Cult fiction: The Bearcat explores the making of a ‘master manipulator’
The debut novel from Adelaide-based Georgia Rose Phillips delves into the fascinating backstory of the girl who grew up to become the woman behind ‘The Family’.
Cults and their charismatic leaders hold a dark fascination in the popular imagination, and none is more compelling than the figure of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the late founder of ‘The Family’ in 1960s Victoria. Self-proclaimed messiah Hamilton-Byrne and her bevy of white-haired children have been the focus of a flurry of documentaries and adaptations for page and screen over the last decade, but writer and academic Georgia Rose Phillips has taken a distinctive approach to the life of this notorious cult leader.
Rather than explore the well-trodden ground of fraud, illegal adoptions, hallucinogenic drugs and Anne’s idiosyncratic mix of eastern and western spirituality, Phillips turns instead to the years before the cult’s formation, reimagining the relationships and events that shaped the upbringing of the woman who would create Australia’s most infamous cult.
“As cult leaders go, there aren’t many women,” Phillips told InReview. “So that was intriguing for me as a writer. I had a sort of male archetype in my mind about what a cult leader was and how they might behave and maintain their power. So I think the gender element definitely added interest for me.”
A prolific writer across multiple genres from poetry to creative non-fiction, The Bearcat is Phillips’ debut novel. She began research into Hamilton-Byrne five years ago, while tackling her PhD on historical fiction at the University of NSW. Now, with her degree and many writing awards under her belt, Phillips is living and working in Adelaide.
The novel creates a nuanced psychological portrait of a mother and child, delving into both Anne Hamilton-Byrne’s childhood and her mother Florence’s experiences as a young mother in rural Victoria in the early 1920s. Through these dual perspectives, Phillips immerses readers in the early years of Anne’s life, imagining new motherhood through Florence’s eyes, then exploring Anne’s inner-life from adolescence into young adulthood.
"I found a way into the novel by asking what did she lose to give her this pathological urge to build a cult fashioned in the shape of a family?"
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“I found it hard to write [Anne’s] character, because she seemed so far from anything I was familiar with. She seemed to break so many expectations of gender and behaviour. So that was definitely something that I was curious about from the start – the fictional possibilities of her character,” Phillips explained. “I found a way into the novel by asking what did she lose to give her this pathological urge to build a cult fashioned in the shape of a family?”
Meticulously researched and richly imagined, one of the many strengths of this novel lies in Phillips’ potent language and her ability to immerse readers in the time, place and inner life of both Florence and her singular daughter. Given that most readers will come to the novel with preconceptions about the character of the already notorious public figure, Phillips is careful not to excuse or condone Anne’s behaviour.
“I’m hesitant to say that I sympathise with her, because she is recognised as a cruel person who’s left such a terrible legacy on many people’s lives,” Phillips explains. “So when I’m writing, I craft characters and then deliver them to the reader to make sense of them. I like to trust the reader, to give them something and have them make sense of that experience.”
The novel reveals the stories of Florence and Anne using a fragmentary approach, cutting the narrative into short, non-chronological chapters that form a mosaic image of the two women’s lives. “I didn’t think I could fully cover Anne’s whole life,’ Phillips explains.
“So I wanted to convey moments that felt pivotal within the arc of her character. So it was definitely a selective process and there’s a sense of fragmentation. And I also wanted to craft moments from Florence and Anne’s lives that had some sense of thematic resonance between them.”
"I like to trust the reader, to give them something and have them make sense of that experience."
When choosing these pivotal moments that would both tell the story and reveal character, Phillips describes her approach. “I often looked at adult Anne, observing and thinking about the things that she’d done later in her life, and I worked backwards, imagining what could have happened in her early life to make her that way. Or I would choose a historical fact, use it to draw out a larger scene and then think about what that fact would have meant for Anne’s psyche and emotional state and where she was at that point in her life.”
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One of the themes binding the fragmented narrative together is family – those that raise us, those we choose and the powerful legacy of familial trauma. The choice to observe Anne’s formative years from the perspective of her mother was a breakthrough moment for Phillips.
“I couldn’t find the right voice,” Phillips says of an initial decision to write from Anne’s point of view.
“It wasn’t working, because to me, she’s a character who has manipulated her own story and just completely gone rogue with it. She was a master manipulator. And then I became really interested in Florence, the idea of her being a 1920s woman from South London, living in a densely populated place but being inexperienced with men before marrying and immediately moving to Sale [in country Victoria].”
Phillips was captured by the unspoken trauma and isolation Florence must have experienced as an immigrant, new wife and young mother.
“I found these flashes of resonance between Anne and Florence’s stories. I think there’s quite a different tone and register to the two parts, but I hope it sort of clashes and carbonizes at the same time.”
When asked how she settled on The Bearcat as the novel’s title, Phillips laughs, explaining that it’s term that was used in the1920s as slang for a fiery girl or woman.
“It’s been quite an interesting thing to talk to people about. I kind of wanted something that had teeth — I feel like this novel has teeth. And Anne herself sort of seems like part cat, part bear, and a bit conniving.
“And it’s an obscure creature. Apparently, it looks a bit like a red Panda but darker, and it’s got whiskers. And it’s meant to smell like popcorn,” Phillips chuckles. “And at some stage someone decided it would be a great insult. A way to call someone a nasty woman. So it’s gendered – a bearcat is a girl or a woman behaving outside expectations. I thought it was interesting, but it was also quite subversive.
“A bit like her,” Phillips reflects.
The Bearcat by Georgia Rose Phillips (Picador Australia) is out now