In the Clearing

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2000s: What is life in a cult?

ISBN: B0845Q8D3B
Genre: Crime

What you need to know before your trail

Amy has only ever known life in the Clearing. She knows what’s expected of her. She knows what to do to please her elders, and how to make sure the community remains happy and calm. That is, until a new young girl joins the group. She isn’t fitting in; she doesn’t want to stay. What happens next will turn life as Amy knows it on its head.

Freya has gone to great lengths to feel like a ‘normal person’. In fact, if you saw her go about her day with her young son, you’d think she was an everyday mum. That is, until a young girl goes missing and someone from her past, someone she hasn’t seen for a very long time, arrives in town.

As secrets of the past bubble up to the surface, this small town’s dark secrets will be exposed and lives will be destroyed.

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Travel Guide

Travel inside a cult in Australia

The author was inspired by the infamous cult The Family which was a major story in Australia. The Family – also called the Santiniketan Park Association and the Great White Brotherhood – was an Australian New Age group formed in the mid-1960s under the leadership of yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne

Santiniketan was the home at Ferny Creek in the Dandenong Ranges on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne. The Family was a group of people and around a third of them was made up of nurses and other medical professionals. The children of the group were either those of the group or had been adopted or obtained by various means. All were kept in seclusion and home-schooled at Kai Lama, a rural property usually referred to as “Uptop”, at Taylor Bay on Lake Eildon near the town of Eildon, Victoria.

Newhaven Hospital in Kew was a private psychiatric hospital owned and managed by a Santiniketan member; many of its staff and attending psychiatrists were also members.