WikiLeaks by Luke Harding, David Leigh Read Free Book Online Page B

was now also running into problems. Brett Assange, who ran the puppet theatre with her, was a good and close stepfather. Assange would in later life often quote sayings “from my father” such as, “Capable, generous men do not create victims: they nurture them.” Brett Assange would later describe his stepson as “a very sharp kid” with a “keen sense of right and wrong”. But according to transcripts of a court hearing Brett was, at the time, “plagued with difficulties with alcohol”. When Assange was seven or eight, his stepfather was removed from his life, when he and Christine divorced.
    Assange’s mother then became tempestuously involved with a third, much younger man, Keith Hamilton. Hamilton was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association. He was also, according to Assange, a manipulative psychopath. Hamilton allegedly had five differentidentities. “His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth,” Assange claimed in Underground . Despite its respectable-sounding name, The Santiniketan Park Association was a notorious cult presided over by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a yoga teacher who convinced her middle-class followers she was a reincarnation of Jesus. Keith Hamilton was not only associated with the cult. He may even have been Hamilton-Byrne’s son. Hamilton-Byrne and her helpers collected children, often persuading teenage mothers to hand over their babies. She and her disciples – “the aunties” – lived together in an isolated rural property surrounded by a barbed wire fence and overlooking a lake near the town of Eildon, Victoria. Here, they administered a bizarre regime over their charges, who at one point numbered 28 children. There were regular beatings. Children had their heads held down in buckets of water.
    Assange’s mother tried to leave Keith Hamilton in 1982, a court transcript reports, resulting in a custody battle for Assange’s half-brother, Jamie. Hamilton was an abusive partner who “had been physically violent”, court documents allege. Assange says Hamilton now pursued his mother, forcing her to flee repeatedly with her children. Assange told an Australian journalist in 2010: “My mother had become involved with a person who seems to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down, possibly because of leaks in the social security system, and having to leave very quickly to a new city, and lived under assumed names.”
    For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives. Christine travelled to Melbourne, then fled to Adelaide for six months, and on to Perth. As a teenager, Assange returned to Melbourne, living with his mother in at least four different refuges. The WikiLeaks founder was to act out this pattern of evasive action all over again in 2010, believing he was being pursued by US intelligence because of his WikiLeaks exposures.
    Court files from the teenage Assange’s eventual hacking trial in Melbourne – of which more later – document some of the effects of such a strange life on a gifted teenager with a strong aptitude for mathematics. His lawyer said Assange was deprived of the chance to make friends or associate normally with his peers. “His background is quite tragic in a way.” Underground describes a “dead boring” Melbourne suburb: “merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto [spouse]. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time … his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.”
    When Assange was 13 or 14, his mother had rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange began going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved to buy the computer for her older son as a present.