When I talk about this time of my life, I refer to it as ‘the 19^th autumn’ – I don’t recall the exact date, the exact month – just that sometime in that year, I was walking up a hill, in the dark, kicking autumn leaves, terrified the devil was about to get me.

Autumn 1999

I’m kicking soggy leaves along the pavement, as I slowly walk up the hill above my university.

I stare down at my feet, kick the piles of leaves beneath me, they’re soggy.

I’m cold. My feet are cold. This city is so cold.

Last Sunday afternoon I made the decision not to go back to the Sunday or Wednesday Meetings. I’m feeling lost.

I take to walking up and down the streets at night, seeking something I can’t articulate. Solace, maybe. I can’t sleep, so I walk.

I pace Elgar Road Burwood, a boring suburban part of upper-middle class Melbourne.

A few days earlier at the same time of night, I was approached by a man asking me the time. I told him, and as I looked up from my watch, he flashed his penis at me. I laughed. I roared with laughter. I don’t think it was the reaction he was expecting, and he ran. No, he sprinted, back the direction he’d come.

I wonder when the devil is going to get me?

What day will a car come around a corner and kill me? Or will it be a tram? Or a bus? How do you know which way the devil is going to come – do you get warning?

Is the flashing man the warning? Did I laugh in the face of the devils warning signs?

I look around, suspiciously – any signs here of the devil on his way to get me? Any speeding cars or wayward trams? Nothing obvious. Best I’m on alert though.

I walk on, shuffling and kicking leaves.

I listen out for screeching car tires, falling tree branches, meteorites.

There is no vocabulary for me that day – to understand that I’m experiencing spiritual and religious trauma, that I’m hypervigilant, worried about dying, worried about the devil.

Truthfully, I learnt hypervigilance at birth – always on alert for worldly materials that might lead us astray, or ungodly thoughts that might corrupt me.

Hypervigilance is my baseline.

Apparently, penis flashers do not bother me. I’m more worried about the devil getting me for ‘not believing in the one true way’ than some below-average man who thinks his penis is interesting.

1999

I land, a refugee from cult-land, on a planet awash with fear and polarization.

The world I was entering had no cultural touchstones I recognised.

Y2K fears were everywhere. Everyone was convinced that the dawn of 2000 would be some kind of apocalypse. It wasn’t just inside the Truth 2x2s that end-of-the-world conversations were common.

In the university halls, even lecturers talked of catastrophe. They predicted trains would crash, trams would career into cars, hospitals come to a standstill, life support machines turn off.

My panic and hypervigilance in that 19th autumn were being fed from all angles.

The internet has just become accessible for all students at university in the computer labs– for the first time I have access to dial up internet, linux and AOL chat rooms. It will take me another six months to find anything about the 2x2s.

The women’s studies department I find myself enrolled in is a hotbed of radical feminism (sadly the kind that later became TERF). Third wave feminist lesbians surround me, teaching me women-centered love, sexuality and non-monogamy.

We claim we don’t need men, that we need women to choose women.

Men are just for side fun and games. Truthfully, that sits uncomfortably with me. I deeply love the 2x2 man in my life. Some of my greatest supporters were, and still are, men. Bisexuality is not something we can discuss in these circles.

When I tell the radfems, after pashing a few of them under the stairs outside room EB15, about the flasher man on Elgar Road, they’re horrified that I laughed raucously at his penis instead of screaming. They urge me to call the police, to scream loudly next time.

I probably should have called the police. But I stand by the idea that laughing loudly at men who sexually harass you, is the best way to make them run, small and deflated.

Pauline Hanson and One Nation are consuming all the air in the political debates. There are polarizing conversations about race, migration, abortion. She’s told everyone we’re being ‘swamped by Asians’. I’m studying Chinese language, and later I go on to win a scholarship to study in China. I sit in classrooms with Chinese lecturers who’re visibly shaken when her ideology is raised. It’s all very uncomfortable. I like these lecturers and my classmates, yet Pauline says they’re ‘swamping us’.

How much does not change in 26 years? The same conversations and the same small-minded woman are consuming us in 2026. Where did we go wrong, in those university corridors, that this debate is back?

I took two buses and a train, 6 hours home to my family for New Year’s Eve 2000. I was scared that I’d die in that strange, wet and cold city – alone without my family. I woke up on January 1, 2000, in a bedroom with my sisters, and the world was just fine. Y2K came and went, and we went on unperturbed.

I lived. No buses careered around corners; no trams nor trains crashed into me. No meteoroids arrived.

Imagine how annoyed I am to find I have cancer, 26 years later. That wasn’t on my hypervigilance watchlist.

The meeting finishes, I go to shake hands with Ralph the Elder of the meeting. He sidesteps me, walks quickly past me and almost dives over a sofa chair to escape me.

I look around me, uncomfortably. Everyone avoids eye contact. There are half a dozen couples, mostly middle aged, in this Sunday Meeting. I’m one of only two young people in this Meeting. The other couples catch me try to make eye contact and they start to leave the room, into the long hallway which leads to the back patio.

I’ve been coming to this meeting for about a year, since my move here from country NSW*. Its always felt a bit uncomfortable, like I wasn’t welcome. The smiles and handshakes after the meeting feel forced. Today they’re not even faking it. They’re reversing out of the room, side stepping me over sofas.

What have I DONE?

I try to ignore the way Ralph has just tried to escape me, and the way the other couples have exited the room at pace. I go towards Ralphs wife, Maureen. As Elders wife, she’s owed respect and a handshake for hosting the meeting in her home. She too sidesteps me, rushes off to take the emblems (bread and wine) back to the kitchen.

They’re doing that ‘thing’ that Truth Friends do, where they won’t tell you anything, they’ll simply shut you out. Not talk to you. It’s our way of saying ‘you’ve said or done something that doesn’t fit with our people, you’ve got the wrong spirit, and we’ll shut you out until you repent and change’.

I look down at my Doc Martin boots and take note of my rainbow socks peeping through the gap between my long skirt and the boots. The boots and the lack of stockings might be one of the things I need to reflect on?

I also have my hair in dreadlocks, which I’ve cleverly pulled back into a bun. I think it looks quite cool. Ive spent hours making those dreadlocks myself – twisting and teasing hair into long, thick strands of dreads. It might be another thing they’ve noticed and want me to reflect on?

Have they heard somehow about the women I’m hanging out with at university – the raucous women’s studies students, who pash behind the stairs before and after class?

I decide its best I leave without trying to shake any more hands, it feels uncomfortable.

As I walk outside the meeting-house door, I realise its pelting down with rain. I don’t have an umbrella, rookie mistake. Melbourne. I’m still acclimatizing, from leaving the hot, dry lands I come from.

I tuck my beloved hymn book and bible under my jumper and jacket, run across the driveway, across the highway, to the tram stop.

I stand in the rain, clutching that precious hymn book and bible under my layers, not wanting it to get wet. It’s my sacred connection to god, to family. My family spent good money on that beautiful bible and hymn book, its precious.

I watch as car after car drives out of the meeting house driveway. Six of them in total, driving out after the meeting.

Six carloads of them look the opposite way to avoid acknowledging me standing there at the tram stop, in the pouring rain.

Something in me snaps.

These are not my people.

My people would not drive past one of their own standing in the rain.

In the red sand I come from no one would drive past ANYONE standing in the rain, let alone one of the Friends.

If god exists only to save the good Truth Friends – then I don’t think this is my god.

I’d rather die and go to hell, than drive past someone standing in the rain.

I don’t understand how gods true people could justify not wanting to shake hands with someone simply because she wears Doc Martins and dreadlocks.

Is our spirit not guided by what is in our hearts?

I like my spirit, and I like my heart.

I am done.

The tram rumbles around the bend in the highway, wheels squealing as it comes to a stop in the rain. I board, sit my soaking butt down on the seat.

I take my hymn book and bible out from my layers, and stare at it.

I stare at the gold on the edges of my bible. Workers would tell us from the platform: gold on the edges means you didn’t read the gold inside enough.

You need to wear off the gold on the edges of the bible pages, to get to the gold inside.

I’ve tried so hard to read all that gold, to shake the right hands, to be a good and honest person, to have a good spirit. And yet – they’d drive past me in the rain.

I can’t go back.

I never go back.

Footnote:

*Years later I realize Ralph is one of the key money men in the 2x2s. At the time I knew so little about the 2x2 hierarchy and money, that I didn’t realize they were ‘important’. So much makes sense once I understood who Ralph and Maureen were. Imagine their discomfort at being given me to host on a Sunday, this gritty country kid with dreadlocks, in their beautiful living room of cream carpets and beige leather sofas. A gritty kid in Doc Martins, who still had the gold on the edges of her bible, who pashes women underneath the stairs at university Monday to Friday.

We did, however, love ourselves some 2WEB, Bourke Outback Radio.

On the sly.

My father and one of his brothers, a man we dare not name these days, were the main culprits.

They fancied themselves country music guitar men. With no skills to speak of, just an old guitar of my mothers. They’d strum make-believe cords (genuinely, I don’t think either of them had a music lesson in their lives) and copy the country music songs from 2WEB.

I grew up on their rough cover versions of country music songs, belted out in the evenings in the tin shed my grandparents lived in. They’d perform for the gaggles of kids, backlit by the light of the caravan kitchen, while my nan and the older girls did the dinner dishes.

I secretly thought their versions were better than the ones on the radio. My music taste is questionable, I blame them.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, 2x2 Workers in Australia had a reputation for ripping radios out of cars. Many people dared not turn them on, often they removed the radio themselves before Workers could get to them.

My grandfather listened to an old radio in the machinery shed each morning, for a short 15-minutes – to hear the weather report. Then promptly turned off ‘the devils machine’. Why he bothered wasn’t clear– given how rarely it rained out there.

In the rough beat-up shearing cars, and the tractors – places Workers did not enter - we listened occasionally to 2WEB – a diet of Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich, George Strait, Slim Dusty. Dolly was one of the only women’s voices I recall hearing through the radio.

I took my love of Dolly (and Johnny) into a new life. Collected records, played them at civilised dinner parties over fancy red wine, far away from the red sand of 2WEB. In my 20’s I had a reputation for getting drunk and belting out ‘Love is Like a Butterfly’ in a quite uncivilised manner, at civilised parties.

I regret nothing.

Dolly was the best kind of Christian. She was one of the ones I want more of here.

Dolly was the kind who said that which bathroom you use to pee doesn’t matter, who loudly said that LGBTQIA+ people belong. She apparently refused to be called a feminist, despite living a bold and feminist life. I don’t blame her. Sometimes the feminists in the rooms these days are the least feminist ones. It’s a term I hold onto in the hope it can be re-claimed.

Her death leaves me a little hollow, I needed you right now, Dolly. Selfishly.

Love IS like a butterfly; it IS a rare and gentle thing.

I find myself ensconced in that rareness of those butterflies of love right now. Im aware that at no point prior to this in my life have I had the community and the love to hold me quite as hard, as I have right now.

I hold those butterflies of love, close. Glad to have this community to hold me.

Vale Dolly. Thanks for the tunes. And sorry for the ways my lot has butchered them in caravans, tin sheds, red dirt, fancy dinner parties.

After my recent surgery, I’ve used a lot of pads. Pads of all sizes and shapes.

Not a day passes when that doesn’t make me uncomfortable to be using so many of them.

I need more pads; I’ve used all the ones the hospital gave me at discharge. Truthfully, they were uncomfortable ones, and weeks ago I should have ordered more online, I’ve avoided it. I know I have.

I’ve always avoided buying the pads.

A few years ago, I let myself bulk buy large boxes of them from a social enterprise menstrual brand Tsuno – I legitimized it by saying it was for the work bathrooms. I regularly ‘borrowed’ a few boxes of them from work.

I can make sense of that purchase for other people, but I would not buy them for myself.

I can’t drive at the moment, I cant get to work to restock from the toilets there.

I’m going to have to buck up, buy my own from the supermarket.

I hesitate over the ‘add to cart’ button on 6 packets of pads on the supermarket website. They cost $7 each. Is it worth it?

Maybe I can just make do without them.

Why? Why am I like this?

Growing up, menstrual products were used as a tool of control.

I did not have easy or consistent access to them.

In Australia there is now a vocabulary for this - its called Period Poverty – where people who menstruate cannot access the products (or the quantity of) they need for menstruation.

This is recent vocabulary, its not something I could have used back in the 1990’s.

When I first got my period at around 11, my mother deliberately bought me the ugliest, cheapest ones she could find. She had done the same thing with deodorant a year earlier.

In the months before my first period, a school mate had told a story in the playground about her mother and her first period, and how she’d taken her out for chocolate milkshakes, bought her the fanciest pads in the local chemist, been so happy and proud of her daughter, I secretly had hoped for the same. Instead, I got an enormous nappy (diaper) style packet of cheap Payless brand pads thrust at me, and she walked away. Wordless. I was an inconvenience.

We didn’t have a lot of financial stability, to be fair, but in almost every situation where she was forced to supply hygiene products for me, she used it as a bargaining tool.

She typically purchased the cheapest, nastiest product she could find with hygiene products, and then told me (and the others) that if wanted any different we had to buy it ourselves. She kept a ledger book in the kitchen, and charged us each week if we wanted shampoo, conditioner, tissues which fell outside the cheapest, nastiest ones on the supermarket shelf. We were framed as inconvenient, costly. Shamed.

The pads she gave me fell apart while you wore them, were bulky, bad quality and uncomfortable to wear. I decided quickly not to bother with them. Instead, I used old socks. Sometimes, I had the money from my casual jobs to buy tampons. I loved swimming and the only way to swim consistently was to fund my own tampons.

I knew what she was doing – I always did – even without a vocabulary to use.

I knew she used products we needed as bargaining chips, to hold over us, to control where we went and how confident we felt.

These days this behavior could be considered as part of a pattern of coercive control.

These days tampons and pads are more available for free in some Victorian buildings (like the hospital I recently left, fully stocked).

The world has thankfully moved on from some of the shame around menstruation that existed in the 1990’s and 2000’s – mainstream culture allows us more space to discuss our needs. Nonetheless – I walk through the world refusing to allow myself to buy these products, carrying a warped idea about if I’m worth them. I don’t believe I am.

I’ve absorbed the idea that I’m not worth a decent pad. The work toilets though – I understand that other people should have access. Just not me. I dont think I’m worth it.

I wonder how many more of us there are, who carry around these strange, warped behaviors and beliefs about our worthiness for basic hygiene products?

How many of us are carrying around trauma in the shopping trolley, and in our bodies about basic hygiene?

Some will say that this has nothing to do with Truth 2x2s, that this behavior wasn’t endorsed by the group, I disagree.

This behavior is part of a wider pattern of control of the bodies and lives of (predominantly) girls inside high control groups. It’s a tool used in purity culture, to shame us about our bodies and control our movement.

I don’t blame my mother individually, if I’m honest. It was a tool she learned, probably had to navigate it herself, it didn’t come to her from nowhere.

In the past 25+ years of supporting women, girls and LGBTQIA+ from high control environments like 2x2’s, I’ve heard numerous stories like my own.

In families where women and girls needs are deemed secondary, period products can be seen as taboo, seen as a luxury.

In working class and low SES families, where financial strain is real - women and girls are known not to ask for hygiene products and not to put their own hygiene first. They simply stay home and manage it with toilet paper.

In communities where women and girls are told to be ‘submissive’ there is sometimes genuine fear around asking for and needing basic hygiene products. Girls can self- select out of asking - through shame and conditioning around what ‘submissive’ girls should and should not ask for. In the Truth 2x2’s in particular, there can be a belief around ‘humility’ and need for women and girls to demonstrate ‘humility’ and not ask or have basic needs.

Where financial control is used as a tool of coercion, as it is for some (I’d argue many) 2x2 women, girls and LGBTQIA+, basic hygiene needs can become secondary to food, rent, petrol for the car.

It’s common for me to support people who leave these kinds of families/communities with little access to money. They have often worked in some capacity and been expected to give large portions of their paycheck to Workers or clergy (usually male) or their own family. Often, they have family who have access to their bank accounts and regularly transfer funds away without approval or knowledge, leaving them to juggle a decision between food and tampons.

Very few of them are likely to tell me this outright. I try to ask deliberately because I know how common it is, and I know they won’t tell me unless I ask. They’re often used to being treated like their needs don’t matter, or that these are shameful conversations to have.

Recently a woman told me that she had been asked by a young Sister Worker in her family to buy period underwear for her, as she did not have the funds to buy them for herself, and had been taking pads and tampons from the homes she stayed in, which left her feeling (rightly) humiliated.

The issue runs deep in my opinion, and we dont have enough data to demonstrate how deep it is. One day I hope we do.

Controlling access to basic products is a behaviour sits in a toolbox, used inside high control families and communities – It’s a part of financial control, appearance control and control of movement. If you can keep girls trapped inside, ashamed of their bodies – you can control their fertility, their education, their ability to engage in the world outside.

That’s group based coercive control. Not every tool is used in every family, community or group – it’s one of many in the toolbox.

I did eventually buy the pads.

It’s ridiculous really, that in my mid-forties I’m still carrying trauma-behaviours that I should have let go of decades (and several pay-grades) ago.

Much like my reluctance to fill my car with petrol (I worry needlessly that I’ll need the money for something else later in the week) it’s all wrapped up in poverty, control and fear.

You can leave a high control group, but leaving behind the legacy of it is a whole other journey.

Thanks for being on this journey with me. Subscribe below for essays direct to your inbox. And a reminder that I have a Patreon and a Buy-Me-A-Coffee, both of which contribute to me being able to provide support to others.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do.

I chose to do it, to bear witness.

I wanted to stand there, to see it tabled. I wanted to feel the presence of that report and its monumental significance to survivors.

Survivors took risks to trust a process in that inquiry. They took a chance on a government inquiry, with a risk of personal retraumatisation, to submit over 250 times. Cult survivors - who often distrust authority and have limited belief in institiutions - submitted to that inquiry. That isn’t lost on me. I see and feel the significance.

Today, survivors of high control, coercive groups were heard in the Victorian Parliament. They were believed.

I have cancer, I have a plethora of other essays I’ve written and not published on it. I don’t know how to push ‘publish’ on such things. It feels cliché.

Eventually, I’ll be brave enough to talk about it more, I hope. That diagnosis means I have no idea if I can finish the work I’m passionate about, in getting formal support structures for survivors of group based coercive control.

That diagnosis, the chemo and health implications mean standing in a public gallery filled with potential germs isn’t a decision I took lightly. It’s a decision I made with consideration for the world I want to see after me, germs be darned.

I want to bear witness to change, to believe I can leave behind something better for young people leaving cults/high control/coercive groups.

Change happens so slowly, and then sometimes, all at once.

The past 26 years have been slow, tedious, traumatic. Then the past year, so fast. What is in that report has the potential to move things fast again. Group based coercive control is entering the mainstream vocabulary in Australia. I want to bear witness to that change.

To be believed as a survivor of group based coercive control survivor is monumental.

I wanted to bear witness to being believed. I wanted to stand there, in my 46 year old, ill and fragile body, but emotionally as the 19-year-old I was when I left the Truth 2x2s. I wanted that teenager, scared and alone in a city far from my home to hear that she was believed, she wasn’t exaggerating.

I wanted 19-year-old Laura to watch that report tabled and know: ‘survivors are believed here in this alien land you have arrived in. You are safe here’.

Community and survivors’ matter to me – I wanted to stand there in solidarity and on behalf of them. I want to believe that the world after me will look back on this report and see it as a catalyst for change – not just in Australia but around the world – for survivors of coercive control in groups like the Truth 2x2s.

What is in that report, here in my hands is this: High control groups are real. Coercive control in group settings is real. Religious freedom is a right, and so is the freedom from abuse. It’s not about belief, it’s about behaviour. All of these are about to become important concepts in Victoria.

I watched it, I bore witness.

Change in all its complexity and slow pace – I saw it today. It can happen.

I heard the politicians who sat on that committee say ‘this was hard to hear but we’re glad people trusted us with these stories’.

I heard Victorian politicians value the lived experience of survivors, I heard them say we mattered.

Tomorrow the next chapter starts – taking recommendations to actions.

I stood and bore witness, holding onto my pieces of home.

I grasped these tightly all morning, in the hope that this report recommendations means no kid grows up in situations like I did. That no kid ever has to lose as much or fight as hard, to be taken seriously about the harm being perpetrated inside high control groups.

The report can be read here. There will no doubt be other summaries and hot takes published as time passes.

*sexual abuse, grooming, child abuse, medical issues, mental health issues

I grew up putting myself in front of the abusers.

All of us put our bodies on the line, in my family. I’m not special.

The community I came from is fiercely working class, fiercely underdogs. They’re the kind of people who just voted in right wing nationalist MAGA-wanna-be One Nation because they distrust everyone and want to blow everything up.

They’re anti establishment. Low trust in systems. No one is coming to save people like mine.

We save ourselves.

No one is coming to save our bodies, help fight our demons.

My family found the 2x2s to save themselves, to find hope in often hopeless places.

Maybe we can save our own souls, if we find the One Truth Way.

I grew up in shearing and farming families. My maternal grandfather left school at 14 to join a shearing team. He was the youngest of 11, he followed one of his many older brothers across western NSW into shearing sheds. His mother was a deeply broken person, who once stole and hid all his clothes so he couldn’t leave the house. He left home as early as he could.

Everyone said his mother, my great grandmother, had bipolar.

I’m of the opinion she was traumatised by having a bunch of kids, with 3 different men, all of which either died or abandoned her. She found the Truth 2x2s.

They saved her, I guess.

They didn’t save her from being in Royal Park Asylum repeatedly.

Did they really save her?

I guess they gave her hope in something beyond the shitty parochial, colonial, misogynistic world she was surviving in.

She sacrificed her body. Her first child was probably the result of rape. It was an oft repeated story in my family that she’d say to people ‘she didn’t know where he came from’ when people asked who her first born child’s father was.

The Royal Park asylum was a cruel place, where patients were treated with inhumanity.

My grandfather destroyed his body in shearing sheds. A strong, tall, skinny man. A proud man. A shy and reserved man, deeply spiritual and wildly clever.

By the time I met him in my childhood, his body was destroyed by hauling sheep across shearing boards and crouching over them all day for decades. Dodgy hips, one leg profoundly shorter than the other. Multiple hip replacements.

He had serious social anxieties, that I now wonder might be on the autism spectrum. Or perhaps, like his mother, he was also traumatised and I’m over diagnosing him in the same way his own mother was.

The bodies of working-class people are how we survive.

Our bodies are used, abused. Not protected. Not believed. Not valued, disposable.

The world is not set up for us to thrive, is it any wonder some want to blow it up voting for nationalism and populism?

The adults worked, they didn’t always supervise us the way we do these days. Kids were left in the company of unsafe people.

But then, should we be suspicious of everyone? Can our kids not be safely left in their communities?

Sadly, the way we’ve constructed communities – regardless of class – it’s not safe for children. Society simply likes to demonise the lower classes.

I can’t help but watch the reactions to the murder of Kumanjayi Little Baby recently, in one of the Mparntwe town camps, and I see how much is cloaked in racism and classism.

Kids are unsafe in posh suburbs too, it just looks different.

In ‘nice’ suburbs you don’t end up with dangerous men released into your community with nowhere else to go.

The nice parents of Malvern aren’t going to invite a murderer or a child rapist into the back yard to live, because they know themselves what life on the fringes is like and they can’t let someone go hungry and homeless. The ‘community’ of Mossman or Toorak is unlikely to park a caravan on the nature strip and house a child predator.

So, the kids in communities like mine are left in unsafe situations.

By the time I’m 8 years old, I know that there are unsafe people in my community. My community invites unsafe people in - gives them the guest room, parks a caravan in the yard for them.

My body knows. I become hypervigilant. I hunch into myself; I develop posture issues. I create protective mechanisms.

I think of myself as the ‘mother hen’ – I cluck around like I see the broody hens in our farm chook pen do – making sure I can account for all the younger kids. Who are they with? Are they alone with someone? I keep them all close. I watch. I follow, I interject, distract, redirect. I rearrange the chairs.

I wonder sometimes where I learnt the hypervigilance, at what age did it start? It must have come earlier than 8. From what? From who?

Some time back I took notice of the old Worker lists from the late 1970’s to early 1980’s, observed some of the names of the Workers who came out west. Several of them have been found guilty of child sexual abuse. I wonder a lot, about when those men were in my home as a toddler and youngster.

I’ve made the younger kids some afternoon tea, a bunch of SAO crackers slathered with butter and vegemite. It’s our preferred afternoon snack. Every weekday afternoon we arrive home from school, sit around the wooden kitchen table talking boisterously and playfully with each other.

McConnell kids are not quiet – despite the image the family likes to project. We have wild tendencies, which will later follow us into adulthood. We’re not easily contained. Not easily quietened or controlled, without a wooden spoon to the backside.

Left to our own devices, while the adults work, we concoct games to entertain ourselves.

Our current game of choice involves hauling a bunch of tricycles onto the shed roof and racing each other down the corrugated tin pitched roof. Afterall, there is no TV, no radio. We entertain ourselves by trying not to kill ourselves, riding 15 metres off a shed roof.

And people claim YouTube is dangerous. You never met a McConnell kid riding a tricycle on a shed roof, while the adults are working. YouTube is tame.

SAOs, squished butter through them.

Vegemite. Little fingers covered in it.

Loud arguments about who has had more crackers that the other. Who has more vegemite.

I open a fresh packet, defuse the argument as I hear the back fly wire door slam closed. I get out of my chair, quietly rearrange the kids in their chairs – push them all around to the far wall, away from the doorway, away from the table.

‘Stop lining us up like we’re in the Meeting!’ they all protest. I ignore them. I push them and their SAO’s into the chairs against the wall.

He walks in. He always does, at this time, when he knows the kids are sitting around the table, play fighting, yelling. He says he finds us entertaining.

I finish putting more logs of wood on the stove, preparing it for my mother to cook dinner after work. I return to the only chair left at the table, butter myself some SAOs while the other kid play the fools on the opposite wall.

They’re loud, the sounds of them raucously playing cancelling out the sounds of plastic cracker wrapping. I can feel the insides of my body, thumping. I stare intently ahead, watching the fresh wood catch fire in the stove nearby. Flames, watching flames flicker through the glass. I’m thinking about anything, but what is happening behind me. I’m counting the number of crackers left in the packet on the table in front of me.

Dissociating. I’m dissociating. That’s not a word I know, it’s not vocabulary I’ll have for another 3 decades.

He pushes himself against the chair behind me, weirdly angling his groin through the chair slats, pushing and weirdly gyrating against the chair.

I don’t know what he’s doing, exactly. If I’d had to explain it to anyone, I’d have had no vocabulary, except to say that he was uncomfortable. Strange. It’s a big kitchen, no need to stand so close to the chairs.

No need to ‘accidently’ rub yourself against the chairs.

I let him do it to me and my chair. I figure I can absorb the weirdness, protect the little ones. The kids are engrossed in squashing vegemite through the holes in the SAOs, competing for who can squeeze the longest. They don’t notice. I like it that way. I don’t want them to know how weird he is.

Protect the little ones.

Protect the little ones.

Count the crackers. Watch the flames. It will end.

It escalates, because of course it does. Eventually he finds ways to isolate me, catch me alone without the other children. He pushes me against sofas, rubs himself against me.

I don’t have vocabulary to discuss what he’s doing, I don’t have safe adults to even soundboard it with. Everyone is working, ensconced in their own world. Free time is for the bible, for Meetings. There is no space for conversations about weird men who gyrate themselves against you.

Is there a bible passage on that, I wonder?

I search for one. I find nothing in my little bible. No verses on men who push themselves against chairs seems to exist, despite the bible apparently being the font of all wisdom.

The bible is supposed to answer our questions, and yet I cannot find what I need.

I stay quiet. He leaves our community eventually. I’m freed of him.

At 14, It happens again. A different community, another Worker. I still have no vocabulary, even at 14. All I know is that I won’t tolerate it any longer – and eventually I start to slam doors and refuse to speak to him. It upsets people. I’m called ‘a problem’ because I won’t shake hands with him after gospel meetings or greet him in our living room.

My mother can’t afford my defiance, she’s a single mother by then, been told she ‘can’t participate’. She needs me to shake hands with the Workers – her salvation depends on it.

Her own soul is at risk. Her salvation. I’m putting her hope of eternal salvation on the line.

My body absorbs it.

I dissociate. I leave my body. I focus on other things. Plastic wrappers, the flames in the fire. Whatever it takes to survive.

Several of the men who harmed me had died before I found the vocabulary to describe what they did.

They die before I can articulate to myself, let alone to law enforcement, what they did.

A select few live on.

Over 3 years ago I reported one to the police. It was an attempt to ensure he would not have access to other children. I’d also seen him online, behaving weirdly. It worried me.

After I reported him, he went missing.

He’d been quite active until that point on YouTube where he’d made some confronting comments on videos of my advocacy. But somehow, he disappeared and police couldn’t find him.

His name is common, it was easy enough for him to go undetected, especially in an anti-establishment community. I feared he’d gone sovereign citizen, like some others in that community.

Recently police found him.

Finally. They found him.

I went through a rollercoaster of emotions. Relief. Fear.

Worry - if he had gone SovCit - would we have another Dezi Freeman on our hands?

Then it turned to disappointment.

The DPP believed my chances of conviction to be low, the chances he will recall that time of his life is low. He has had a difficult life as a long-haul truck driver. Had a serious truck accident, PTSD, memory loss.

The case is unlikely to get up; it will likely be dropped, not pursued.

I keep getting up, working. Pushing through my own chronic pain, my own CPTSD.

Then my body gives way – a three-week-long cold and flu that leaves me bed-bound. I can’t get up. I can’t sleep. I’m distressed that I can’t get up and keep living. I sob that ‘justice’ is not a thing that survivors like me can access.

‘Justice’ isn’t for us. Justice is for other people, who grow up in nice suburbs.

During the last CSA court case, which was close to me in my community, my hair fell out. Every morning I’d run my hands through my hair and be left holding chunks. It grew back eventually, thicker and coarser. Prematurely white-grey.

Mine is a body of survival. Mine is a body that has absorbed. Prematurely.

There was no ‘justice’ in that case either.

I tell myself I can absorb this too. I’ll survive. Again.

I wake up each day, run my hands through my hair, wondering if I’ll get chunks.

So far, so good. Hair still intact.

I spend so long thinking about the hair, that I miss other signs. Focus on other things. Plastic wrappers, flames in the fire. Whatever it takes to survive.

I keep turning up to my swim squad 4 times a week. Desperate to keep my place in the squad, even when I’m not sleeping and my chronic pain is crippling me. The squad, its camaraderie, its competition – it’s my sanctuary. Even when I look like I’m swimming in a one piece G-string (a thong, for the Americans).

My swimsuits aren’t fitting me properly; I’ve lost weight up the top but strangely gained it around the middle. The younger ones in the squad start quietly asking ‘are you pregnant too?’

I laugh it off. I am a bit swollen; my abdomen is a protruding a bit. I put it down to hormones, I am mid 40’s. It’s probably perimenopause, I tell myself. Bloating, totally normal.

A good friend catches a glance at me side on, says ‘Laura you look pregnant!’ She says it’s not normal to look this bloated. She texts and calls me every day until I get a scan.

I’ve named the tumour ‘Trevor’.

Trevor is 23 centimetres long; my lucky number. Trevor is the size of 4-month pregnancy. He already weighs more than my baby, at over 5kg.

He has moved into my abdomen. Uninvited.

Trevor is the reason my squad swimsuits don’t fit and I’m wearing a G-string to do laps.

My luck.

My lucky number.

I’ve thought a lot lately about what I want – what do I want from cult survivor advocacy?

I don’t want us to sacrifice our bodies like this – I want survivors’ bodies to feel rest, safety. I want us to not die early, not suffer chronic pain, not lose our hair. I want us not be so disconnected and dissociated, that we don’t know Trevor has moved in to our bodies.

I don’t want survivors to have to fight like this.

I want us to be able to access ‘justice’ - restitution, be believed, be heard, be compensated.

I want our children to remember us without broken bodies.

I don’t want the children to inherit this – to learn how to rearrange the chairs, because we can’t keep them safe.

I’m resting, hopeful. Trevor will be removed soon.

I’m being the f*cking Pollyanna I always am - believing that Trevor can in some way help me in this fight for support services for cult survivors. Trevor is here because the stress, the lack of ‘justice’.

He’s here because of the decades-long injustices that compound in institutional trauma - these things metastasize in our bodies.

Trevor is here because I have not received the support nor the restitution my body needs. Institutions have failed: Trevor has thrived on that failure.

I wish now I’d ridden the bikes across the roof a little faster, lived even wilder. No one is coming to protect us or save us. Ride. Wildly.

It wasn’t planned, but apparently you do this work long enough, struggle hard enough to do it well-enough, and you become the holder of knowledge about the practice of advocacy.

Who would have thought?

Certainly not me.

Perhaps there is a superpower here I can leverage, always the entrepreneur.

One day, perhaps in another lifetime, I’d love to work as an educator of advocates in Australia, a mentor of the ones who come after. Maybe it will happen, with that PHD, when I’m 70 or 80.

Dr Lalich is doing it, what a role model. So much to look forward to.

I don’t know how I came to be an advocate, activist, whistleblower.

I mean – there are flashpoints that I look back on as being key, but I never sat down until the past decade and said, ‘I am an advocate/activist’.

I came from a community, a place, a people.

Those people taught me things.

I would never have called what they taught me ‘activism’ or’ advocacy’. It was just a cup of tea, a hitch hiker, a couple of nights on my living room floor.

I wonder sometimes what my grandparents would think of this language, this framing of me. For my ancestors, this was the daily texture of working class, 2x2 life. It didn’t have fancy names, it was lived.

Both sets of my grandparents never passed a hitchhiker on a highway without offering them a lift.

Both sets of my grandparents had wide networks, never went anywhere without ‘dropping in to say hello’ to half a dozen people.

Travelling with my family was a feat – it sometimes took hours, day days longer than the average traveller, as we ‘dropped in to say hello’ along the way.

Along every major highway they knew someone - Uncle Pete from Coonabarabran, retired there to the unit, 4 streets back from the Gospel Meeting Hall. Just drop in. Cousin Sarah’s mother-in-law comes from Adelaide, she’ll meet us in the park for a picnic as we drive through town, bring her a box of peaches from the orchard, she loves our peaches.

Third house on the highway outside Orange, the one with the white fence – Cousin Janice’s husbands brother lives there, just stop in for a cuppa. Aunty Elvie in the nursing home at Cohuna likes my grandfather’s fresh farm eggs, drop past on your way and leave a dozen at reception. Grandpa’s sister, the one who married a Jehovahs’ witness (true story.. can you imagine that marriage) likes a box of sultana grapes in-season, drop those past on your way through town, will you?

Some of it was being from a large intergenerational 2x2 family. Some of it is because we’re isolated, remote people who don’t have TV – we like the entertainment and the drama. Some of it is because we’re poor and poor people share, they yarn. They celebrate survival over cups of tea.

Our car broke down late one night on the fringe of Lake Cargelligo in the mid 1980s, traveling back from my mother’s family at the border. My father hitchhiked into town, found a public phone booth, while we slept in the car outside town in a truck stop. Within half an hour, he’d found a cousin, right there in town. Auntie Grace collected us, tucked us into her kids bed, top to tail with her own kids.

So it was, wherever we went, we found our people.

Community and communion was in our bones. Truthfully, I wonder sometimes how many of my family really truly believed in 2x2 ideology, and how many of them stayed and pretended, because we needed and loved each other too fiercely to leave.

Do they resent me, because I left?

I guess I was set up anyway – my mother had already betrayed them by leaving the McConnell’s.

They see what both my mother and I had done, as betrayal – perhaps as doing what they wish they could have, but could not?

What I did in walking out is betrayal of my people on so many layers, honestly. I betrayed them by talking to the government and to the media, I betrayed them by challenging the gender and sexuality order. I betrayed them by refusal to conform. I betray them by writing it down, without them, letting the lions eat them.

I lost the cups of tea, the boxes of farm peaches and sultanta grapes; the dozen eggs left at reception. I never lost what they taught me about community though, about people.

In this broken patriarchal world we find ourselves navigating in 2026, a lot is said about matriarchy in conversations about how to change systems and behaviours.

A lot is also said about ‘finding community’. Near everyone wants to ‘build’ community, it’s a phrase banded about with wild abandon by people I suspect not have spent long in community with others.

I have suspicions.

I’m well placed to have them – I’ve seen both women wield power, and community-gone-wrong.

My suspicions about ‘community’ and ‘matriarchy’ are well founded.

I’ve long had reservations about the idea that matriarchy is a catch-all, fix-it-all solution. I have reservations because I’ve seen women abuse too.

I ask questions of people around me about how women believe matriarchy would work. I hear from them (mostly white women) that matriarchy isn’t the opposite of patriarchy – women will often say that matriarchy is a culture of nurture, care.

That sits uncomfortably with me, as its often said by women who see nurture, care as inherently feminine traits.

I do not feel inherently feminine, I have a lot of traits considered ‘masculine’ – directness, boldness. I do not consider myself a particularly nurturing person in the traditionally feminine sense.

The ‘culture of care’ some women advocate for, sits uncomfortably with me- another way to frame femininity and masculinity in a way that feels binary.

I keep asking, online and in my circles ‘what is matriarchy, how would matriarchy look different to patriarchy?’

I’m directed back to materials I’ve long read, loved and respected. Let’s talk about it.

The problem as I see it is that in matriarchy as a feminist goal, under mainstream white feminism, it accepts the same hierarchical structures as patriarchy, it just changes who sits at the top.

Many feminist conversations around me focus on securing equal rights with men. Which is noble, but for me the question is bigger – I’ve seen how power and control play out to enable abuse by women, I’m sceptical that the issue is simply gender equality.

The question for me is whether we need a system beyond patriarchy, rather than just a different version of it. Matriarchy as I hear it played back to me is another binary.

I want an alternative.

Matriarchy as the alternative reproduces another binary.

Here is the thing: I think the future is community. Circular. Together.

Community has no gender. Community makes space for whatever comes to the table or to the circle, to eat there, with reciprocity.

It sits somewhere outside of binary idea of gender, sexuality, relationships. Its fluid. It gives space to ‘us’ in all our differences. There are no perfect or ideal ways to perform gender, sexuality or relationships in ‘community’. No perfect model of monogamy, non-monogamy, man, woman, straight or queer. There is whatever you turn up as, respectfully.

The thing is, in the model we’re living in – community has been commoditised, made competitive, dysfunctional. The communities we’ve built aren’t protecting; they’re extracting and exploiting. They’re hierarchical. They leave people vulnerable.

I’ve lived in tight knit communities, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it go wrong not only in cults.

Between the ages of 14 to 18, I worked in a tiny village petrol station. Owned by a major brand, run by an onsite manager.

The manager worked sporadically, preferring to hire me and another woman, a single mother who worked cash -in-hand, to do the work for him. It wasn’t hard work, fill cars with petrol in the driveway, take the cash, record it in the cash register. There was the occasional bank card, but truthfully most of the payments were in cash. The boss was rarely there to supervise.

One day my colleague pulls me aside and tells me our boss had been telling people I’m stealing money, that he couldn’t reconcile the tills after my shifts, and that I must therefore be taking cash.

Logically, that made no sense. If I wanted to steal cash, I was savvy enough to know you didn’t need to put it into the cash register records to begin with. I also needed that job to give me any semblance of freedom and independence – so I had a vested in interest in NOT sabotaging it by stealing cash from one of very few employers in the village.

About 6 months before this, at the end of a shift I had put my work apron in the washing machine, and a $20 note fell out. At some point in the shift, I had put the cash into my apron, moved on to the next car to fill in the queue, and simply forgotten to go inside to enter it into the till.

I was mortified at myself – conscious that it looked like I wasn’t trustworthy and reliable. The next shift I admitted to my boss I’d found $20 in my apron and asked if it was ok to enter it into the current shift’s register. Not much was said about it, I entered the $20 into the till and moved on.

Apparently – he had decided I was stealing cash.

I had no idea what to do with the rumours, no idea how to defend myself. The co-worker also told my mother, who to be fair, did stick up for me and say that it didn’t sound like something I would have done.

My mother gives me the household cash and bills every week, sends me to town to do grocery shopping, has me drive the car to collect the kids. I think she genuinely believes me. I’m not the kind of kid who steals - a few years earlier I’m the first to discover my father’s stash of cash from selling marijuana and am tempted to steal some to try to get my siblings out of the house, to catch a bus to my grandparents. My conscience won’t let me.

There still isn’t much my mother, or anyone else, can do to protect me from these rumours. We’re pretty powerless against a man who runs a business which is integral to the local economy.

It gets around the little town, that I’m a thief. I’m heartbroken.

A few weeks later, my boss starts telling people its actually all ok, he re-reconciled the tills – and somehow now they’re reconciling.

He never tells me. I hear it all through others.

Just a simple mistake.

Opps.

Opps-a-daisy.

I learnt something from that – how fragile your reputation is. How fragile and how easily you can be framed as ‘a problem’ in a community.

It doesn’t take much, to use your power to set someone else up to take the fall for you. Kids with fathers in prison know that they’re made vulnerable by it.

Ask anyone with a criminalised parent or loved one, they’ll tell you how suspicious people become around you. You’re an easy scapegoat.

I wonder sometimes, was he gambling with the cash, then won some back and was able to cover his tracks? The Sporting Club, with some of the most popular pokie/gambling machines in the Murray Mallee is a mere few hundred meters from the petrol station.

Or did his conscience get the better of him, for lying about a 15-year-old?

Kids from backgrounds like mine have be twice as good, twice as trustworthy, twice as educated. Communities do not trust us, do not respect us.

We know our reputation can be questioned. We know we must have receipts. We know we’re under surveillance for the smallest slip up. We know we can’t afford to leave $20 in our apron pocket.

I learnt early that your reputation is constantly under threat. That you’re always at risk of being sacrificed to protect someone else, someone with more power and no sense of responsibility to their community.

Community as we know it, in villages like the ones I pumped petrol in as a teenager – that’s not all that ‘community’ can be.

For me it’s important that ‘community’ instead of patriarchy or matriarchy, is viewed from the perspective of power sharing. How do we build communities of shared meaning, shared responsibility?

How do we build communities that don’t throw people under buses, instead of taking accountability for their mistakes, ones who understand responsibility to each other? How do we build communities of hope, of acceptance, of strength through diversity, of hard and genuine conversations? How we build communities with people who bring things to the table, who don’t bring it to create power-over, but to be building something together?

Reciprocity. How do we build a community culture that doesn’t wield power over, doesn’t glamorise performance of masculinity and femininity in binary ways? A community that doesn’t glamorise monetary wealth, status, whiteness, proximity to institutional power?

It all requires nurture and care in different ways – not just demands it from women to care for children.

Nurture is relationships – that has no gender.

Nurture is community – not just the nurture of children. Its care for land, water, plants.

This is the model of community that Indigenous people talk and write of.

Every time I start to explore this, I find myself led back to cultures of Indigenous people across the world. Every time. Indigenous cultures had social structures that recognised a reciprocal relationship with land, people, animals. They had places and respect for space outside binary.

I’ve cried this week, re-reading Braiding Sweetgrass. I haven’t read it for years, I forgot how powerful it was, a reminder that there are so many other ways whole civilisations lived for over 65,000 years, thrived outside of capitalism, christianity, monogamy, heterosexuality.

When I read works like Becoming Kin (Krawec) and As We Have Always Done (Simpson) I grieve if I’m honest – that mainstream culture is so hung up on Patriarchy v’s Matriarchy. It’s missed the point, its missed that neither is the answer.

While we’re busy on social media arguing about the merits of Matriarchy, Indigenous people had over 65,000 years living in completely different models of community.

We need to sit and listen. Stop. We need a cuppa in a park, with a box of peaches, a dozen eggs. We need to pick up the hitch hikers*, even when they vote Pauline Hanson/MAGA supporters.

(*not literally….I think Ivan Milat ruined that for us… )

I want to explore this more, understand how we can centre and learn from Indigenous models of community, without endless extraction and exploitation of Indigenous people.

We need to let go to matriarchy and start asking how community could be built.

Im always searching for more literature on this topic, please send me resources which cross your path, and talk about this with me, loudly.

What am I reading to help this Smart Mouth?

• Let This Radicalise You – Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (here)

• Radical Relating – Mel Cassidy (here)

• Becoming Kin – Patty Krawec (here)

• As We Have Always Done – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (here)

• Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer (here)

• The Beginning Comes After the End – Rebecca Solnit (here)

• Six Conversations we’re Scared to Have – Deborah Frances-White (here)

• 44 Poems on Being with Each Other – Padraig O’Tuama (here)

From Padraigs book, the poem below feels useful, a reminder we’re all mortal.

None of us get out alive. We got to make something better here, its all we’ve got. Pick up the hitchhikers*.

People I’m following and learning from on the topic of community, reciprocity, matriarchy and patriarchy.

I’ve not directly quoted them here, but they inform my thinking and curiosity:

• Lovette Jallow (here)

• Nayuka Gorrie (here)

• Åileen Moreton-Robinson (here)

• Bayo Akomolafe and The Emergence Network (here)

The 2x2s are narrative machines – Workers, Elders, our families – other people write the stories.

Ours is an oral culture, a story telling culture. A gossip culture.

Survivors and leavers of the 2x2s do not have our stories believed.

Our stories are not heard. We are undermined, dismissed.

Increasingly, as survivors are telling and writing the stories about the ways false narratives have been spread about us, this conversation will become bigger and more obvious.

What we’re doing here, telling 2x2 survivor stories on platforms like tiktok, substack, its powerful. It’s a taking back of power, and it matters.

Narrative control is a tactic used by most high control groups. We’re not special. It’s a documented cult control mechanism, a way to make people fear leaving and be stuck in a ‘system’ of control. Margaret Singer wrote about it in the early 1990’s in Cults in our Midst.

We have our stories written for us, especially as girls and women of the 2x2s.

To say, ‘I own my story not you, I write what happened, even if others disagree or have different versions’ - its powerful.

I’m grateful to stand beside and work with survivors of these systems, who also bravely telling their side of the story publicly.

None of us expect that ours is THE only version of the story – none of us are naive enough to think one version exists. Each of us who tell our stories know we are watched, know our versions are dissected and trashed by people with other agendas. Writing and telling the stories is an act of courage.

2x2’s believe in a binary world – one version of THE Truth.

I’ve heard all the binary stories about myself, I’ve heard all the narrative-controlling and thought-stopping cliches about advocates.

“Survivors are motivated by money or bitterness”

“A few bad actors, not a big problem”

“We are being persecuted”

“They left because of sin”

“You’re remembering it wrong”

“They’ve repented”

“This is a family matter”

“We are the only true church”

“We have no name”

“Workers are penniless and give up everything”

“We are just simple Christians following the Bible”

“She was inappropriate with him”

“They’re doing it for money”

“They have mental health problems”

“They’re under the influence of the world”

“They were always troubled”

“They chose the world over God”

“They’re overreacting”

“They’re too angry to be taken seriously”

“They’re causing division”

“They’re trying to destroy the church”

I’ve heard narratives about myself which haunt me, if I’m honest.

There probably isn’t much derogatory stuff I haven’t heard said about myself, often by people I know and have loved. Don’t even start me on the nonsense I've heard from randoms on the internet.

“Alcoholic”

“Incapable of parenting”

“Neglectful wife”

“One of those sick alphabet people”

“Doesn’t believe survivors”

“A wicked spirit”

“A deceived spirit”’

“Sexual deviant”

“Rainbow cult leader”

‘Sick in the head because she was abused’

And my favorite: “the soul of a witch and the heart of a dead person”

(the threat to slap my “stuck up little face” is so mild I barely register it)

What can I do with that, except to let it ‘be’ - refuse to be silenced and erased by false interpretations of my life.

None of those things are true, arguing otherwise is a waste of my energy.

The world moves on: history will prove me to have lived with authenticity. I hold onto that.

One day I’ll get around to that tattoo:

‘she had the soul of a witch and the heart of a dead person’

Or do I save it for my headstone?

Narrative control is about power. Misuse of power.

Cults make people scramble for access to power

I want to preface this by saying that in wider society, false allegations of sexual assault are believed to be relatively low. At around 5% of all reported allegations, according to a Victoria police factsheet (noting that the denominator is also under reported, as many sexual assaults are not reported to police).

The phenomenon of false allegations in high control groups needs researching, as does the prevalence of abuses by women in these groups. It’s an under discussed and under documented issue.

This next piece is not in any way to be taken to undermine a very real issue of sexual assault in Australia. It’s a real, valid and under-reported issue.

False allegations in a high control group are their own eco-system, their own tool of power and control. They need examining outside of how mainstream culture uses them, in my opinion.

2x2’s have a false allegation culture, one of weaponizing whatever cultural and structural advantages they can to grasp – especially for women.

Right now, talking about sexual abuse in the 2x2s is culturally acceptable in ways it hasn’t been before in Truth 2x2s, women have been silenced for decades. They’ve finally got a platform to name abuse, which they haven’t had before. Sadly, some are weaponizing this opportunity.

In groups like 2x2s, it’s socially acceptable to pull out whatever stops you can do discredit someone.

It distresses me, if I’m brutally honest, the number of stories I’ve heard of men (typically those who’ve left) being accused by women in 2x2’s (and it’s not through legal systems, it’s through gossip and hearsay) of sexual assault.

Along with women using coercive control in the 2x2s, we also have people misusing sexual assault allegations, to gain control and power.

I also have an experience of being falsely accused of having an abortion, as a young woman (are you a young woman at 12? A child, I was a child).

These false, sexualised and controlling narratives are more common than most of us what to believe.

(You can read a little about abuse and violence in my commuunity in my other essays, here and here )

Sometimes the depths of it makes me sob with despair.

How can this be the culture I was raised in? How can this be my people?

We need to talk about it, and we need to talk about how this culture came to be and who benefits from its existence.

Who benefits?

Workers do. Elders do. The Trust Fund holders do. Parents who want their children to ‘marry up’ benefit fom undermining boys (and girls) in their path.

Some women in the 2x2’s become bootlickers, get involved in false allegations to ingratiate themselves to more powerful men, escape scrutiny themselves. To try to play a system which is rigged against them, truthfully.

An abusive culture benefits from women who do this, Workers spread fear through these false narratives. “See, the World is dangerous, better you stay safe in here, away from wicked people who leave gods true way. The great cleansing is underway – the bad eggs have left’.

The continuation of 2x2 culture benefits the people at the top of the hierarchy. The friends at the bottom who spread gossip and false narratives are propping up a system rather than examining it.

Understanding these mechanisms — naming them, giving them language — is how we begin to dismantle them. The 2x2s don’t only have a problem with sexual abuse. They have a problem with power and control.

When 2x2s focus only on the problem of sexual abuse – they miss all the dynamics at play, all the behaviours that have led to endemic abuse.

Having these conversations is how to we say to survivors ‘you matter, the culture that harmed you isn’t ok’ ‘that culture needs changing’.

Without naming the ways power is being misused in high control groups – we can’t stop it. We can’t keep kids (or vulnerable adults) safe if we don’t name it.

We need to keep fighting for us to access resources, for more research to be done into narrative control, false allegations and women who abuse inside high control communities.

We need to keep writing the stories. We need to stop carrying the shame of those false narratives – they’re not our shame to carry.

I’ve just watched the electorate of Farrer vote overwhelmingly for a populist, MAGA-inspired One Nation politician, backed by anti-immigration and anti-trans politician Pauline Hanson (who is backed by billionaire Gina Rinehart).

If you’d like to see the results by booth around me, see this tiktok.

I wonder how many times can your community can break your heart?

Farrer is somewhere I consider ‘home’. Farrer is where my great-great-grandparents, my family’s original 2x2 converts, come from. Farrer is a mere few hundred metres across a river from where I live part time.

Farrer is the reason I got into 2x2 cult survivor advocacy.

I don’t talk about that much, but perhaps I should.

Most people don’t know the stories of how I came to be a Truth 2x2 survivor advocate.

I’ve worried too much over the years about the privacy of people I’ve supported. Their privacy matters to me.

But the same people whose privacy I have protected in rarely telling the stories – are the same people who’re voting for MAGA- wanna-be-Hanson in Farrer.

I think its time to carefully tell the stories.

I came to advocacy via abortion.

Well, that and the rogue act of leafleting Truth 2x2 meetings.

In the late 1990s and early 2000’s I leaflet dropped 2x2 houses and put flyers underneath the windshield of 2x2 cars at Sunday afternoon mission meetings in Melbourne. A fellow JW survivor and I would do the kingdom hall then the 2x2 mission meetings on Sunday afternoons.

And then abortion found me. I had no posters saying ‘safe to discuss abortions here’ or flyers proclaiming ‘Abortion Friendly’ – it was by word of mouth that it found me.

My maternal home community sits on the west-to-far-west of the electorate of Farrer, hours away from major NSW hospitals, and specialist clinics. We do have doctor’s clinics at places over the border like Swan Hill, Mildura and within NSW at Balranald ( the stories I have on that…see here for a couple) but even now the doctors can be fly in fly out locum and not always the highest quality, especially in the case of Balranald.

Surgical abortion still is not available in this region to my knowledge. And now, they’ll probably find it even harder to access. Pauline Hanson is vocally anti-abortion. She’s actually got a weird-conspiracy-fetish with abortion.

Abortion issues from the Truth 2x2 community found me because I was one of the first (and few) of my generation of 2x2 community to finish high school, and one of very few who went to higher education rather than straight to have babies.

I left and went to the city to study feminism. Rogue. Very rogue.

2x2 young women found me, perhaps my rogueness spoke for itself. My homemade dread locks screamed, without me meaning to : ‘I will treat you with dignity’.

Yes, I did have dreadlocks. What of it!? You can pull dreadlocks back into a bun! Let me show you a photo some time.

Our communities are small and our communities talk (gossip). One of the young women, a distant relative of mine, found me through my grandmother. For years Grandma would ask ‘have you heard from Maria* lately?’ on the regular. She had no idea why Maria* and I were friends, and I darn well know she suspected something was up but couldn’t work out what.

Grandma kept asking, right until her death bed in hospital ‘how is Maria*?’ obviously hoping I’d cave and tell her the gossip. I did not.

I know Maria* would never have told my grandmother why she wanted to contact me, but she garnered the courage to ask her for my home telephone number and spent a week on my sofa after having a surgical abortion. The abortion cost $500 at the time, and she also had no money to return home. Her (worldly) boyfriend at the time had to wait for his paycheck to land, to drive to collect her, over a week after the surgery. She went on to marry within the 2x2s, and as far as I’m aware, is still a loyal Friendly 2x2 follower. Occasionally I see her name pop up in my ‘views’ on Facebook stories. It makes me smile. (I see you, girl. You can do hard things, I know that.)

Mifepristone, the pill you can now access for early-stage abortion from some GPs, was not available then. It is available now for early stage, but it is still a process to access. Rural women still often need to travel outside their home areas to feel they can safely access it.

Even if it is accessible, it’s still a difficult thing to use and go through, without support. It’s pretty hard to hide too, having accessed it myself. Medical abortion is still a painful and quite difficult physical thing for your body to go through. It’s more than a painful period, let me tell you.

Surgical abortion is expensive and requires several appointments. There are scans, assessments beforehand. You need around $1,500 last time I encountered an abortion, to access one privately in Melbourne. You need to stay close to medical services for 48 hours after a procedure.

Post operation bleeds and complications occur, and one of the Maria’s had to be returned to surgery, when bleeding indicated the surgery had not been successful. I still wonder if she’d have survived, if she’d driven back home as she had wanted to, rather than staying the extra days with me.

I’m crying now, wondering if she’d have died of complications from infection, if I hadn’t insisted on getting her back to the clinic and subsequently to hospital.

For people from rural and remote areas, abortion is an often-insurmountable task to access and to fund.

Then layer on 2x2 secrecy, guilt, fear. The worry about ostracization, the fear of hell. Purity culture is a bitch.

Abortion is healthcare, and Farrer voted for someone who is anti-abortion – they’ve voted against their own best interests. That’s apparently what populism does – eat itself. Eats its most vulnerable.

I wonder out loud often ‘how many times can my heart be broken by the people I care about?’

There is no limit, apparently.

There were more Maria’s who slept on my living room floor, before Mifepristone.

One of the Maria’s has sadly now passed away. I think of her often. She had a wicked sense of humour and used to send me the occasional hilarious Christmas cards with anecdotes of her children.

What Farrer has done, especially in the parts of the electorate I came from at Tooleybuc, Balranald, Euston, Barham and Murray Downs – hurts. They didn’t just vote for popularism – they OVERWHELMINGLY voted for it. At rates of between 70 and 80% per booth. I can’t pretend it’s just a few of them - its 7 to 8 out of the 10 standing in the main street.

It seems even the Maria’s voted against their own best interests.

Have they forgotten my living room floor?

‘Be a little candle, light another’s way. Maybe just a little candle, surely someone’s watching you’

CW. Discusses a person recently deceased who had abuse allegations. Initals MG, should that help you decide to proceed or not.

I made a mistake recently. I logged into a 2x2 funeral livestream. I thought I was healed enough to cope with it.

I wasn’t.

It was Max Goldsacks funeral. Max - a disgraced 2x2 Worker, returned to his home country of NZ after being overseer of Western Australia. Sent home in disgrace for being gay. And for abuse allegations. But mostly, for being gay. Max died recently after a heart attack.

The uncomfortable reality is that I’ve never heard of Max having described his own sexuality, never heard that he identified as gay. So, I use that term here gently, we all, no matter who we are and what we’ve done, get to define our own sexuality.

2x2s of course don’t have space for LGBTQIA+ people, we simply do not exist. We can be straight and married, or in The Work (allegedly celibate).

I’ve spoken elsewhere (see toktoktik) of my belief that Max would still be in the Work, probably even be Overseer of Australia by now, had his abuse been of girls and women, To be gay in the 2x2s was his biggest downfall.

Maybe Max did understand himself to be gay, perhaps someone can fill that gap for me if they did ever have that conversation with him.

I doubt that Max did ever identify as gay, 2x2s don’t have vocabulary for sexuality and gender outside simply ‘traditional marriage’. We simply have no way to discuss it or navigate it – its CIS HET or out. Or go into the Work and turn away from all intimacy, sexual or otherwise. It’s a shame-filled nightmare. No wonder the dysfunctional families abound, no wonder the abuse and the cover-ups abound. We have no vocabulary – only shame.

To not have vocabulary or space to exist as a queer person in and around 2x2s sends powerful messages. That message says ‘you don’t belong here’ and ‘you are broken’. Our inability to exist in the 2x2s is a form of suppression and conversion. I’ve recently realised that – while we may not openly say to ‘pray the gay away’ (although I have had stories provided to me of Workers and Elders who have said similar sentiments) we erase and LGBTQIA+ people from 2x2 culture, we suppress them from existing.

That erasure and suppression is gay conversion and suppression.

That erasure and suppression is illegal in several Australian states. What they’ve done (and continue to do) is illegal.

I last 10 minutes watching the funeral livestream.

It begins with a hymn, played by a woman seated on a piano on the far edge of the screen. Her hair perfectly swept up in a bun. Her dress the right length, the sleeves the right length.

The women’s voices in the background, sweetly and passionately singing the hymn, emotion rises in my chest at the feeling of comfort and safety those hymns gave us.

I’ve just watched the piano-playing woman do a perfect performance of 2x2 humility, as she steps lightly across the stage, to sit at the piano. She smiles in the right places. She opens her hymn book on the piano to perfectly bookmarked pages. My stomach heaves, my body remembers.

Remember how being the piano player was an honour. Remember how having hair in the right kind of bun, the dress the right length - it demonstrated your pure heart and perfect spirit?

Remember how our mothers and grandmothers – they wanted their daughters and granddaughters to be that woman. They wanted us to have that spirit, that heart. Those perfectly bookmarked hymnbooks and bibles. They wanted us to be honoured good-truth-girls playing on pianos at funerals and lightly sweeping across funeral stages like that.

2 hymns in and I can’t do it. I hit ‘leave’ on the livestream. I dash into the work photography room, shut the door, put a pillow over my face and howl. I cry. I cry because I couldn’t be that perfect woman. In 2x2 land, I am a failure. A bad example.

Decades later, my failure to be a ‘good truth girl’ stings. It shouldn’t be here simmering away under the surface, and yet it is.

Moments before I’ve been at the desk of a multimillion-dollar brand I co-run. And yet I still feel like a failure, too much of ‘me’ and not enough like ‘them’.

My failures.

Selfish.

Self-Centred.

Demanding.

Different.

Difficult.

The wrong example.

I can’t be the candle, like we sang in that hymn.

‘Be a little candle, light another’s way. Maybe they are wandering in the darkest night, Surely you can help them with your little light.

I resisted. As young as I can remember – I resisted.

My grandmother, a talented musician, painter, needleworker. My mother and equally talented pianist, seamstress.

They want the girls after them to have these skills too, to attract the right ‘nice truth boy’ with their piano skills and their needlework.

I’m sat down with my sisters, every Saturday afternoon, to do needlework. My mother has acquired some kits of cross stitch and embroidery. She wants us to learn, is firmly of the opinion that these are things girls need to know.

We ‘re told we can sew a pretty tablecloth to donate to a Workers table at convention, maybe make some doilies for the centre or to cover the milk jugs.

I don’t have vocabulary to describe this for decades – but its ‘ladder climbing’ and ‘worker worship’ and the foundations of endogamy. Its training the girls to learn skills useful to be ‘good little truth girls’.

I’m having none of it.

We’re squashed on the sofas in the living room, while mum supervises from the piano stool. She practises her scales, plays hymns gracefully, performs her duty as a good truth woman. Every few minutes comes over to watch our cross stitch.

I’m defiant. It’s a role I’m well known for.

I deliberately mix up the sampler colours, stitch the red where it’s meant to be blue. I make terrible crosses, all out of proportion, crossing the lines in uneven places, making my piece look ridiculous. I go slow. I poke the other girls. I stab myself with the needle to make my finger bleed onto the sampler. I lose multiple pairs of scissors.

I make a scene. I resist. I make life difficult for everyone else.

I have no interest in cross stitching tablecloths for Worker tables. I say outright ‘I don’t know why you’re making me learn this embroidery, I’m never going to use it’.

Mum aggressively bangs at the piano, gets another few hymns in before she collects up the embroidery and packs it away for another week.

Eventually, she stops trying desperately to teach me embroidery. I win.

In the last decade I’ve taught myself basic embroidery and crafted several activist banners. One even made it into an exhibition on feminist resistance, at the George Patten Gallery.

I wonder how good my tablecloth for the Workers could have been, had I stuck it out?

Left to my own devices, might I have crafted a tablecloth with ‘Have you met William Irvine?’ on it for the special convention Workers table? Or perhaps a milk jug cover for the table, covered in glass beads and embroidered ‘Grace is for all of us and God is gay’.

Imagine how good I could have been…. Or don’t. I think my resistance was worthwhile, I can’t see how my embroidery was going to catch me a decent man.

I also refused to learn to cook, the ultimate rebellion for a girl of my culture. I was determined to be so bad at it, that no one would let me cook.

I won that one too.

Before she left for work every day, my mother would leave us lists of chores. Clothes to wash and fold, beds to make, rooms to clean, meals to cook or reheat, gardens to be watered.

Once I was left instructions to cook a tuna casserole. After dutifully following all the cooking instructions, I made the decision to add blue food colouring, just to provide a certain little pizazz. After all, how boring is tuna casserole?! I never met one as fun as that one I made.

That evening a bright blue tuna casserole was served up to the amusement of the younger kids, who thought it hilarious to squish and eat.

My mother burst into tears, ran out of the dining rooom and locked herself in her bedroom, howling in tears of frustration.

I was relieved of any future cooking responsibility.

One of my sisters, then herself only around 12 years old, showed far more promise. She became the household cook.

I left home with limited cooking skills. I lived on reheated tinned food, mostly. I didn’t own a pot or pan until I met David. I didn’t even have a clue where to buy cooking implements– I’d never paid attention. I was about 25, and I had no idea homewares stores stocked frying pans.

Of Italian heritage, David was horrified to learn I could not cook and did not own cooking implements. It didn’t help that he lived with his Nonna and had also never cooked. Both of us as useless as each other.

He still tells the story of watching me buy my first frying pan, in an army disposal store. He wondered if I was going camping or learning to cook risotto.

I ended up with an enormous cast iron pan that could cook for 15. I lived alone in a studio apartment, with a cat. That much risotto was unnecessary.

I’m truthfully not a bad cook, now that I’ve upgraded from disposal-store-cooking-implements.

I refrain from adding food colouring to my meals these days. Although maybe my son would eat more of it if I did.

Acts of resistance. They’re Important for girls/gurls.

To say ‘I won’t learn that’ is powerful. Even if it does come back to bite you later and you wish you had stuck it out a little longer.

To say ‘no’ is powerful. To be ‘difficult’ is a badge of honour. We have the right to resist, to take up space. To change our minds.

There are so many ways that I was framed as ‘setting the wrong example’. It was for refusing to profess, for wanting higher education, for pushing back on marriage and babies. Every time I pushed for autonomy it was shut down with ‘setting the wrong example’.

I was made to feel I was responsible not only for the physical needs of my siblings, but also their spiritual wellbeing…. ‘Set the right example for the little ones’.

Be a little-fucking-candle.

Between sobs into the pillow after Max Goldsacks funeral, I remind myself that I did in fact set a good example for my siblings. I was never the humble-piano-playing-hymn-singing kind. But I did ok.

I’ve got to tell myself ‘I did ok’.

The kids after me might not have learnt from me to perform perfect hymns for funerals, or how to craft a beautiful bun on your head, sew a lovely cross stitched tablecloth or bake a sponge cake– but they did learn to resist. They learnt to fight. They learned to think for themselves.

I showed those kids how to finish school. I showed them how to get to university, build a career and a brand. I showed them it was possible to get out of poverty, to build relationships outside heteronormativity, to live harmoniously and co-parent.

I showed those kids you could live and thrive outside the Truth 2x2s.

There are things I undoubtedly failed at, but I wasn’t the terrible influence I was framed to be.

I did what had to be done, to try to keep people safer. I did what I had to do, to survive. I continue to do this.

Who else has delivered acts of resistance? Who else has put their own body in the way, put themselves between abusers and children?

Who else is wearing the cardigans inside out? (see another piece on my resistance)

Who else has held a candle, not to light another’s way, but to prevent another walking this way, into coercion and abuse?

Truthfully, I don’t want to be an ‘example’, I don’t want to be holding a fucking candle at all.

Why must I be setting examples for anyone – being held to the impossible standards which advocates are? It feels a heavy responsibility.

I just want the kids to be safe. I want the kids to grow up learning critical thinking skills, with the ability to dress and behave the ways they choose – not the ways a bunch of men with a wild interpretation of a bible, have told them they must.

*a note that this isn’t a standard 2x2 hymn. It came to us via an unauthorised, self-bound, photocopied hymnbook that somehow my mother had acquired. She’d play it to us on the piano, mostly on Wednesday nights. It was encouraging us to be that little candle, a light to world.

Did other 2x2s have this version, hear this hymn, feel the same sense of responsiblity to be ‘light’ to others?

I’ve tried to write, vlog on the issues of reciprocity, some would say in-articulately. You can see here (link to tiktok and Instagram)

It’s a layered and complex issue, one most advocates early in their journey of advocacy probably haven’t had to grapple with.

Starting out, you’re wide eyed and enthusiastic. You don’t have the experiences yet to wonder about ‘who gets platformed and why’ – you simply think ‘I’ve got something to say, a thing I want fixed and I’m going to use my voice.’ And good for you. You totally should. Please do.

But. Here is a thing I’ve learnt and a thing that I grapple with – not all voices in advocacy are treated equally.

Who is heard, platformed, believed – its political.

We need to talk about that.

The misuse of power in our community doesn’t stop at the gates of a 2x2 Convention, the doors of Sunday afternoon Mission meeting after shaking hand with the Worker. You can walk out of a group like the 2x2s and not stop to untangle and deconstruct from high control behaviour. You can (and we all do) take the same behaviours we learnt in cults and replicate them in new lives and communities. This is not unique to 2x2s – this is something that comes out of all kinds of high control communities.

Power is capable of being misused in all communities.

We’re taught some toxic behaviours which often get glossed over in survivor communities, and every high control group has variations of these behaviours.

Love bombing, toxic positivity, shutting down dissent, white-anting, gossip, silent treatment. Just a few I can rattle off here without taking a breath. There are mountains of others. That stuff is culture. That stuff takes effort and internal work to break apart and replace with new patterns. Some of us do it without even realising – its our default. Its not our fault, we were raised in that water.

Even with the best of intentions, and after having done all the work in the world, sometimes in moments of stress, overwhelm – I (we all can) default to what we learnt from the cult. Its survival. Its childhood indoctrination.

This where personal reflection and responsibility comes in – it’s our own piece of ongoing work, never ending work, to stop and breathe and reflect. To learn how to apologise, how to reach out when we’ve hurt someone, or over reacted – to create cultures of healing, restitution, recovery.

Whose work is seen as credible, whose work is amplified?

Do this advocacy stuff long enough and you notice patterns. You notice whose work is shared, discussed, believed, published. And you notice whose is not. Institutional gatekeeping, about who is seen as educated, credible rears its head. You’ll find some work is elevated in ways which others is not.

Who is platformed and who is not, its not neutral. It’s a political act. Whose work is seen as ‘skill’ and whose is simply extracted for entertainment and voyeurism – that’s something I could talk about all day.

As a survivor advocate, with a degree in feminism (amongst other business and language qualifications, althought those are irrelevant in this) my work has often been used as trauma-porn, rather than consumed as serious advocacy.

Institutions prefer to elevate ‘professionals’ – journalists, doctors, PHDs, psychologists. That’s not to say this work and those skills are not crucial – they are. We need them. However, they’re not the only way to be ‘expert’. These are not the only voices and skills worth elevation.

Who is ‘expert’?

‘Expert’ is a term I find difficult to use.

In Australia to be ‘expert’ is laughed at, ridiculed. ‘Who do you think you are? An EXPERT?’ The tall poppy syndrome is real.

To call myself a 2x2 survivor expert or a cult survivor expert, feels in-authentic. It’s not vocabulary I’d use. And yet out of the US, people from cults shape themselves, with less skill and experience than me, as ‘expert’ all the time. That shaping of their skill allows them access to space and conversations I am not given access to.

Culturally – who gets elevated, and under what conditions? Whose work is elevated and why? Who does that elevation then exclude?

My intersecting identities provide reason galore for my work to be undermined, dismissed, deplatformed. I’m a queer, secular, non-conforming, low SES (I don’t claim to be low SES now, but I spent over 2 decades in a poor family), the child of a criminalised person, a child a remote and rural Australia – I’ve got some differences to navigate. Differences to not only the ‘average’ 2x2 survivor, but also the average Australian.

All of that matters.

It matters because those things are used to diminish my experiences, my qualifications. The culture I come from matters. The water I swam in and learnt to swim in, matters.

We are expected to make people ‘comfortable’ in our advocacy, with no (or very little) healing or repair when we’ve experienced ongoing backlash and resistance.

I get the occasional comment on my work, when I write about anger, exclusion and backlash – ‘one day when they leave, they might apologize for treating you like that. Treat them with grace’.

Would you believe in 25+ years of doing this – I’ve never received an apology from someone who harmed me in the cult-survivor space. Not one. That’s not how this works, down here in the trenches. It’s not for lack of grace that I haven’t been experienced repair and healing. Its not a thing that happens in survivor communities. Healing and repair of rupture is rair.

Often, the resistance and the backlash come in equal parts from ‘innies’ and ‘outties’ (to do a deliberate Severance reference) Its not only the deep 2x2 followers who push back, who gossip and undermine the work of advocates. The myth of healing, restitution, repair - it needs unpacking some time. I have a podcast episode brewing on Truth 2x2 cult kids on it.

To live with that lack of apology, healing, repair - is to live in grief.

Those of us with variations and intersections of marginalised identities, through disability, race, gender, sexuality are expected to smile sweetly while other people debate the validity of existence. We are gossiped about; we are isolated, rejected and/or ejected from support groups and community spaces.

We endure endless lurking and stalking and gossiping about us. Our expertise and our skills is often extracted from us, repackaged and re-written by ‘more palatable’ voices, without acknowledgement or credit.

I can reel off at least half a dozen times I’ve found my work in articles, presentations, substack essay pieces - repackaged without credit or being discussed in presentations without me in the room to represent the ideas. Its exhausting.

I watch people elevated ahead of me on the basis of institutional qualification, geographic location, class/hierachy, Christianity, sexuality, gender.

I am called ‘too angry’ ‘too political’ ‘too confronting’ ‘not Christian’ ‘uncomfortable’ ‘not representative of a typical 2x2 experience’.

Social capital and hierarchy is not discussed enough in cult survivor communities. I’ve written a little on it here, on being a ‘nobody’.

I live with grief from navigating these complexities. A grief at not being believed, centred, heard. A grief at being gaslit for decades that my experiences weren’t real, weren’t representative of 2x2s, were an exaggeration.

Its a grief which is alive. It’s the loss of trust, identity, place, community. That grief sometimes consumes me.

I think a lot about living with grief, how to live beside it and not let it destroy you.

I think a lot about watching my Nan live with grief.

My nan lost her first-born baby, Colin. He died of SIDS. After Sunday Morning Meetings, Nan would take us to the cemetery to visit Colin. She would buy us ice-creams, and we’d sit on a little patch of dirt, while she spoke to Colin. He didn’t have a headstone, so we sat beside a simple wooden cross, with Colins name written roughly on it in black marker.

As we sat there in our good dresses, melting ice-creams and fighting amongst ourselves, Nan speaks to Colin like he is alive.

She tells him little stories about our games in the dirt. What flavour ice-creams we have selected. The braids in our hair. The colours of our dresses. She cries every time we leave and as we drive home, she tells us about Colin. Its always the same stories about his weight and his height, the colour of his hair. The way he slept in his cot. Always on his stomach. She blamed herself for his death, for letting him be a tummy sleeper.

25 years later, I ask my father to take me to Colin’s grave. I’ve long forgotten how to find it in the cemetery. Someone, probably my aunts and uncles, has had a marble headstone put on his grave. I know Nan would have loved it.

Watching her live with that grief, share it with us, was powerful. Many women of her generation (and class/background) buried babies and never spoke again of it. Not my Nan. Colin was alive, with us through her.

When the grief feels like it will eat me, I remember the way my Nan navigated grief – living IN it and around it. Talking about it. Not denying it. There is something powerful about that decision by her, that I respect.

So, I talk about this grief – I live with this grief.

I talk loudly about what it feels like to have your work constantly diminished, dismissed. Not being believed, not elevated, or trusted. Constantly having knowledge extracted without acknowledgement…. .

Nan would probably be horrified that this grief was compared to her own loss of a child. I get that. For me grief is about loss. Navigating that loss is a choice – I can deny it, silence it. Or I can sit on its grave every week and talk about it.

Whose responsibility is it to recognise the power imbalances, to talk about them, to navigate the grief of living in marginalised identity?

Must it always be the ones with the least power? Must it always be those of us already marginalised?

Could the ones with the power breathe, listen, hear, self-learn? Could they possibly sit in the dirt next to us in grief, and listen to us?

Each of us can take an active role in asking ‘whose voices am I valuing and why? Whose voices are making me uncomfortable, and why? Who has my community elevated and who has it silenced?’

Here are the resources which have informed my smart mouth in and around this topic. As always, I’ll take recommendations for more.

Loving Corrections – Adrienne Maree Brown

Say The Thing – Kami Orange

The Art of Community – Charles Vogl

The Art of Activism – Lambert

Pleasure Activism – Adrienne Maree Brown

Abolish the Family – Sophie Lewis

Communion – bell hooks

Radical Relating - Cassidy

By the time I was 8 I’d worked out that if you cry in my family – it makes things worse. I stopped crying. Crying and showing vulnerability or feelings made the women in my family lash out. It wasn’t safe to cry or feel.

I started my first round of anti-depressants age 17. I was numb from high doses of medication for decades.

I wrote an essay awhile back on anti-depressants, and then I took it down from substack, because I worried it would be perceived as anti-science. It was called ‘The anti-depressants don’t fucking work because I’m not fucking depressed’. Maybe one day I’ll have the guts to publish it again. I stand by it, I just don’t want it misconceived to dissuade people from taking medication.

I cried for the first time in over 30 years a few months after taking myself off all my medication.

During a long Melbourne COVID-lockdown I was standing in the narrow alleyway beside my inner-city terrace house, watching my toddler play with trucks, and the wind whipped up. As the wind swirled down the alley between the sweet little Victorian houses, I felt a sensation I’d never felt. Something was tingling, on my arms. I panicked. What was that?

I looked down and saw the wind moving my arm hairs, creating a movement and a sensation I was not familiar with. It felt terrifying, unnatural.

I sobbed. I leant against the brick wall in the alleyway, collapsed into sobs. The toddler, obsessed with trucks and busy moving dirt across the concrete, had no idea the momentous occasion occurring – that I had just felt my arm-hairs move. I had FELT something. That I had cried for the first time in decades.

I have mixed feelings about the 2+ decades I spent on anti-depressants.

As I’ve written, they didn’t fucking work, because I wasn’t fucking depressed. I was traumatized.

I have mixed feelings about all the health implications I live with because of it – the unprocessed trauma, the inability to ‘feel’, the lack of vocabulary to describe the violence and abuse I was (and still am) living with.

I have mixed feelings because had I not been on those anti-depressants, which masked a passive suicidality, CPTSD, probably ADHD– I wouldn’t have had the career I did. I couldn’t have functioned. But at what cost?

Getting that script for anti-depressants in the first place was traumatic. It was no walk in the park to access medical support as a rural, low-socio 17-year-old, who was suicidal. I knew I wasn’t well, and that I needed something. I’d read about anti-depressants in books. I thought that would ‘fix’ me.

I took myself to the rural doctor’s clinic at Balranald hospital, no small feat in a home where access to a vehicle to travel 40kms to a doctor wasn’t simple.

Luckily for me it was a time when 17-year-old could independently drive in NSW, without supervision. Those days are over. I worry about the younger kids now, in rural areas without access to a car like I had (albeit sporadically with not a lot of petrol).

I was driving on public roads from around 14 years old. In a rural area, with no back up, my single (not by choice) mother didn’t really have options but to have me drive – kids needed to get to school, we needed groceries, she needed to work. Sometimes I drove the kids alone, sometimes she slept in the passenger seat, while I drove the family. The exhaustion of working full time and parenting alone wasn’t lost on me, I knew she needed me to help and did I what I could. Albeit in some cases, illegally.

I rarely took the car for my own entertainment; it was for helping the family - for grocery shopping or collecting my more-intelligent-sister from the bus stop. One of my sisters was deemed ‘intelligent’ and worth educating. That earned her a place in a better school, an hour away on a school bus, over the border.

I’d been taught to drive farm vehicles at 8 or 9, driving behind harvesters and tractors in first gear, before my little legs could reach a clutch or accelerator.

I drove home from Sunday Meetings by the time I was 12, down country dirt roads, navigating the country-traffic around what would later become the Girilambone Tritton Copper mine. Recently I drove down that lane, and even with decades of investment since my days driving it, that road is a red-bulldust hell hole. It’s risks galore that no 12-year-old, in good Sunday sandals and driving in 3^rd gear, should be navigating.

All of this is to say: I could drive quite competently by 17, but I didn’t drive for my own entertainment. I drove for survival. The day I decided I needed anti-depressants I had to wait until my mother had left for work, take a carefully hidden $20 to fill up with petrol, and sneak out of a very small community without being spotted and reported on.

I had to brief my siblings not to tell that I’d left home in the car. I had to drive across the border to fill up with petrol at another community service station, because the local one I worked part time at. I knew the owner would tell my mother he’d seen me.

The cash I earned at the local service station was my lifeline; I used it for all kinds of secret sources of independence. A tiny 2^nd hand transistor radio to listen to BBC, ABC and Triple J. Doc Martin boots to wear with my dresses and make my appearance slightly trendier. Petrol to get to the doctors. Doctors’ fees, because I didn’t have a Medicare card. Prescriptions for medication.

When I do eventually get to the doctors - he promptly mixes me up with my cousin. My file was right in front of him – and because of my clothing and hair – he assumed I was another Truth 2x2 girl - my cousin. We all looked the same to him. He didn’t read my file, didn’t bother to notice my name. He referred to me by my cousins name the entire appointment, and disclosed confidential information about her, to me.

Now I know this to probably be medical malpractice, and reportable conduct – but I had no idea such concepts or laws existed. The fact I had the guts to get there at all, that was all I could think about.

I was too worried about how to sneak the car back into town without being spotted, to worry about the malpractise of a doctor.

What did the Workers used to say about our appearance - that you could tell who we were by our spirit? That doctor sure did a grand job of mixing up my spirit with my cousin’s.

The next time I need to renew the prescription for the antidepressants, I try a different doctor in a different town. I’m collecting my sister from school and doing grocery shopping, so I craftily put a doctors appointment into the trip. Less stress. Less likelihood of being caught. The doctor, one I’ve not met before and does not have a file on me, clocks me as a 2x2 none-the-less. I can’t articulate why I need the anti-depressants; I don’t have vocabulary like that. I bumble and stumble over the questions about why I’m depressed – I say its because my fathers been in prison, and my mother isn’t well.

He says something as I go to leave the surgery room, which is seared into my brain. I can hear him say it almost 30 years later, see his exasperated body language: ‘There isn’t much I can do for the women in your religion, you’re all depressed’.

It burns me. I’m embarrassed to be one of the women from THAT religion.

Its also an eye opener, it awakens something in me. I wonder for the next few years, until I am excommunicated, about all the women in my religion who are depressed. Why is that?

I’m also angry – I wonder why he doesn’t do something about that – why isn’t he asking some more questions about our lives? Surely something must be wrong, if he’s finding all of us depressed?

Anger isnt an emotion im allowed, girls aren’t to be ‘angry’ its not becoming. I shove it down. Take an anti-depressant.

One thing he does do though, is stop me being ashamed of getting the prescriptions filled. I figure all the Truth 2x2 women are doing it.

I find out in the decades afterwards, how many of the women in my family are depressed. Some of them diagnosed with bipolar.

After much debate with my own physiatrist, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are not (were not) depressed – they are traumatized. What we have is a community of women who’ve been abused, controlled and harmed. Their mental state is a response to surviving in a cult. They’re surviving.

They too are living with CPTSD that will probably never be diagnosed, because they’re still seeing those doctors that I saw. Doctors who know there is a problem with the women in that group, but not able to do or say anything about it. Religious freedom, I guess is the excuse.

These days I find myself sobbing at the slightest of things.

I can cry. I don’t even hide it, I’m proud of it. I can FEEL things. I can be overwhelmed and emotional, I can show it. I can feel wind on my arms; I can feel water on my head in the shower. I can feel a branch of tree as it brushes against me. I can enjoy somatic movement and touch.

Feelings and sensations are marvelous things – I embrace them, chase them. It’s a key part of my own practice of kink – seeking sensations. For me the ability to FEEL something is sacred. Special. Kink is how I found my way back to myself, found a way out of survival. It’s a deeply somatic experience for me.

I still live with passive suicidality, best described as a constant feeling of hopelessness. I get up every day to chase feelings. Its what keeps me alive, sensation. Pleasure.

Truth 2x2s and emotion-suppression

I have a large tattoo on my arm that says ‘FIERCE’. Its reclamation of the emotional control I grew up in, a reclamation of the ways my personality was (still is) framed as ‘a problem’. Fierce girls like me were not appreciated.

Fierce gurls like me are troublemakers.

The 2x2s actively control and supress emotion and feelings. There are tight ways feelings can be expressed in the group, which is a cult indicator. Most high control groups have socially acceptable ways feelings can be conveyed, tightly monitored.

In fundamentalist groups the ‘fundie-girl voice’ is one such control mechanism– the high pitched, girly, fake voice. The half pleading, half silly voice. It’s a hard voice to take seriously – for good reason. No one likes a fundie woman who demands respect and authority.

Women in 2x2s are not allowed space to be angry, not allowed space to question or have rage.

There are defined places, roles, dress – we have to stay in our lanes. Follow the rules.

There is space for performative tears over bible verses on Sunday morning. There is space for crying about worldly children who’re not professing or married ‘outside’ or lord-help-us maybe they dared get divorced. There is space for crying in the last Meeting of Convention, about the fear of returning to ‘the world’ after these beautiful days amongst friends.

Plenty of space for yelling at your children in the car, who haven’t done their hair quite right and ‘bringing your family name into disrepute’

Asking questions and getting fiery about why we cant cut our hair or wear trousers – no space for that.

Getting angry about the rates of sexual abuse, demanding to know how survivors are being supported? No space for that.

The indignant rage at discovering someone with allegations of abuse has been sitting in your Sunday meeting for decades without your knowledge, in the full knowledge of Workers and Elders? Not acceptable.

Asking why Workers have excommunicated a woman who’s husband is abusive? No space for that.

You raise 3,4,5 generations of women in this kind of environment, with no access to developing and expressing emotions or feelings – except tightly prescribed ones allowed by Workers and Elders – you get trauma and you get all of us on anti-depressants.

I was not taught nor allowed to have, emotions. I come from a long line of women who were also coercively controlled in ways which shut down emotional processing. The only coping mechanisms in my family was to hide, to yell at the children or to read your bible.

No one talked about feelings. We didn’t have them.

Truth 2x2 women are often described to me as cold, emotionless.

Sometimes, when I’m negotiating or in a tough work situation that requires stoicism – I’m grateful they taught me to be an iceberg. I can dissociate and not feel a thing. I can be ruthless. Cold. Detached. I guess its how I climbed as high as I did in my corporate career.

What would I say If I could go back and tell that doctor what he could do about all those women from that religion, who he felt he couldn’t help?

I’d say can he start talking about us, and with us.

I’d say can he help us connect, help us find vocabulary to describe WHY. What is happening behind closed doors that closes off our feelings and our emotions?

I’d ask him to teach me words like somatic disconnection, emotional suppression. Maybe even words like kink, bodily sensations, consent.

I’d ask for words I could search in the school-library dictionary and teach myself – much like I taught myself what ‘abortion’ meant.

Vocabulary is power. I have those words now, and I’m gifting them to you.

Law enforcement in the documentary appears apathetic, appear resigned. They appear to wait, hesitate, want more evidence. FBI do eventually act, ironically because of an unsafe traffic/driving situation rather than acting immediately on allegations of CSA.

And haven’t a lot of survivors been there.

How many of us seen perpetrators found guilty on other charges, and not on charges of abuse? I’d like a research project on that.

Police, courts, legal systems consistently fail survivors – so why bother?

Legal systems retraumatize, dismiss and stall. I say all of this with absolute confidence. I’ve been there. I’ve stood beside other survivors and watched them failed too, in courts and in police stations.

On the flip side, I’m involved in advocacy to change coercive control law. I’m involved in advocacy to incorporate group based coercive control into our legal understanding of what coercive control looks like. This is a complex juxtaposition for me.

The Complex Juxtaposition

Laws fail to be enforced constantly and consistently. Laws fail to be written well and written in ways that protect vulnerable people from exploitation. Even when laws are written in world class ways, they still fail to be implemented by front line officers.

Recently I attended a hearing at the Victorian Law Reform Commission, with two of my fellow advocates, to discuss the ways that an extremely well written law around gay conversion and gay suppression, has failed to result in even one single charge to date. Evidence was presented about very clear violations of that law, which law enforcement did not take action on.

I have abolitionist feminist leanings. None of the failings I’ve seen over my journey of experiencing domestic, family and community violence leave me with much confidence in law enforcement.

I am held together by friends and community. I am not held by law enforcement. While I know it has a place, that its needed – I see it as a last resort. What I’d prefer is a place where we live IN community with each other, hold each other in difficult conversations, hold each other accountable.

I want community and survivor led care. I want survivors to be centered, supported and believed. I want survivors to not live in poverty, distress, shame, isolation. I want less trauma p*orn before our stories are believed.

I have been failed by inquiries, agencies, departments. I see survivors around me failed too.

This is not an easy walk to push for law reform

I come from some-what anti-authoritarian people. I come from a remote and rural Australian community; we had to sort out our own issues amongst ourselves. I grew up with suspicion of authority, outside of god as our ultimate authority.

It’s in my bones. Unfortunately.

You can leave the good lord and his authority, but somehow the anti-authoritarianism lives on.

I juggle that very legitimate anti carceral, abolitionist belief structure with a deep sense of wanting laws which do in some way provide guide rails.

My community failed to keep the predators out. And not only that – it created predators. My community birthed, nurtured and supported some of the worst.

I’ve seen first-hand the legal system at work. I’ve seen how class, race and disability intersect with the kind of sentencing and treatment people get in our legal system.

I want to trust it, but I do not. It’s not proven trustworthy.

I am a pragmatist. An anti-carceral, abolitionist pragmatist. People will say on both sides of the debate that this cannot exist. I think it can.

I believe in the power of grassroots and community led. I believe we all have a day-to-day role in holding each other accountable, having tough conversations, loving and holding each other. I think this position is possible by being considered about who we elevate to positions of authority, being considered about the voices we elevate, being purposeful in who we given airtime to and why.

In my life and community, the consequences for drug cultivation has resulted in harsher penalties than that of the CSA of multiple children. In my community you get harsher consequences for drink driving than you do for financial abuse.

Repeatly I’ve been failed by law enforcement - including being sent away from a police station by a women’s liaison officer while attempting to report DFV, told that it ‘sounds like a family issue you should sort out yourself’. The woman I was trying to report went on to later threaten to burn my house down.

I’ve written about my first Christmas out of the 2x2s, the threats and harm I was navigating back then. I continue to navigate complex family and community violence - nothing has changed.

Systems have failed me, and others alike. Relying on systems, laws is dangerous. They fail. Especially for cult survivors, with no back up support nor plans. We trust them tentatively for good reason.

But none-the-less, I advocate to change laws.

I advocate to build new legal frameworks for group coercive control. Because I’m a f**king Pollyanna like that - distrusting but never ever giving up on the hope I’ll be wrong, that change is possible.

Watching the failures of law enforcement in Trust Me: The False Prophet, was triggering, overwhelming. Altogether unsurprising.

Laws are not enforced. ‘Religious freedom’ is an excuse we hear in Australia when many report heinous things in cult communities to police. In Australia all kinds of abuses are ignored by law enforcement on the belief that religious freedom laws make these behaviours untouchable. In some cases, they’re right. Group coercive control is not illegal.

Police often don’t investigate allegations in a timely manner in small, insular communities. Perpetrators ingratiate themselves in small communities. Perpetrators are often charming people, grooming even police in small communities.

In rural Australian communities I have multiple stories of women being turned away by officers or being scared to report a perpetrator, because the perpetrator is friends with the local cop.

The apathy and the dismissiveness we saw in that documentary happens in communities all over the world. Survivors’ world over know this story line well.

Our laws, no matter how wonderfully written, are pointless if they’re not used well and not appropriately enforced.

So what’s a gurl to do with all of this?

Its my belief that we need frontline services - police, teachers, DV agencies, homelessness services to understand cults and fringe groups. To understand how to communicate with survivors and advocates, how to use language we understand and apply laws in an appropriate way.

Survivors and advocates need to at the tables when laws are written, helping craft laws which protect and can safely be enforced without unintended racist, sexist, classist consequences.

Services need to be briefed by, and with survivors and advocates, learning how to support the appropriate application of laws.

It should not take documentaries and media coverage to drive change. In fact, it infuriates me that we need to tell these stories in these media formats to get anyone to care and act.

Listen to survivor advocates. Believe survivors. The first time.

In every community, don’t wait for media attention in the form of cult trauma p*rn documentaries to decide ‘gosh we should act on that cult stuff!’.

It should not take undercover, potentially damaging and coercive cult busting, broadcast into your living room by Netflix, for law enforcement and agencies to act. That’s exploitative. That’s cruel.

Don’t wait for laws to be passed, and news reels to be filmed - act when survivors tell you these places are unsafe.

Listen when we speak. Act when we speak.

Act when survivors tell you a community is unsafe and do it without needing a documentarian filming you, to hold you accountable.

Now for some 2x2 specific asks:

I have recently done call outs for whistleblowers in the 2x2s in Australia. If you are in a position where you cannot safely leave the group, or you need some time to gradually work your way out, and you’re able to provide information to help I would like to hear from you.

As an example of information I need at the moment: evidence of children and young people in volunteer positions at places like Conventions. One of the ways overseers are circumventing child safety reportable conduct schemes in Australia is to claim that there are not children and young people in volunteer roles and no child specific services and roles.

This is incorrect, and the reportable conduct schemes can examine this if they are provided with evidence.

If you have evidence of children performing waiting on tables, tea and coffee service, cleaning and washing tasks at a 2x2 Convention in Australia, please consider if you could provide me (either confidentially or anonymously) this evidence.

I have a form on my website where you can submit information. https://www.lauramcconnell.com.au/whistleblower

You can see my call outs for whistleblowers and information on my social media accounts.

I’d love to start sharing with you the literature, people, work which underpins my essays and my big mouth.

This smart mouth does not get smart on its own :)

Here is what I’ve read in the past, which guided my abolitionist, Pollyanna heart to this point:

• A Decolonial Feminism – Francoise Verges

• Abolition. Feminism. Now – Davis, Dent, Meiners, Richie

• Feminist Theory – bell hooks

• Black and Blue – Veronica Gorrie

• When Cops are Criminals – Edited by Veronica Gorrie

• The Patriarchs – Angela Saini

• Feminisms – Lucy Delap

• Hood Feminism – Mikki Kendall

Here is what I’m reading lately:

• A short history of queer parenting – Kirsty Loehr

• Six Conversations we’re Scared to Have – Deborah Frances-White

• After the Exit –

• How to Live and Artful Life –

• Shame, The Politics and Power of an Emotion – David Keen

May you go forth a with an abolitionish, feminist and Pollyanna heart 💙

It starts out with International Women’s Day on the 8th, which I’ve long believed to be a corporate rort. I worked in corporate for 17 years, and the cupcakes and stickers are a performance of nausea-inducing levels. If you care about women, pay them and promote them in equal parts to men.

I don’t want to see your glamour pics on LinkedIn titled ‘Proud to celebrate women in power’.

I want to see your bank balance being equal to a white mans. Don’t get me started, please. I don’t need empowerment, I need pay.

Then the 12^th of March rolls around.

CW this essay contains references to mental health issues and guns. Please read gently.

The 12^th of March 1992 is a date seared into my brain. It’s the date my mother decided, for the first time I’m aware of, that we might leave both the McConnell family and the Truth 2x2s. We lasted 3 weeks.

It came after an enormous argument, when us kids got locked in a spare room, while she got absolutely smashed drunk on the bottle of port which we kept for Sunday Morning Meetings, for the emblems. She got drunk on the emblems….if this whole story wasn’t so traumatic, it would be hilarious.

She passed out, vomited everywhere in this locked bedroom. Then the next morning she packed us up and decided, for the first time I’m aware of, to leave the whole McConnell circus.

She had a second cousin who lived one town over from us out west. It was an odd situation, as her family came from the south, but this cousin had packed up, much like my mother had, and left the family to build his own life out west.

We knew his name, we knew all about him. But we didn’t speak to him.

Welcome to 2x2 dysfunction.

He’d divorced his first 2x2 wife and remarried. He ran a successful business, drove a nice car, lived in a flash house. Everyone in the district knew them. We avoided interactions with them, dutifully driving off or changing isles in the supermarket when we encountered them.

Despite us never speaking to this man and his worldly wife, when we turned up on their doorstep on the 13^th March 1992, he and his wife welcomed us with open arms. No questions, no hostility.

I’m not sure I’d be so gracious in their situation.

Here is the story of Cousin Doug and the 3 glorious weeks we lived with him, in March 1992.

Cousin Doug

You’re not meant to drink alcohol in The Truth, it’s The Work of the Devil.

No one in this Truth community openly drinks alcohol, except for a sip of port from a fancy cup on Sundays for our version of ‘communion’ (called taking ‘The Emblems’).

My parents keep a carafe of McWilliams Tawny Port in our fancy china cabinet for the Sunday Meeting Emblems. Drinking that port outside of The Emblems is sacrilegious. After each Sunday Meeting, dad in his role as Elder, takes the left-over port in the special cup outside. He has a special place in the garden to bury it. The blood of Christ. Buried in our garden. I wonder what Christ would feel about being buried next to our dead pet budgies every week, alongside the compost?

Dad comes home mostly for Meetings. He lives on the family farms. Mum works 75km the other direction, as a teacher in a predominantly Indigenous school. It’s a marriage held together mostly for the purposes of 2x2 ritual and community. They can’t divorce because it’s against the rules. They live separate lives. Dad lives with Caroline, with his parents on the farm or on the road with mobs of sheep. I’m stuck in the middle, caring for the little ones and being expected to be far wiser and older than my 12 years of age.

Mum starts drinking the port.

She arrives home from work, furtively pours herself a coffee mug of port, alone in the kitchen while us kids do our chores. She thinks I don’t know what’s in that mug.

As the evening wears on, she starts the well-worn ritual of calling around to try and find dad. None of us ever know where he’ll be, except on Wednesday nights or Sunday Mornings – when he turns up for Meetings.

There is a ritual – mum calls the general store near the farm, asks when they last saw him fill up the car with petrol, when he last collected the farm mail. Then she calls Caroline. She always says she’s not seen him.

Then she gets on the two-way radio to contact the farm shed/caravan my grandparents live in. It’s always a last resort – they’re always hostile that she’s trying to find him. Perhaps annoyed their son can’t manage his own marriage and family.

Sometimes, she finds him at the farm. Sometimes there is yelling about how he never comes home to care for his kids, screaming matches about money and the lack of it.

March 12 1992, there is a particularly aggressive call.

Mums worked her way through more glasses of port than usual. My bedroom was closest the kitchen, I can hear the telephone conversations, the sound of the china cabinet door opening, the pouring of more mugs of port.

Mum becomes hysterical. She’s sobbing and screaming at the kitchen table.

I came out of my room to try to calm her. I’m worried the little kids will wake up and be scared.

As she sits screaming and ranting at the kitchen table, she decides dad is dangerous.

I’m a mere kid; I’ve just turned 12. I’m used to defusing, deflecting. Worrying. Being responsible.

She says I need to get the little kids out of bed, lock them in the spare room. Dads dangerous and we need to be locked away from him.

The spare room is the only room in our house that has a lock. She’s organised for our spare room to have one, because the Workers use it once a year. Workers need doors which lock, apparently.

The spare room also has the family guns in the wardrobe.

I carry the sleepy, groggy kids into the spare room, squish them into the bunk beds side-by-side.

Mums ranting. She’s decided that dad will have left the farm by now, be on his way into town, that he’s dangerous and he’s going to hurt us.

I keep asking ‘Why? Why will he hurt us?’

Dad is a problematic man, at 12 I know that. I know he grows marijuana, has a second family, lives this double life that no one in our community seems bothered by or willing to stand up to. But despite all the issues I can very clearly see, that he doesn’t support us financially, doesn’t stick around to care for us – I don’t believe him to be a violent person. I have never seen him use physical violence. If anyone in that house uses physical violence, its my mother.

(I later realise he is violent, he uses a leather strap on us, but in the context of 1980’s / 1990’s Australia – it doesn’t register with me as violence).

I am confused.

Mums still drinking from that coffee mug.

‘Listen out for the car. He’ll be here soon. We’ve all got to listen out and be ready.’

What are we meant to be prepared for?

The little ones keep asking, ‘What’s he going to do to us?’

‘Break the windows probably,’ she replies. ‘He’s dangerous’

She had entered a state of delusional paranoia, but that wasn’t a concept I knew. I had no idea what was happening. I now believe she was having a serious mental health episode.

A few hours pass. We all sit terrified listening for the sound of the car, for the sound of breaking glass. There are guns in the cupboard next to us. There’s mum’s drunk, raving state. Everyone is scared. I’ve started singing hymns to the little ones, to soothe them.

Around midnight, dad does turn up.

The littlies have finally fallen asleep, huddled together next to me on the lower bunk bed. I’m wide awake, hyper alert, cuddling the little ones. Dad knocks on the spare room door and tries to negotiate with mum, tries to get her to open the door and let us kids out to go with him to the farm. She refuses.

Eventually she says that she’ll come out to speak with him on the condition that the kids are staying in the room. She has me lock the door after her. I’m terrified. Locked in a room with the guns and kids, while the adults fight.

The yelling and screaming goes on for hours in my 12-year-old mind. I lie there, daydreaming. Now I’d call it ‘dissociated’. I’m reading bible verses, repeating hymns in my head.

I hear dad’s car roar off down the street, back off to the farm. Mum has me unlock the door, she comes in and vomits into a waste-paper bin. A bin she has specially bought for Workers, which sits under the writing desk she restored for them to write their Worker letters. Good use of the bin, on point.

She then promptly passes out. I’m left there, the only one awake, hyper alert, clutching the little ones on the bunk bed, still terrified of dad breaking the windows.

I’ll lie in bed each night for the next 30 years, hyperalert to noises. To this day I try to sleep with a light on wherever possible, and doors slightly ajar. I never want to be locked in a dark room ever again.

The sound of a Toyota Hilux, specifically the sound of the engines in the models from 1988 to 1995, will forever give me flashbacks when I hear them in traffic.

13^th March 1992

Eventually the sun comes up. I unlock the spare bedroom door and usher the kids back to their own beds. I make myself breakfast, put wood on the kitchen stove.

Mum wakes up, hung over. She has me pack a few suitcases of clothes; says we’re leaving.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask. Wondering if she is taking us back to dad at the farm.

‘Doug and Marissa’s’ she replies, firmly.

Shes’ really thought it through, even if shes obviously hung over.

“Doug? As in COUSIN DOUG”? I ask, astounded.

This is same Doug we last week drove around the block to avoid at the farm supply store, because he divorced his first Truth 2x2 wife and married Marissa, a heathen worldly woman?!

An hour later we turn up at their beautifully styled home, with plush white carpet, a pool, lovely, lush green lawns. Us in our clapped-out car, filled with a few changes of clothes, a bunch of kids, a dog and cat.

Doug, Marissa and their 4 kids don’t blink an eye. They clear out bedrooms, let us move in.

For 3 weeks, we live with them. Its like a fairytale. Marissa is a stay-at-home parent, she cooks, cleans, washes our clothes. She asks us what food we like, lets us watch TV, swim in their pool.

It’s a wonderful time. None of us kids are used to being coddled like this, cared for, nurtured. Marissa takes us to the park on Sundays, followed by take away at the local pizza place. This isn’t a world we’ve ever been near. Its calm. Nurturing.

Its there, at Doug and Marissa’s that I fall in love with a girl.

Marissa has a daughter, Olivia, from a relationship before Doug. Olivia is five years older than me, inhabits a completely different world to me. I’ve never encountered her until we move into their house.

Olivia is tall and strong, wiry and sporty. She has muscles on her calves that I can’t stop admiring. You can see them clearly because she wears short skirts, not the stupid long ones I have to wear. Olivia has sharp biceps much like my own. I’m not used to seeing strong girls like me. I love watching those biceps as she’s carrying food to the dinner table or stacking dishes from the dishwasher. I was in love. She was beautiful, strong and powerful. She had gorgeous wavy hair that sat at her shoulders, in a fashionable way I could only daydream of.

Olivia barely acknowledges that I exist. She’s a fully-fledged Worldly teenager with sports training to attend and friends to hang out with. She has no time for sitting around the house entertaining a love-struck pre-teen.

She generously gifts me a few of her old clothes to wear, as I’ve forgotten to pack my own, too busy packing for the littlies. I wear the skirt and a sweater she gives me, for about two years afterwards. I’m loath to take them off, not wanting to forget the feeling that comes from being close to Olivia.

Three weeks later, my mother decides it’s too hard to live away from the McConnell clan, away from our home and the Truth 2x2s. She packs us up, takes us back home.

As quickly as it began, our foray into the world outside is over.

We go back to the Canary Yellow House.

Postscript

I now have another date in March to navigate. Bruer-gate. 23^rd March.

The date when 2x2s and ex 2x2s decided that abuse in the 2x2s was in fact, real.

The date that survivors finally started to be believed.

Its monumental, that change which has occurred post 23 March 2023. It wasn’t default to believe survivors before 23 March 2023.

I spent decades not being believed. That all changed in one day.

The date comes with complex feelings for me. It comes with relief and gratitude. I’m glad we are believed.

But why did it take so long to believe us? What did I do wrong that I wasn’t believed? Will the people who publicly did not believe me, ever apologise?

Does the ex-2x2 community realise that the denial of survivor’s experiences prior to March 2023, has left a deep grief and hurt? Is there appetite to acknowledge that, grieve that with us?

March is complex. I’ll be glad when its over for another year.

*It breaks my heart now, all these decades later to consider what that must have been like for Doug and Marissa. We went home after those three glorious weeks with them and never spoke again. How heartbreaking for them, to have us acknowledge them for three weeks, and then promptly withdraw (in common 2x2 style) to never speak again?

I have been thinking of Olivia again recently, after being asked on a podcast about my own queer realisation. There is no grand realisation. It just was. I liked girls like Olivia, I liked boys. I always knew. It always was that way, with no doubt or issue with it in my mind. The trouble was there was no space to discuss that in my community.

This is part of a series of essays about the world I came from – one of remote communities, rough houses, deep family connections.

It was also a world of God. Bibles. Coercion.

These essays came about because the world I came from is foreign to most people. The world I come from is not ‘normal’.

The Truth 2x2 world is strange, secretive. The world of remote Australia is usually spoken of and understood romantically by urban people, without genuine connection to it.

This is a complicated reality for me- not much of the world I was formed in is understood in polite, urban conversations.

I wrote this essay almost 10 years ago, after a trip home. It had been my first trip home to far western NSW in over 20 years. That trip shredded my heart into pieces. I felt a deep, soul-destroying grief when I saw the places and the people I had known so intimately.

Recently I returned home for the second time in over 30 years. It was nothing like I anticipated, the grief and loss was not there.

What had replaced it was a deep sense of belonging, pride.

Perhaps enough time has passed; enough people have affirmed my experiences of that community now; no one can deny my reality.

The world I came from is still there; it hasn’t changed very much if I’m honest. Its still the wild, wonderful and beautiful place it always was, just with some 5G and the occasional solar panel.

In my mind it had moved on far more than it really has.

Im glad I waited to publish this essay on homesickness. I’ve changed.

Homesickness. Grief.

2017

My heart was left in the red sand of far western NSW, My heart lives in a little piece of the vast Ngemba land, by the side of the dead-straight highway to Bourke.

Two white granite rocks, covered in red sand, sit on my inner-city desk. They remind me every day about home. Sometimes when my homesickness overwhelms me, I carry those little rocks in my bra, to hold a little piece of home near my heart. Those rocks sit beside documents from investment banks, social impact pitches, women-in-business documents.

Those rocks are far, far from home. They’re outside their comfort zone, much like I am most of the time.

The rocky little hill in front of my home comes to me in my dreams. The physical ‘home’ is gone now, long ago it fell over into the sand. Eaten by termites. Blown about by north easterly winds. It was never more than a tumbledown collection of shanty buildings, precariously standing in sand.

In my dreams I’m always arriving at that little hill above the house. I’m coming over the crest and looking down on the tumbledown buildings.

There was always a presence there on that hill, something that grabbed me and wrapped me in its love. That same presence also scared me.

Much like our religion - it scared me and loved me in equal parts.

As a child the darkness there was deep and terrifying. It was an overpowering darkness filled with shadows. It was a place of long, beautiful days, and long terrifying nights.

There was always something watching me from that hill above my home, a presence. Something moved up there in the shadows, between the spindly pine trees.

As a child I thought that presence was god, maybe jesus. I thought those shadows watching me were ‘him’ (whoever ‘him’ of the 2x2 world was), making sure I was behaving and following all the Truth rules.

I often worried the presence on the hill was judging me ‘not good enough’.

The day I returned after 20 years away, the presence on the hill met me.

I rode my motorbike home, 13 hours from Melbourne.

They teach you in all the adventure-off-road bike courses back in Melbourne: never ride without your full riding kit on. I’ve paid a lot of money for that advice.

Skin is precious and dirt roads are notoriously slippery. Sunburn and wind burn dehydrates on your bare skin; our ride-guides reiterate it at every opportunity. Despite paying exorbitant amounts of money for this advice- I ignore it out here riding on my own.

Tomorrow I’ll have horrendous sunburn.

I’ve taken my thick motorbike jacket off at Nyngan when the temperature on the bike shows 45degrees. I stop at the little service station and buy a bag of ice, shove it down the back of the bike seat, lean back on it. It acts as air-conditioning as I ride. I’d rather sit in melting ice than I would my own sweat.

The bag of ice is my outback-adventuring hack. I’m usually the only woman in the rides, and the blokes think my ‘bag of ice’ trick is quite unnecessarily feminine and a waste of $15 bags of ice. I do not care.

I arrive on the crest of the little hill above the farmhouse, wearing a pink tank top combined with thick off-roading bike trousers – all damp with melted ice water. My hair stuck to my head under the helmet. Sweat running down my face.

I stop on the hill crest, 45 degrees celsius of sun belting down on me. Ice quickly melting around me.

I cut the bike engine and sit. I take off the helmet, fuck the sun. I want to sit here, face full of sweat and tears. I want to see and smell this place without that helmet. In my pink tank top.

I sit. Looking down on ‘home’ from the bike. Watching. Taking it all in. Crying. Smelling home.

When did I last stand on this hill with my siblings, when did I last ride a horse down the hill? Would little Laura recognise this version, sitting on a fancy BMW motorbike in a pink tank top?

I sit, looking down on a collection of collapsing buildings, broken beams and twisted corrugated iron, all that was left of ‘home’ in a physical sense.

The hairs on my arms stand on end.

A gust of wind comes whipping up the hill, north westerly, full of heat and dust. And then its gone, in seconds. Dust settles.

Back to calm. Not a sound.

I sit there clutching my helmet, sweat and ice water puddling under me. Nervous, arm hairs on end, feeling like I’m being watched from all around.

There isn’t, and can’t be anyone here. The farm gates are locked behind me. No one is here. No one in the physical sense, at least. A kangaroo under a tree, a few hundred metres away.

I look nervously around me. The kangaroo is nervously watching me too.

I realise, this is the ‘thing’ I feared as a child.

This is that mysterious presence watching me. This isn’t god nor jesus nor that kangaroo watching me, this is something else, protecting me.

This is someone. Their shape is not physical, but they’re here. They are watching over me. They’ve come to welcome me on the hill. They know me.

I smile. Tears stream down my face.

I sit in that stonking hot sun, smelling the silver-green spindly pine trees in the deathly silence, remembering all that was here, everyone who loved me who was here. Feeling for the first time in decades, that I belong.

My heart is here. I belong here.

I have never stopped missing home, family and community. Regardless of how flawed and broken it may be, I never stop seeing the potential and believing in the capacity of people to change and to hold love.

I have never stop missing that little rocky hill, even though to the average eye it’s just another hill in a red sandy paddock, at the end of a vast blue sky.

No one else can feel that ‘thing’ that I feel there. Or can they? I haven’t asked them – maybe they know it’s a special place too. Perhaps like a million other things, they wouldn’t tell me even if I asked. So many secrets. So much silence.

I come home to the city after that trip, carrying deep grief. All I can feel is that I lost my community and family, I lost my ‘place’ in the world when I left there.

It left me rootless, floating. For someone who grew up surrounded by multiple generations, second and third cousins, deeply rooted in family: to be without place, people and stories has been endlessly lonely. There is endless grief. There is a hole I have plugged with adventure motorbikes, long distance swimming, smoking, Valium, alcohol.

If I think too much about the grief and loss of place and people, I worry it will swallow me. I try not to think about ‘home’. I shut it out.

The idea of ‘home’ feels raw and uncomfortable– like I don’t have right to miss it or desire it, since I wanted so much more than they could give me. Guilt. I feel guilty missing something I couldn’t possibly have stayed in. To stay would have buried me in a marriage with unequal power, children I did not want, 2x2 rules I did not see value in. To stay would have buried me in an ideology I did not believe in.

I don’t have a right to miss home at the bottom of that hill – I wouldn’t survive there even if they wanted me. Remember how we all treated Uncle Squeaky? No wants a queer like me out there in that redneck land.

None the less, I know where my home is, and I refuse to relinquish it.

Its at the bottom of that hill.

Back in the city, I’ll always panic when asked innocently, “where is home for you?”

How do you explain that your home is a place you don’t belong and are not welcome?

Postscript:

I know now that I’ve returned again recently – my home is always there – for millennia past and millennia ahead.

Last month I stood in that red dirt again with my son.

As we arrived, we watched a flock of rare black cockatoo’s circle above us. We took our shoes off, let the red onto our toes. We stood in silence and smelt the trees.

We searched in the sandy soil for the biggest white quartz-like rocks to take back to the city. We laughed that these were the same white rocks that my father once put in a sack at the end of my bed for Christmas.

A chain of the past and future was linked together – something precious was passed on. One day that kid will stand on that hill without me and maybe feel mysterious things too.

We stood outside the tiny school that I learnt to read and write in, we laughed that no one knew what they were creating there in that one room school. Did they have any inkling that I’d go on to use these words to create change?

My son rode on the same farm gate that I grew up riding. He laughed hilariously that I thought riding a little metal farm gate was like being on a theme park ride. I had no reference point – as far as I knew that was as wonderful as life could be, riding that gate as fast as I could every morning on the way to school.

He has been to real theme parks, ridden in airplanes. All I’d ever ridden at his age was a motorbike, a horse and a farm gate.

I managed to get my father to tell me some stories. I watched him cry. I had no idea how much he would tell, on his terms. I laughed with people and family I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again.

My father said he’d put me in his will, beside my brothers, and then told me about all the farm junk he’d leave us. I promptly had regrets. I don’t want the girls pitted against the boys, as it will undoubtedly be. Unexpected emotions.

None the less, something healed.

When my Nan Maisie died, I had not seen her for over 20 years. I never saw her again after our first excommunication. I went to her funeral, a kind of act of defiance.

At the funeral my grandad, then a frail and elderly man, looked at me as I stood before him at the 2x2 graveside service and said brashly ‘oh so you’re back again?’

I felt like slapping him. I felt like saying ‘I never left – I was just away caring for the kids and fixing up the mess that this McConnell family left us in’.

You left me, Grandad. You left me.

That’s how I felt when I came home this time – I never left, they left me.

They left me. A child. This loss and grief is not mine to carry.

I can return whenever the hell I like. I belong here.

This place out here in the red sand, its still my home. I can come back whenever I please. There is a spirit waiting on the hill, to welcome me.

No one passes that gift on in any kind of inheritance document. No one fights about whether the boys deserve it more than the girls - that spirit on the hill owns it. Not any of us.

I have a home, and it can’t be taken from me.

I think the grief and homesickness has passed.

I’m aware that this essay will be interpreted by conservative Christians as an attack on their faith, and as ‘persecution’. It is my belief that accountability and sitting with harm caused is different to persecution.

I was a progressive Catholic for a hot minute; I married an Italian Catholic in my early 30s. I gradually drifted away from Catholicism but still called myself a Christian for several years.

I definitively stopped calling myself a Christian because of the behaviour of the Christian ex 2x2 Support Group.

I decided one day after an interaction in that group: ‘If this is Christianity, I want none of it.’

Watching what is playing out with Christianity in the US at present, I’ve stopped even referring to myself as ‘culturally Christian’ - that culture is harming people and excusing dehumanising behaviour.

I can see a time, when the world changes, where I might identify as ‘culturally Christian’ again. That time seems far, far away at this point, when I see the daily excuses some Christian’s are making for behaviour in the US.

The reason I stopped identifying as Christian was due to a conversation in the Christian ex 2x2 Support Group somewhere around late 2016 early 2017, about my belief that there were endemic abuses in the 2x2s in Australia. Someone (an Australian) commented that there were a lot of ‘false allegations’. A distressing number of Australian ex 2x2s ‘liked’ that comment.

Something in me broke that day, and I decided ‘I can’t be Christian if this is what Christianity looks like. I want none of this’.

At the time of that interaction in the Christian ex 2x2 group, I had not long written a letter to the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse in Australia, outlining that I believed The Truth (as most of us called them at the time) had problematic levels of abuse in our communities. I named specific communities in Australia which I had lived experiences of, and several other communities I had been told about.

I outlined how the group was not registered and highly secretive, and it was therefore hard for me to submit to the Royal Commission in the format they required. The Royal Commission had referred me for legal assistance, something I’m grateful for. You can see a video with KnowMore Legal here, about this.

After receiving firm resistance in the Christian ex 2x2 Support Group about the idea that abuse and grooming was a problem, I started to wonder if I’d been wrong. Perhaps all the grooming and abuse was just me, was I the problem? Was it just MY family? Was it just MY community? Was I wrong about all the grooming and abuse I’d seen, experienced, heard about? Spoiler, I wasn’t.

I felt awful – I wondered if I was wasting government resources by accepting legal advice from the Royal Commission. I had many long conversations with my friends and network – was I doing the wrong thing by contacting the Royal Commission about The Truth (now commonly called the 2x2s)?

The Royal Commission and its subsequent Redress Scheme have failed 2x2 survivors (and other cults) in Australia – but the existence of it, and 2x2s inability/decision not to sign up has put a lot of pressure on Australian Overseers and resulted in media coverage of the group.

I nearly didn’t name the 2x2s in that inquiry, because the Christian ex 2x2 Support Group gaslit me into thinking it was ‘false allegations’ to say that 2x2s had high levels of abuse and grooming in Australia.

Not long after this incident, I had a termination. While I was recovering, I logged onto Facebook and discovered a conversation in the Christian ex 2x2 Support Group which was anti-abortion. An Australian had shared content which was anti-choice and anti-women’s autonomy.

I was in a vulnerable state and was made even more vulnerable by seeing that content shared, liked and tacitly approved of (in their silence) by fellow Australian ex 2x2s. That no one moderated that content was equally as distressing.

I promptly left the group completely, blocked some Australians who had been in and around that content. It’s worth saying here – that was the only operational ex 2x2 support group I was aware of at that time. Leaving and blocking was upsetting and isolating.

This group contributed to my CPTSD, religious trauma. A few years later I was ejected from the Australian NZ support group after several months, for having one moderator blocked. None of the other moderators checked with me why I might have people blocked. It felt like another excommunication by 2x2s, and I’ve already survived three of those, I didn’t need a fourth. Ouch.

Over the approx. decade since I left the Christian facebook group, I have been sent screenshots of other problematic posts in the group. I have contacts who are trying to move towards a more progressive place with Christian interpretations. They often see content and ask me ‘what do you think of this? Is this ok?’ Usually the answer to that is ‘no... that content isn’t ok, it’s promoting the ‘othering’ and dehumanization of fellow human beings’.

The content I am sent is typically content which discourages sex outside of marriage, disapproves of divorce and remarriage, encourages bigotry towards trans and gender diverse people, questions the legitimacy of queer and gay people. The posts are often not moderated well, and it’s often an ugly place in the comments.

What do I hope for in writing this essay?

That Christians consider what kind of Christianity they’re supporting.

If you’re an ex 2x2 or someone in the process of leaving 2x2 culture – consider if the kinds of Christianity being supported in the groups and churches you’re in, is safe? Consider what content you support.

Your language, posts and ‘likes’ send powerful signals to queer and trans folk, people leaving DV, divorcing, people who need abortions as healthcare (or frankly any reason they decide).

Your support of Trump and his allies is to be in support of white supremacy.

I accept there is a need for Christian support groups, to be landing places for 2x2s leaving and attached to conservative Christian behaviours and interpretations, however these groups need to be well moderated with clear guidelines about what is considered acceptable debate.

Moderate, progressive Christians need to be louder, clearer about what is acceptable. When harmful debate and conversation continues in Christian spaces– moderate, progressives need to stand up and make it clear what is acceptable. The silence is tacit approval.

I’ve written about our lack of relationality, and ability to apologize here – we’re not taught these skills in 2x2 culture. 2x2s (and many ex 2x2s) are never wrong. Even when they might be, they hide and hope it will all go away.

In hiding and staying quiet, moderate and progressive Christians are allowing conservative interpretations of Christianity to set what is acceptable behaviour inside ex 2x2 communities. That’s hurting and devaluing people like me.

You can hear more of my journey out of Christianity in this interview on Beyond Religion. One of my regrets in that interview is that I was scared to name the Christian ex 2x2 Support Group as being one of the key drivers of me saying outright, ‘I’m not Christian anymore’. I was worried about backlash from the Australian ex 2x2 Christians. I regret that, after seeing their recent silence on anti– LGBTQIA+ content, and in some cases outright support of anti LGBTQIA+ sentiment. They’re seemingly not scared to be debating my existance, so why should I be scared to upset them?

Many ex 2x2s in Australia went on to various branches of evangelical and Pentecostal churches. I’m very aware that as an atheist, I’m in the minority as an ex 2x2 in Australia.

I commend those who went on to progressive interpretations of Christian faith. I see you and I know many of you see me.

It’s not easy to do advocacy, for anyone. It is especially difficult to do advocacy from a position of less power, especially when you’ve been rejected from the survivor group for your country. It results in needing to stay quiet and ‘keep the peace’ to navigate the power dynamics.

I’ve written also about the fact I’m ‘no one’ in the 2x2 hierarchy. I have no power or place in the 2x2 hierarchy. I am a kid from tin sheds and red sand who had a father in prison. No one was giving my family any power, then or now.

For around a decade, I quietly navigated this ex 2x2 behaviour, thinking that not only did I not have enough power to call it out and be believed, but I would also be ostracised for doing so.

I hope that my writing of late has helped with understanding the complex, intersectional life I have come from and still lead. How differences in class hierarchy, gender, and sexuality have resulted in minimization of my experiences because of power imbalances.

I’ve stayed quiet on a lot. The numbers are against me as a queer, secular survivor in a small country of ex 2x2s. I know my place (or at least, the one I should stay in).

It’s not easy to share these private and deeply personal experiences. The precursor to facebook groups, the chat rooms of the 1990’s and 2000’s, were also problematic spaces with regular outright hostility to LGBTQIA+ and feminism as two examples. The harmful opinions and behaviors are not new. I’ve stayed quiet because I hoped people would change, grow, stand here beside me as an ally. Infighting helps no one.

Sometimes, as I’ve written ‘you gotta let the lions eat them’. It’s not my job to educate and be endlessly tolerant. At some point people have to face into themselves, if they’re planning to be our community matriarchs/patriarchs.

I am a queer, feminist, proudly intersectional and secular cult survivor advocate.

I terrify some people, and I know that. It’s hard for 2x2s and some ex 2x2s to hear a woman-presenting person speak frankly about these issues. Especially when you’re from a culture like the 2x2s, where people like me are expected to be ashamed and stay quiet, ask for forgiveness, shrink.

This is all uncomfortable. We need to move through that, sit with that.

My advocacy looks and sounds different to other peoples, because it has to. It comes from a different place, is driven by a different fire. I work increasingly with cult survivor advocates from other cults, I find it powerful to band together and drive higher-level change. I seek out like minded advocates, who’re intersectional, inclusive. I find it less lonely to partner with them.

I have long believed that in-fighting solves nothing amongst advocates and support groups. Its pointless. It doesn’t help the bigger picture. Ive been doing this alone for a long time, we need more safe advocates so this work is less lonely.

Creating conflict and infighting is not my intent in writing this essay, nor is it my intent in my openly discussing on other platforms the difficulties of secular 2x2 advocacy in Australia. My intent in naming this, is to stop people asking ‘why’ and further causing me distress in my inbox.

My intent is to ask Christians to find a safer way to live out Christianity, and to ask that people respect and honour my life, and not make me unwelcome by debating my existence. My intent is to ask for solidarity and for support so that I feel less unsafe in the spaces I advocate in.

Note: there are several well moderated and well-run support groups I recommend on Facebook. You can find them in my Facebook profile here (under ‘communities’).

The groups I recommend are the Australian Cult Survivor Network and the ex-2x2 Support Group. I have found these to be safe and inclusive spaces which are well moderated.

I’ve recently found the CCF (Concerned and Connected Friends) to be well moderated. It contains a mix of current and ex 2x2s who are for the most part, Christian. I don’t have long term experience of this group, but have found their moderators to be progressive Christians who actively moderate (and fast), and the topics explored in content/posts to be done so respectfully.

I hate talking about how cult survivor advocacy in Australia is not funded or supported institutionally. I hate that I even need to DO this advocacy to begin with.

In an ideal world, there would be good survivor supports, housing and counselling support for cult leavers which are government funded. In an ideal world there would be ways for me to publish my memoir, release Truth 2x2 cult kids podcast and receive some level of financial support to do so. In an ideal world the 2x2 overseers would register an entity, pay my redress.

In an ideal world the overseers would reform their ‘church’ and I wouldn’t have to spend time advocating or discussing this at all!

That world does not exist. Writing and publishing in Australia is severely underfunded and undervalued. Cult survivor supports are near non-existent from government agencies. The 2x2 system will never reform itself. It’s a cult. Advocacy, the kind which is intersectional and secular, will always be needed.

I have been a self-funded advocate for 25+ years, my career (first in finance, later at #GoKindly) has always funded my cult survivor advocacy. I regret not a cent of it – its all been worth it.

Late last year my financial situation changed significantly. I no longer have support to cover the gap in earnings and the cost of managing my chronic pain. I cannot work full time, due to chronic pain from a hip injury. I have a lawyer/solictor on the case, but there is no guarantee of any change in this situation in the near future.

While I work where I can and #GoKindly is a thriving and successful brand, I cannot work at a full-time capacity, and the work needs to be done by paid employees in the hours I cannot work. Without a full-time income, I cannot continue the status quo of my advocacy.

So, upon returning from my summer break, I realised that I cannot continue to self-fund my cult survivor advocacy the way I have been.

I’m exploring different crowd funding ways to contribute to the costs of my survivor advocacy. I have set up a Buy me a Coffee account and a Patreon, with some tiers of support. I hope they are considered ‘affordable’ and reasonable.

You can find ways to support me here at Buy me a Coffee and here at Patreon.

I will do all I can to continue writing, creating, producing Truth 2x2 Cult Kids Podcast.

2026 was always going to be a tough one for me. I have already said that I don’t have goals for this year - I can’t afford to. Goals themselves are too much of a goal!

Any ideas for crowd funding are welcome, as are experiences of others who’ve crowdfunded on various platforms.

If you value intersectional, accessible cult survivor advocacy, please consider supporting my work. Its ok if you’re not in a position to support financially long term, or right now. No judgement. No pressure, ever, to financially support. Please do what you can - share a story, talk about my work in rooms I’m not in.

For me accessible, affordable, intersectional and inclusive cult survivor advocacy is important. I am passionate about my Substack, podcast, reels/tiktoks remaining public and being an accessible resource.

I am a secular, queer, Australian, low SES cult survivor advocate - and all those pieces of this identity are important. Those pieces offer insights, arguments, support that isn’t always available other places. If those identities matter to you - please consider supporting my work when you can.

Maybe one day Australian 2x2 overseers will pay that redress, huh! Maybe one day that redress will help me fund a charity to do this work.

A million stars of thanks for being on this journey with me,

Laura

Our village of Nyngan had been cut off by flood water for almost a week. The levy banks gave way late one afternoon and the village evacuated to the highest point, a railway station and a series of railway good sheds.

None of us had been to school in about a week, with everyone sandbagging and helping build levy banks around town. When the levy banks collapsed late in the day, everyone was exhausted.

My family evacuated our house as water started to lap at the floorboards. We were accompanied by 6 sheep dogs, a bunch of chickens and a pet lamb.

We slept in a railway good shed, and early the next morning helicopters started landing at the railway station. The army had come to evacuate us.

The army had instructions to evacuate everyone to Dubbo, the opposite direction to our family and farms. Dad, along with several other local families with farms on the Bourke and Cobar side of town, did not want to leave that way. They wanted the army to escort them to the Bourke side, to be collected by family and friends. The army refused.

The army also could not take animals, and dad refused to leave without the sheep dogs. ‘Expensive to train’ he said, ‘cant leave them behind’.

Never mind the kids safety, I guess.

Several other families also refused to leave pets behind.

So, they banded together and decided to leave town without army assistance.

The army wanted no responsibility for us; told us they’d look the other way but not come to our rescue if it went wrong.

I’ve no recollection of whether mum wanted to go or not, what her thoughts were. I do know she walked last. It seemed reluctant. I think she would have preferred the helicopters.

With several other families, we started walking out of town, along the railway line. The railway bridge over the river was the only way to cross the raging river by then – the pedestrian and vehicle bridge was long under flood water.

The water was a metre from the railway bridge.

Railway bridges aren’t designed for pedestrians – they’re essentially two rows of railway-line metal attached to sleepers. There are gaping holes between each sleeper.

The railway bridge was probably 400metres long. It felt like 400 kilometres.

I clutched my sisters either side of me, holding their hands. We took it step by step, carefully stepping onto each railway sleeper, watching the water raging below us. Knowing one misstep and we’d be swept away with the tree logs and debris raging below us.

The water was close enough that it splashed us, wet our long dresses as we carefully balanced on the railway sleepers.

Dad went ahead, dogs and him in-step together. Certain. Confident.

Mum went behind, carrying some household items.

No one spoke. We silently navigated that railway bridge, knowing it was life or death on that thing.

We had no food, no water. We were exhausted from days of sandbagging and worry.

We walked, as far as the railway line would take us.

Not far from town the army had blown up part of the railway line to Bourke, in an attempt to relieve water pressure from the levy banks.

Our walk stopped.

We sat, in a reasonably hot April day, on the railway line.

Around us, flood water rushed and gurgled, tree trunks flew past.

Mum spotted our outdoor table and chairs floating past.

If we hadn’t been so exhausted and scared, we might have laughed.

Somehow, dad and the other families got word on the country grape vine (I don’t know how – there was no power nor telephones) that some families had decided to defy army orders and had walked out of the town. Farmers were asked to rustle up tinnie’s (little tin boats), to collect us.

Dad somehow got word to my grandparents that they were to leave the farm in an old truck, and drive as far as they could down the highway in the flood water, and that somehow, we’d get a tinnie to them.

Late in the afternoon, a couple of farmers with tinnies arrived and ferried us down the middle of the Mitchell Highway, amidst the swimming brown snakes, dirty red sandy water, floating tree trunks.

We followed the tops of the guideposts and signposts, down the highway in little tin boats. It was an adventure at that point – we’d survived that railway bridge – it was all up from there.

25kms later, we reached grandad and nan, sitting in the old truck, water up to the bottom of the doors, waiting for us. We were loaded onto the truck tray, us and the dogs, and as the sun set they reversed us down the centre of the Mitchell highway, out of the flood water.

It took months for the water to subside, and our house to be clean and safe enough to return to. We lived back on our farm, back with our family. We’d get Truth Friends visiting, coming with donations of clothes and furniture. Friends were very generous.

They’d arrive with stories about how they’d heard from Workers about the three little girls who walked out of a flood, clutching nothing but their hymn books and bibles.

The first time I heard the story I was confused: were they talking about my sisters and I? Surely it was a misunderstanding, and it was some other little girls? The stories continued to circulate. I continued to be unsure who they were talking about.

One day we unexpectedly turned up to gospel meeting in Condobolin. I don’t think the Workers were expecting us, perhaps didn’t even see us until the end. As we sat in that meeting, one of the Workers, a young and reasonably hip one who we all adored, told a story about three little girls he knew, who’d walked out floodwaters at Nyngan, holding their hymnbooks and bibles and praying. In his story, those little girls were not scared, they knew that god was protecting them.

I was horrified. Our favourite worker. He was telling this story far and wide, that I knew was not true – not true in so many ways.

The girls and I had been terrified on that railway bridge. The girls and I had been hungry, thirsty. We’d been tired. We hadn’t even HAD our hymn books and bibles with us.

As we drove home, I plucked up the courage to ask my mum ‘why did Uncle x say those things about us walking out of town with our hymnbooks and bibles? It isn’t even true’.

She paused, clearly uncomfortable, and replied ‘sometimes workers exaggerate things, because they want people to feel safe and know god is protecting them’.

And then I knew, aged 10, that Workers shit-talk. Every single story I heard them tell after that, I did not believe.

Perhaps that little girl, who walked out of floodwaters terrified, was set on a path that day – earlier than most – of being aware that 2x2 Worker-worship feeds lies and exaggerations. No one dares pull them up on their tall tales.

This past weekend, Colac convention was held over a period with high and catastrophic fire risks. It continued even when a bushfire burned nearby.

As I watch and listen to the stories coming out of Colac Convention– I wonder ‘what exaggerated stories are those workers telling about that fire?’

Which little girls, scared and worried, are being used as fodder for their stories?

Which little girls might those stories eventually set free?

The men in my family got to do what they did best inside The Truth: Spin a yarn.

Women in my community didn’t tell stories. They did what they were told. They might push the boundaries occasionally, with a little flourished story during Sunday Morning Testimony, but it was within strict boundaries of what was ‘acceptable’ for a woman.

Women knew not to stretch their wings too wide, not to have too many opinions.

It was the lack of stories and strong women in my life that drove me to start writing as a child. Well, that and the shifting sands of our reality.

I could never pin anything down. Because nothing in The Truth 2x2s is written down, my experiences and reality were dismissed, undermined, shut down every time I spoke. So, I wrote them down, in a desperate attempt to make them real, to hold them as evidence.

I was writing down my stories and taking photos as early as eight years old – desperate for my reality to be captured somewhere.

I wrote and took photos as evidence. I scribbled and drew in a little pink diary, dutifully writing down all kinds of facts. I took photos, mountains of albums of them. Mostly terrible quality on an old Kodak Sport camera. Sometimes my mother would confiscate the camera, as punishment for not being ‘good enough’. There are sadly gaps in my photo diaries. Getting film processed was also costly, so there is that.

In my young mind I needed to capture facts and keep the details concretely written down. I wanted to be able to come back to them, to make sense of a world where my reality was constantly undermined – where I was told what I was feeling was wrong or misunderstood.

I was given silent treatment, often for things I didn’t understand. So, I wrote it down and photographed it.

Like a mad data scientist, I wrote facts, chronologies, photographed our lives.

I think at its essence, I wrote stories because I wanted to hear” yes, you’re right, that did happen” instead of “The devil is in your spirit for thinking that way”. I wanted to hear that my reality was real.

I grew up in a culture lacking in ownership and accountability. It was a culture where stories and experiences which didn’t fit our narrative and religious view were cut off, shut down, shunned and ignored. It was a culture where nothing was written down or recorded and could (and still is) undermined and questioned by Workers and Elders. It was a patriarchal, controlling culture were a girl with questions and thoughts was shut down and silenced.

I’m writing all of that in past tense, aware its very much still the case – this problem is in current tense too. Ours is a culture without written records, with no accountability. Still.

I always felt invisible.

I didn’t, and still don’t, see cult survivor stories like mine told - stories that are honest about the loss and grief of leaving a family, community, home, faith.

I don’t hear enough of our stories told - of how you can be harmed over and over again and there are so few happy endings.

We need these stories to be told, and for audiences to honour them, to hold our stories and believe us.

We need to NOT be invisible, even when our stories are messy and imperfect.

Writing and taking photos was my way of making my existence concrete, a way for my smart mouth to have an outlet.

I believe now that to shut down and silence a kid like I was, a creative, critical thinking and curious child – you create a monster.

I’m a monster who remembers, and a monster with records. That’s why my words and work elicit backlash. All those photos and stories, they’re an evidence trail, they’re receipts.

I was about eight years old the first time I thought ‘I have to remember this, one day I’ll need these details’. I’d just seen an adult male relative get into a car with a much younger girl – a girl around my own age.

There was no one to tell about what I’d seen. Even if there had been, I didn’t have vocabulary to explain it. So, I wrote it down and I remembered her.

I remembered her dark long hair, her name, her age. I remembered the weather; I remembered what I was wearing. I believed that one day I’d be able to use what I knew.

I did that repeatedly, my whole childhood – writing down and remembering the things I didn’t know how to tell anyone. Not that there was anyone to tell anyway, everyone was too busy with God.

I write carefully here in telling this – because I hold on to the hope that the evidence I hold, and the girls (now women) it relates to, will one day be able to use what I know to get justice for them and for me.

In my essays I’ll tell you what I safely can, without jeopardising the safety of victims, without compromising evidence I hope one day can bring justice to abused people.

I hope one day my stories can bring me justice too. As an observer I am also a victim– while some of these men didn’t abuse me, as a bystander child, I had to learn from and observe their behaviour. I had to keep their secrets, because I didn’t have a vocabulary to tell those stories to anyone except a little pink diary. Thats called secondary trauma.

There were countless inappropriate interactions I observed, countless experiences of seeing 2x2 men in inappropriate interactions with younger girls and teenage ‘women’.

I tried to have a radar for inappropriate men. I was hypervigilant, something I became to try to ensure my own safety and that of my siblings.

I watched my siblings and cousins like a hawk, always concerned they’d be conned into situations which were unsafe. I was like a hen, always clucking around working out where my siblings were, ensuring they were cared for, accounted for. I was controlling, always watching, always trying to protect. I’ve had to have parenting classes to learn how not to be controlling and coercive with my own child.

If I had to admit to a weakness, it’s overprotecting and over-loving. I know I’m a lioness.

My diary entries from the time are written in desperation, a kind of pleading to be recognised and seen.

My diaries are filled with a kid wondering if she exists or is invisible – because that’s what happens when the adults around you skirt around the difficult stuff and pretend it isn’t there – it diminishes your feelings and essentially gaslights you into believing that issues are ‘all in your head’.

I wrote with curiosity about other kids lives – wondering if they also cared for siblings, ironed dresses and made lunches. I wrote of wondering how their home lives differed to mine – because I knew that my home and community was vastly different to other kids, I just didn’t know how because I never saw behind their doors.

I wrote of wanting to listen to pop music, watch TV and movies, so I could participate in conversations with kids at school.

I consoled myself in that little diary with ‘at least I’m going to Heaven, and they aren’t’ for the times I was teased and ostracised by kids at school for my lack of knowledge about pop culture.

I find my sister in the girls’ toilets, sitting by the basins crying. Between sobs she tells me that Anna, the daughter of the local politican, who is popular, considered pretty and very smart, has been picking on her because she’s running the long-distance athletics competition, in her long school dress.

The girls in our 2x2 community all wear long dresses. Our school dresses have longer sleeves and longer hem lines than the rest of the school kids. We wear our dresses even on Fridays when other kids wear a sports uniform. We don’t have trousers or shorts for Fridays – girls from 2x2s don’t wear what is considered ‘men’s clothing’. Trousers are immodest on girls.

All the girls in my family love sport. Several of us are NSW District and Regional champions in various athletics events at both primary and secondary school– We win competitions, all while wearing a dress. I even represent the region at NSW State swimming, in what can be best described as a lycra mini-wetsuit. Very modest.

As my sister sobs, I catch a glimpse of myself in the tiny bathroom mirror. My face is red, my eyes huge. I’m angry.

‘That ANNA, leave her with me’ I hiss ‘She’s pretty and clever but she isn’t very nice. She’s Worldly and people like her don’t go to heaven’.

I grab my sister, wipe her eyes on the bottom of my school dress. Straighten her out, send her back out to play.

I storm out of the girl’s bathroom, across the playground to where I’ve spotted Anna and her gal-pals playing tiggy.

I march up to her, grab her by the collar of her fancy store bought school uniform (did I mention mum makes all our clothes?), I shove my pointer finger in her face and I declare ‘You tease my sister again Anna, and I’ll put more than my finger into your face’.

I turn around, march back the library. I leave a speechless Anna in my wake. I curl up with a book, throw myself into reading fiction, go to another world where the Anna’s don’t exist.

Anna is not the only girl-fight I get into over the course of my childhood. I fight some girls in bathrooms when I overhear them picking on my stepbrothers, I fight a bunch of girls in the corner of the library when they get jealous of my friendships with the boys they’re swooning after (I always prefer the friendship of boys…rainbow flag alert anyone?) I even fight Uncle Squeaky at the public pool one day, when he thinks I’m laughing too loudly at him. He and I wrestle and exchange soft blows, as he tries to make me behave myself.

I fight still.

I’ve always been a fighter……a creator and a writer.

It’s not to be.

I’m writing and publishing more these days. I’m proud of myself. But its not without tears.

When I write its with great grief that I push ‘publish’ without their approval, without them beside me. I wanted them here, to laugh and to cry with me about what happened to us.

It’s not to be.

I tried, for decades to wait for them and to get their approval. I wanted my family and community to approve of my work, to stand beside me in the photos for media, to be with me. I wanted their stories to be here too. Mine isn’t even the worst story and I know it.

It’s not to be.

Everyone has their own way to heal, goes on their own journey. Some of them don’t want to heal or go on any journey.

I’ve got to let it be.

Some of them want to ‘put it in a box and forget about it*’.

*quote unquote and a reminder to myself come back and finish that piece on the musical boxes my siblings are storing the trauma in*

In 2024 I realised I’ve got to let go, start living without the hope they will return. (You can read about some of it here)

They can’t love and hold me the way I need to be loved and held.

I was holding hope and space for people who can’t and won’t do the same for me.

I’ve cried so many tears. I gave away so much of myself to try to protect others – so much of my own dignity I sacrificed for people who couldn’t see me. Couldn’t protect me.

I’m ashamed of myself for how much of my dignity I gave up – to fight for people who wouldn’t fight for me. I fought to protect the lives and reputations of people who it turns out had no interest in protecting me.

They’ve said repeatedly when I’ve asked for protection ‘what about me?’

What about me.

When I asked for protection from a family member who was harassing and abusing me (and threatening to burn my house down at one point) one of my siblings turned to me and said ‘What about me? Who is going to protect me?’

When I left home and our community, everyone cried. The kids said, ‘who is going to look after us?’ That has left me with enormous guilt for leaving them there in an unsafe home with an unstable parent.

In 2024 when I found a bunch of them had attended the wedding of that same family member who threatened to burn my house down– I broke. I vomited. (read here)

Then I was set free and I started to hit ‘publish’ more often.

I was expected, as an eldest parentified girl, as a competent and practical child – to ‘be there’ for everyone else. What they expected was that I would forever be loyal. I would tolerate the worst of abuse and still protect them.

There is something dysfunctional, toxic in the expectations of eldest daughters in Truth 2x2 communities. We’re to hold up the world for the little ones. We’re to be unendingly tolerate, protective. We’re to forgive and forget. We’re to absorb the blows, smile sweetly back.

It breaks my heart, but I’m not going to be that person who dies of grief at their loss.

I’m going to keep going, keep growing, keep naming the ways we’ve been harmed.

I’m going to create and live in the world that I deserve.

I’m going to live a million different lives, without them.

Naming the reason I stayed near them, the reasons I pleaded and tolerated is difficult. It means examining my own desperate desire for belonging, love, acceptance. It means accepting that I have allowed people to harm me when I should have walked.

It means accepting that I wanted so desperately to be loved, to be affirmed – that I allowed my family and community to erase me and silence me, in my desperation for love.

I, the queerest kid that ever walked out of that family, wanted them to accept me. They can’t and they won’t. Accepting me as I am, means looking into their own hearts and their own bias and saying ‘fuck Laura, I’m so sorry we treated you that way’…and they can’t. These are not people raised to have self-examination. These are not people raised to apologize*.

The best I will get is my pink book of apologies I’ve written myself. If I’ve learnt one thing in the past 26 years – it’s that people who can’t apologise, mend, heal with people – they’re aplenty in the 2x2 and ex 2x2 communities*.

Relational healing, mending isn’t taught to 2x2s. We’re taught silent treatment, pretending nothing is wrong while silently seething and repeating the same harm perpetrated on us. We’re taught to hide, hope the problems go away. Pop back up in a month, say you prayed on it, it’s all gone away.

None of this is ‘going away’. I’m not ‘going away’. I’m getting louder. I’m encouraging other survivors of 2x2 abuse to speak. It’s going to get more uncomfortable for everyone as the decades pass. I’m ok with that. I accept that discomfort.

My acceptance of the discomfort still doesn’t stop me sobbing with grief every time I hit ‘publish’ that they’re not here.

The acceptance of ‘what is’ doesn’t stop me glancing sideways at my son and seeing my baby sister at the same age – and it punches the air out of my lungs that it’s not her…it’s my baby who looks just like her, from the right-hand side.

I would fight like a lioness for anyone I loved. Sometimes Its misguided. Sometimes you got to let the other lions eat them.

I’ve got to let the other lions eat them.

It’s not to be. I’ve got to learn to live a million new lives, without them.

*Kyle released this episode (worth listening) which seems to be on a similar vein.

We’re not taught in the 2x2s how to heal fractures in relationships, how to hold each other in mistakes. We’re taught to be loyal as women and girls of 2x2s, how to ‘forget’ and ‘forgive’. A forced forgiveness because the alternative is excommunication. We’re not taught how to apologise at all. Apology is something my family and community cannot do. How does a people heal when there is no apology, and endemic abuse?

It leads to exactly what I have described above – some daughters doing all the holding and all the fighting, while the others stalk silently around expecting that she’ll always do that and all is forgiven.

We’ve got a problem and it’s a lack of relationality, a lack of ability to heal all the moral injuries. We should work out how to do something about that, in our ex-communities.

If anyone has ideas how to have this conversation on the podcast over at Truth 2x2 Cult Kids - I’m all ears. We need to talk about healing, apology and 2x2s inability to do so.

Why? Because my father goes to prison.

Given the endemic nature of CSA in 2x2s, it feels important to say here: The man was involved in what was at the time, the biggest marijuana cultivating operation in NSW. I think he just got tired of being poor, and who can blame him. Poverty is the pits.

Even for our unorthodox, anti-authoritarian community – this is a big deal. Going to prison for this drug haul is a scandal that far exceeds Uncle Tony’s burnt-out caravan.

The irony of all of this, is how CSA offenders (both accused and convicted) are given such little consequences in the 2x2s.

Its my observation, that in both my family and community, the consequences for marijuana cultivation have far exceeded the consequences for endemic child abuse.

What does that tell you about our values and culture in the Truth 2x2s?

My father’s legacy still follows me. Being a McConnell from that that clan has a whole lot of stigma attached.

When I first started speaking under my own name, there was a cohort of ex 2x2’s who told me I shouldn’t be the one to speak to media or tell my story publicly.

I was told my story was not representative of a ‘typical’ Truth 2x2 story. Sometimes that comment crops up on YouTube videos or under news articles. I know exactly what they mean when they write that: They mean I am ‘not credible’ because of who I am.

I believed the naysayers from the ex-community for about a decade – I thought our story was too complex, my family too broken to count.

The 2x2s thrive on hierarchy, on narrative control. The lower you sit, the more marginalised you are – the more they’ll try to silence you, dismiss you.

Now I believe the more complex, broken, poor, abused your family was in 2x2s – the louder your story needs to be told. Workers and the 2x2 system love broken people – it’s exactly who they prey on.

The broken people are the ones who need to tell the stories. The broken people are where the most harm took/takes place.

Out there in that red dirt - we are unceremoniously, rejected. It is my first of three excommunications from the Truth 2x2s. Two excommunications happen in quick succession.

Dad wasn’t even in prison when the extended family and community decide we are to be excommunicated.

Except no one names it or discusses it with us. We’re just invisible.

As soon as he is charged, no one from our family or Truth 2x2 community will come near us. Mum, desperate to be supported and held, tries to call the new Elder (dad had been our Elder) and the other Friends in our community – no one will take her calls.

She decides she can’t stay, and starts packing to take us back south, 9 hours to the NSW Victorian border to her family.

We come home to discover a bunch of empty cardboard boxes left on the doorstep. The next day we discover a double axel trailer in the driveway.

Eventually, mum realises it’s her friend Lou who is leaving things. She’s one of my mother’s few close friends. She lives a few farms over from our farm, has a bunch of kids around our age.

Its harvest season, Lou is driving tractors and chaser bins all day and half the night, with her husband. Somehow, she is also caring for a bunch of small kids, who she homeschools via school of air.

None-the-less Lou has found the time to drop off boxes, and a bigger trailer than the little one we have. A few days later, she hears on the evening-country-grape-vine that we’re about to leave, and she arrives on our doorstep.

She’s spent all day harvesting, covered in dirt, sporting a dirt ring around her head from an Akubra hat. She’s also sporting a splitting headache, ‘probably just dehydrated and heatstroke’ she matter-of-factly tells me, as if its nothing more than a stubbed toe.

Lou, dear Lou, despite the dirt, the fatigue and headache, helps us hitch that trailer, load up those boxes, and she drives south with us. She is one of very few who will speak to us, acknowledge us, let alone help us.

Mum and Lou take turns to drive. Us kids take turns to watch out the rear window for flying boxes and random furniture. Neither mum nor Lou can tie down ropes properly, so the load is rather insecure. They have also haphazardly tied a small cane sofa to the car roof racks, and sporadically one of us is instructed to wind down the window, stick our head out and check the sofa is still attached.

We drive all night to the border, and Lou promptly catches the next greyhound bus back – back to her harvesting husband, a chaser bin, her Akubra hat and several boxes of Panadol I suspect.

For about a decade afterwards, whenever dear Lou hears of someone driving south, she loads them up with our left-over household items, things she’s salvaged that wouldn’t fit on the trailer. Sometimes, we’d arrive home from school to discover a pot plant, carefully wrapped by Lou and sent south with someone random she’s met at the service station. Another time, the kids’ pushbikes appear. The kids have long outgrown them, a fact Lou will no doubt have pre-empted - but none the less, she has sent them.

For about a decade, we look forward to the sporadic arrival of whatever Lou will gift back next, gifts from a life and a world that we have lost.

--------------------

It’s not clear to me, and perhaps to anyone really in our family and community, how the assets of our extended farming family are structured.

This is a highly abusive family - with endemic sexual abuse, physical abuse, financially controlling. Then overlay the religious and spiritual abuse, and some excommunication, for an extra layer of control and coercion.

In Australia its common in farming families for assets to be pooled, to be held in the name of some members over others. Often the older male generation hold the farm assets, and the younger generation farm the land for income each year.

It’s common for multigenerational families to hold assets away from women and common for there to be no written agreements about succession of assets or access to income generating land.

I have learnt in the past 30 years that its particularly common in 2x2 farming families, for women to have little to no financial independence. Divorce is rarely an option. Women don’t leave these communities, and if they dare to like my mother did – they leave with nothing.

We leave far western NSW with very little, having farmed there for over a decade.

My mother had a house in town, which she had paid for mostly herself from her own teaching income. We lose part of the sale of the house to the NSW Crime Commission, when its deemed a proceed of crime.

To my knowledge, none of the family farm assets are forfeited as the proceeds of crime, and nor are they passed on to my mother.

My father has another family – on the farm next door. They stay. Uncle Squeaky eventually moves out and the farm is purchased/absorbed into the family farms.

We are excommunicated from our McConnell family and community, left homeless and even more broke.

My nan, the woman I love the most in the whole world – never speaks to me again. The woman who hugs me when my own mother will not – excommunicates me. She dies 20 years later, never having seen me again.

We go back to our equally large, extended maternal 2x2 community. There, we endure another round of excommunication or being ‘asked not to participate’. Mum lands in the 2x2 community there and is framed as a ‘single mother’. Single mothers cannot participate.

Being a ‘single mother’ is taboo. Never mind that her husband is in fucking prison and has a second family.

Meanwhile, we hear stories of Workers visiting dad in prison, singing hymns and reading the bible with him in Bathurst Correctional Centre.

We hear that nan sits beside dad before and after his court hearings, waiting with him in the holding cells until he is taken back to prison.

Other than Lou, no one sits beside us, no one sings us hymns.

The only Workers who visit us are Ernie Barry and Chris Chandler – who take the opportunity to prey on us. My experiences of their grooming and abuse are well documented thanks to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse.

We are told by mum, over and over and over and over ‘Never tell anyone what we’ve come from. No one will understand.’

Us kids are told that we can’t tell anyone about our lives before this, about our dad, about our family. None of it is to exist.

My maternal grandparents, staunch and deep 2x2 followers (I’m 5^th generation through them) do lightly and gently support us, but truthfully we are a bit of an embarrassment. They love us, no doubt. But they’re ashamed of us, they want us as small and quiet in the community as possible. ‘Don’t make a fuss, don’t make waves. Sit quietly on the sidelines of the Meetings until you’re allowed back in’.

So – at 13, I lose my father, my nan, my community and my home. We’re driven across the state and put in another community who also don’t want us. We’re told to never talk about what we’ve lost.

We’re told to sit quietly on the sidelines and wait. This is our second excommunication / shunning in mere months, and to top it off we are preyed upon by two well-known predatory Workers.

Could there be a more Truth 2x2 story? Why is it so uncomfortable for some to hear and accept this is what happened? Why are there people who don’t want this to be a story in the public domain?

I think I know the answer: its uncomfortable because there are people who should have done more, said more.

There are people who wish they had been like Lou.

In a weird twist, one of Lou’s daughters goes on to marry one of my stepbrothers. This turn of events is slightly bizarre, in the way that all good McConnell stories are.

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