

To each of you who were adopted or removed,

who were led to believe your mother had rejected you,

we say sorry.

We acknowledge that many of you

still experience a constant struggle with identity, uncertainty and loss,

and feel a persistent tension

between loyalty to one family and yearning for another.

We recognise that the consequences

continue to resonate through many, many lives.

When my kids were born...

..I just looked at them and I couldn't understand

how a person could...

Yeah, I just couldn't understand how a person could abandon their kids.

I guess we've all got a choice in life

whether we replay the same tape that our parents had.

My parents pretty much chose to abandon their family.

I was determined not to do that.

I was unable to hold my first baby by myself

and the midwives were getting a little bit anxious.

"Come on, you need to be able to hold your baby."

And I said, "Yes, I know, I know that intellectually,

"but I'm trying to get my head around it."

The first two or three weeks were so arduous,

so incredibly difficult,

but I finally managed to call my dad and say...

.."I've finally connected.

"WE have finally connected.

It was very difficult, trying to work out how to be a parent.

I do remember one time, going,

"Well, I can't hit you across the room,

"I can't deny you food for days. How do I get you to do what I want?

"What do people do?"

I started explaining, when Kaia was six,

that Mummy had been hurt by some bad people.

I put it that simply.

We bumbled along.

I explained a lot, I processed a lot with her.

I knew I'd never... do what had been done to me.

I did stop that chain of abuse.

Here's my mum with her grandkids.

Well, Ben, although it was all those years ago, it's no different.

Yeah.

I can't believe it, coming back here.

I have a relationship with my mother

that is to the level of honesty that she wants,

and it's very painful for her.

She said, "Look, the decisions I made at the time

"were the best ones I had with the information.

"I would not make them again."

That's probably as close as I'm... we're ever going to get

to her saying, "I stuffed up and I'm sorry."

My kids at least should have the option of having a grandmother.

Everyone deserves the chance at redemption.

When you forgive someone, you set yourself free and you set them free.

Mum retired nursing at 80 years of age.

She was doing night duty to pay this house off for me,

so I cared for her until she died.

When Mum died, things changed.

I have no, uh, loyalty now

to anyone in The Family.

I'm so nervous about it all,

uh, petrified as well,

but excited beyond belief.

I've got something to live for, I've got family

and they all want to know me.

Hello. Hello, Adam. How are ya?

Oh, I can see the family resemblance.

I can. Yeah?

Yes. Oh!

You do, you look a lot like my brother.

Yeah? Yeah.

Nervous? Yeah.

I can hardly speak myself, today.

Hello. Hello, I'm Wendy.

Hey, nice to meet you.

You are definitely family. You look like us.

Hi.

G'day, mate. How are you?

Do you want to see some photos? Yeah.

Alright.

Your mother.

So... And there she is, pushing a pram.

Somebody's kid in the pram.

Every baby wants his mum,

and, um, I never had a proper mum.

The outpouring of love is quite overwhelming.

I guess I've never had that level of love before from strangers.

And, in reality, they are strangers

that are just loving me for who I am and they don't know much about me.

And I don't know much about them,

But there's a bond, deeper than I've ever really experienced before.

So much of the Hamilton-Byrne saga

is shrouded in mystery,

so I thought we'd try and separate rumour from fact, truth from fiction.

How many are your natural children?

Altogether, it was eight, I think.

There were eight or nine.

You got eight this morning, when we were counting them out, weren't we?

It was almost like Cheaper by the Dozen, you know?

We never told them they weren't ours.

I don't know where you put the blame for this, uh, but...

I'd do it all over again.

Well, the question really was...it hasn't worked, has it?

Your family has dissipated, hasn't it?

Yes, but why?

Well, that's what I was going to ask you. Why?

And who do you blame?

I can't blame anybody.

I wouldn't blame anybody.

We don't understand, I don't understand.

It was love.

Just love.

Captions by Red Bee Media

Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation