In the Valley of the Damned: Over four generations, one extended family practised a cult of incest hidden from the world. Now the true horror of their lives can be revealed
- The family of 40, brothers and sisters slept with one another, as did aunts, uncles, fathers and daughters
- - The result was more physically or psychologically damaged children
- - The cult lived 20 miles from the nearest town in New South Wales
- - In a rare move the Australian family court has allowed the full extent of the terrible details
to be made public
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Among the wooded hills above a tiny hamlet in New South Wales, where farmers tended their cattle, and horses grazed on lush pastures, the most unspeakable sexual horrors were taking place — yet no one in the neighbourhood knew a thing about the depravities.
The adults and even the children themselves who were players in an incestuous tragedy had become adept at keeping their terrible secret to themselves for three years — and for three generations before that.
Or so it was, until concerns about the unwashed state and the slow-learning abilities of the youngsters — when they occasionally turned up at school — began to spread among education and welfare authorities.
The family were hidden in the hills above a tiny hamlet in New South Wales. There, four generations of a family practised a cult of
incest hidden from the world
What officials found when they raided a ‘bush camp’ in the hillside valley has since shocked not only Australia but the world.
For the disturbing events that had taken place among the gum trees are now making their mark as among the planet’s worst-known cases of incest and inbreeding.
In this family of 40, brothers and sisters slept with one another, as did aunts, uncles, fathers and daughters — the tragic result being more physically or psychologically damaged children coming into the world.
Had the camp, some 20 miles from the nearest large town, not been raided by police and child protection officers in June last year, it is likely that those newly born damaged children would themselves have gone on to have sex with one another and start a new generation of misfits.
The Australian family court has, in an extremely rare move, allowed the terrible details to be made public, but it has ordered that neither the family, the location of the valley nor the name of the nearest town be identified to protect the minors.
But, with the help of police, I was able to find the valley which today gives no clue to the sickening scenes that took place there.
Instead, wallabies bound away as my shoes snap dead branches and cockatoos screech overhead. It is a peaceful place that even boasts a nearby nature trail for bushwalkers.
The incest ‘cult’ — ironically the court has given them the pseudonym Colt (along with first names to protect their identity) — had hidden themselves well in this bushland. There was little chance of an outsider stumbling into the clearing where the family slept in a shack of corrugated iron, wood and plastic, and in a couple of broken-down caravans.
Police and welfare officers were shocked by the squalor and degradation of the property where the children were found
What does remain are a few structures that give the impression of ‘normal’ life — a large shed with a caravan parked beside it and a children’s playground with a slide. The land itself now has a new owner.
The sordid camp on the hilly sides of the valley was so well hidden that even police who went to check it out before their raid could not find it.
Until then, the flawed family had done nothing to turn the heads of neighbours — no laughter reached their ears, nor any shouts of anger.
No one in the nearby bustling country town knew the secrets of the valley tucked away in the distant hills; no one knew that the dark-haired woman in hippy clothes, who jumped from a four-wheel-drive with a few thin ragtag children in dirty clothes to dart into a local shop for food, was one of the madames of a family brothel.
‘Those of us who even knew they were there didn’t really take any notice of them,’ a farmer told me. ‘We’d see a four-wheel-drive head down the track full of people and kids, and that would be about it.
‘I had no idea what was going on up there, having heard about it only in the past few days. It’s just awful.’
A local woman said that the mothers, whenever she caught a glimpse of ‘the hillbillies’ as they drove by, appeared to wear ‘hand-me-down’ clothes, ‘like Sixties Bohemians’.
She added: ‘I can’t believe none of us knew what was going on up there.’
What was going on was a family regenerating itself, an incestuous group of relatives who turned to each other to breed more of themselves.
They clung together, generation after generation, as they wandered from one temporary encampment to another — a travelling horror show with a script written exclusively for themselves.
Up the dusty, unmade road that I travelled on yesterday, they had come in their convoy of vehicles, having saved enough money from welfare cheques to pay for two blocks of land from a farmer.
As the caravan rumbled by, one or two locals recalled seeing children peering out through the glass. One resident remarked that it was like the circus had come to town.
The family clung together, generation after generation, rarely visiting the town, wandering from one temporary encampment to another
And now that the twisted circus has been forced to leave, several other residents in the district — believing that the area has been tainted by the presence of the family — have decided to sell up.
In the camp clearing there was no sewerage, no running water, the bush flies surrounded them by day and the mosquitoes by night — for the tumble-down buildings and the wreck of caravans they called home were so full of holes that they all might as well have slept outside.
Despite the invading insects, it was in wretched corners of the shacks and caravans that children copulated with one another and with adults in both daylight and darkness.
Pornographic magazines lay about, and for playthings the children, brought up in an environment of sex, would mutilate the genitalia of animals they caught whether they were cats, dogs or rabbits.
‘We’ve had our fair share of problems in these parts,’ said a local wife. ‘There have been squatters moving in on some of the farm houses that look neglected, when in fact the owners were just away.
‘And there have been a few cases of cattle duffing (rustling). But they’ve got nothing on this family. How did they get into this mess?’
It’s a question others are asking now that the news of the raid and the subsequent placing of many of the children with foster parents has begun to spread among the shocked neighbourhood.
Ten of the children had parents who were probably father and daughter or brother and sister. They lived in buildings similar to this. File picture
Like a disease being passed from one person to the next, sex with a relative became part of family life going back to the first half of the 20th century when a brother and sister, thought to be English migrants to New Zealand, had sex and June ‘Colt’ came into the world.
It was the first page in a catalogue of incest. The inbred June married a man referred to as Tim in the Seventies and they emigrated to Australia, where June gave birth to four daughters and two sons.
The family began to drift around the continent, living in remote communities, the parents turning a blind eye to sexual contact between their children.
Sexual relations became a literal reality with their sons and daughters, the family keeping their deep secret as they travelled the thousands of miles from South Australia, across to Western Australia, then to Victoria and New South Wales.
Keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length, they lived and travelled like ferals in old vans and survived on welfare cheques. Over time, the family tree began to get very complicated.
One of the daughters of June and Tim — Betty — herself began to have children. Thirteen, no less, claiming to welfare officials after the raid on the camp that their father was a man called Phil Walton, who has since died, and who was known to the family as Tim. The same christian name as her father.
And genetic tests have shown that one of June’s sons — Bobby, 15 — was fathered either by her own father Tim, or the brother she was sleeping with. Adding to the incest saga, genetic tests have shown that another four of Betty’s children were fathered by a family member.
The family have been in denial about who has fathered whom. Betty’s eldest child, 30-year-old Raylene, for example, has a 13-year-old daughter, Kimberly, whose father has been shown to be either Kimberly’s half-brother, an uncle or a grandfather.
The list is mind-numbing, the wicked sex games deeply disturbing. Nine-year-old Ruth and seven-year-old Nadia told social workers that their brothers Albert, 15, and Jed, 14, played with their breasts and Albert had sexual intercourse with both of them.
And Kimberly told of having oral sex with nine-year-old brother Dwayne, while his eight-year-old sister Carmen — who said her father was her uncle Charlie — watched.
The camp lay 20 miles from the nearest town in New South Wales, pictured, near Sydney
What has really shocked the neighbours is learning that as soon as they were old enough to understand, the children were confronted with scenes of their older siblings and adults having sex.
Young girls who became pregnant were in some cases allowed to deliberately miscarry. If they were old enough to continue with birth, it went ahead, starting a new generation of inbreeding.
Sadly, a number of those children have come into the world with birth defects — a boy with misaligned eyes, another with a walking impairment, a child with hearing and sight problems, another with stunted speech. One girl did not know how to bathe or use toilet paper.
Geneticists wrote into the medical records the word ‘homozygosity’ — a birth resulting from the union of parents who are closely related. Eight of the children were found to have parents who were either brother and sister, mother and son, or father and daughter.
Yet another six have parents who are slightly more removed, such as an aunt and nephew having sex, an uncle and niece, or a grandparent with a grandchild.
The question the locals are asking is now resounding around Australia: how could these terrible things happen in a country that ranks itself among the world’s most civilised nations? How did this depraved family slip through the cracks of normal humanity?
It appears the elders were well aware that child welfare and protection is under the responsibility of the country’s various states, and as soon as they became aware that they were on a ‘watch list’, they moved on across the border.
‘This family did not want to be found,’ said chief executive Maree Walk of Family and Community Services in NSW.
‘Some of the families that we work with are very open and seeking for help — but that wasn’t the circumstances here.’
The mothers are now fighting to have their children, who have been placed with foster parents, returned to them. But one thing is certain — the Colt family will never be seen again among the gracefully standing gums of this particular part of Australia.
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