Passage (3 page)

It follows that many of the children – perhaps as many as seventy of the hundred that lived in the commune when I was there – were born of Brother Ruhamah’s relationships, but there were other, arranged marriages between Elder Brothers and young Sisters.

As to the other allegations that have been made, I want to be clear: in every ceremony of this type that I witnessed, the women – the girls – were over the age of sixteen. That some were barely sixteen may be distasteful to some, but it is not a crime.

Brother Ruhamah was manipulative, insincere, intensely promiscuous … but he was not, as far as I witnessed or on the basis of any information I’ve ever received, a paedophile.

The Victorian police have conducted two investigations into precisely that issue – one in 1999 and one again last year – and they agree.

I have heard it said, as recently as last Sunday on
60 Minutes
, that it’s impossible for anyone to leave the Jesus People, and that it is therefore a mind-control cult. That I stand here today suggests otherwise.

I understand that people want to know how I got out. Some are expecting me to tell a tale that involves a struggle of some kind. But my own experience was quite sedate: when the time came for me to leave, nobody tried to stop me.

I was in my seventh year with the Jesus People – a bit bored, I suppose, but no more than usual – when two Elder Brothers bustled us from the rock fields into the central quadrangle, to hear them read out a special message from Brother Ruhamah. And what a message it was.

A day or so later, we were given both the date and the time – midnight – that the invasion would begin. We began storing food and sharpening sticks to use as weapons. We danced in circles and sang and prayed. One of the Sisters – she had long braids curled around her ears, like Princess Leia – smiled at me and said, ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? I suspect we’re actually going to see the end of the world, and we will be the only survivors.’

On the evening of the planned invasion we wrapped material around the tops of branches, soaked them in petrol, and set them on fire. We held hands, and set forth upon the cattle track that had brought me here seven years earlier, determined to do whatever was necessary to protect our way of life.

It wasn’t a particularly long walk out to the gate. We reached it in less than half an hour, meaning well ahead of midnight. Not sure what to do, we grinned, waved our fire sticks and waited for the lawyers, the bankers and the invading horde of veterinarians.

Midnight came and went, and still we stood there, grinning towards the silent horizon. Nothing at all was happening, as had happened on the six or seven previous occasions on which we’d been told to expect an invasion of some sort.

At some point, the Elder Brothers – not Brother Ruhamah, who had apparently decided to sit out the battle at his Gold Coast penthouse – smiled at each other and, without explanation or apparent disappointment, wandered back to the commune to prepare for a new day.

As for me … I stood for a while at the gate. Beyond it was the paddock I’d crossed all those years earlier, and beyond that was the old highway into town. I took one step, and then another, over potholes and rocks, stumbling until I reached the
familiar corner store. I lay down on the step, and slept until dawn. The shopkeeper, when she arrived, was unsurprised to find me curled up, bearded and shivering in my tunic. She put a warm mug of tea between my cold hands and said, ‘Have you called your mother?’

Three decades have since gone by. I’m happily married to Ruth. We have three wonderful children. I have enjoyed some success in business, and now I’ve been elected to parliament.

I accept that I now live a public life.

I understand that some in the community – parents of children who live with the Jesus People, for example – are wondering whether I’ll use whatever power comes with my new position to investigate, and perhaps smash open, the cult of the Jesus People.

What I have to say today will disappoint them.

Unless and until there is evidence of a crime, we’ve no business interfering with the lives of those in communes.

To be clear: the cult of the Jesus People is not for everyone – their way of life may not be yours, and it’s no longer mine – but the way in which they live is entirely legal, and therefore no business of ours.

To me, it further seems that there is no logic in trying to spring people from that way of life before they are ready to leave it.

Of all the questions I’ve been asked about the Jesus People since being appointed to this new role, the one that’s interested me most came from a reporter at
The Age
: ‘You lived there a long time, Paul. Do you miss it?’

Nobody had ever asked me that before!

I can’t remember what I told the journalist. Whatever I said, he didn’t use it. But I’ve been thinking about the question, and I’d now like to answer it this way …

Have you ever yearned for a life that’s quieter, less complicated, with a gentler routine, than the one you live every day?

Have you longed for a country getaway, eating eggs hatched in a local chicken coop and bread baked in a camp oven?

Have you dreamed of freedom from financial burdens; from your frantic schedule; from the huge number of unanswered messages in your email account?

I suspect the answer for many of you is ‘yes’. But would you trade your free will for those things?

There was a time when the answer to that question, for me, was demonstrably ‘yes’. But I was then childlike, and now I am a man.

I’ll be honest and say I got a bit of a shock when I started getting letters from Snow Delaney.

The first of them arrived in April 2011, by which time she was already in prison.

Apparently Snow decided to write to me after her lawyer – or, more accurately, her old lawyer, the one she’s now sacked – gave her copies of some of the articles I’d written about her case.

They must have got up her nose, those articles, because Snow accused me in that first letter of getting ‘key facts’ wrong and of being biased against her.

I wrote back, asking her to tell me where I’d gone wrong, and then Snow replied, and so on and so forth for more than a year.

Some people might be wondering what exactly Snow hoped to gain by writing to me, but I reckon it was pretty obvious: I’m a reporter, and she wanted to convince
people that she’s innocent of everything she’s ever been accused of doing.

As to what I was doing making Snow my penfriend, well, I reckon that’s obvious too.

I was trying to coax some kind of confession from her, so I could put the minds of some good people to rest.

I see now that’s not going to happen. I got a letter from the State government a few months back, telling me I was officially banned from writing any more letters to Snow while she’s in prison, and since I haven’t heard from her I take it she’s also banned from writing to me.

I’m annoyed, mostly because I believe that Snow had something to do with the disappearance of her sister, Agnes Moore, and now I’ve lost my chance to trip her up on that point.

At least one of my contacts in the New South Wales police force agrees that Snow knows more than she’s saying. Cops, though, spend too many years watching tricky lawyers get dodgy people off the hook, and for them it’s all about getting enough evidence to prove it in a court of law.

Evidence that’s legally admissible tends not to be as important to reporters. For us, it’s all about what makes sense – and what makes sense, at least to me, is that Snow Delaney needs to stay behind bars.