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<\/p>\nRosalind Piper was in her mid-20s, managing the Gloucester Motel in Pemberton in Western Australia, when a well-dressed man walked through the door and asked for her help.<\/p>\n
“He said he was looking for his daughter and she’d gone missing,” Ms Piper said.<\/p>\n
He’d got word his daughter had joined a spiritual group and had travelled the 330 kilometres from Perth to find her.<\/p>\n
“He didn’t know what he was coming to or where.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rosalind Piper was working at the Gloucester Motel in Pemberton when a man came in looking for his daughter. (ABC News: Jacqueline Lynch)<\/p>\n
It was 1985, and forestry, farming and local footy were the backbone of the close-knit Pemberton community.<\/p>\n
All the locals knew each other, and the start and end of each day was marked by a loud whistle from the local timber mill ringing through the town.<\/p>\n
Ms Piper had noticed newcomers clad in orange and red, but until this worried father walked through the door, she hadn’t paid them much attention.<\/p>\n
These new, brightly dressed people Ms Piper noticed were part of the notorious Rajneesh movement, led by the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.<\/p>\n
It was not the first or last religious sect to move into Western Australia’s South West.<\/p>\n
Watch Expanse: The Nannup Four on ABC iView<\/a><\/p>\n Learn more about the baffling disappearance of four people from a remote WA farmhouse, a case that has puzzled Australia for nearly two decades.<\/p>\n Spiritual sects and cult activity in WA’s South West<\/p>\n In 1973, the Universal Brotherhood established a commune in Balingup, reflecting a broader trend of spiritual movements seeking isolation in WA’s South West.<\/p>\n Decades later, in the early 2000s, an online cult called The Truth Fellowship operated from an isolated farmhouse on the outskirts of Nannup<\/a>.<\/p>\n Its leader, a man known online as “Si”, used a web forum to reach devotees, as revealed in the ABC podcast Expanse<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2007, he disappeared alongside three others, including a child<\/a>. One theory of their disappearance is that it was a cult-inspired suicide pact.<\/p>\n Rabbi Raphael Aron believes the pandemic drove young adults to cults. (ABC News)<\/p>\n Cult expert Raphael Aron told Expanse that geographic isolation of these kinds of locations is appealing to cult movements.<\/p>\n “People have been completely isolated from their families, isolated from the community, so that the cult leader has full and absolute total control.”<\/p>\n ‘Orange people’ move in<\/p>\n In Pemberton, the Rajneesh group had managed to secure a sub-lease for Karri Valley Resort on the outskirts of the town.<\/p>\n But what the group hadn’t counted on was the strength of the local community.<\/p>\n Members of the Rajneesh movement secured a sublease for Karri Valley resort in 1985. (ABC news: Jacqueline Lynch)<\/p>\n Ms Piper describes what happened after they arrived as “a great, great coming together” of the town.<\/p>\n “We didn’t want something unsavoury like that out in the bush coming into the Pemberton life.”<\/p>\n Bev Lawrence was working at the resort and living nearby when the new tenants moved in.<\/p>\n “They would all be out there jumping up and down and hugging and kissing,” she said.<\/p>\n The move into Pemberton by members of the Rajneesh movement made news headlines. (ABC news: Jacqueline Lynch)<\/p>\n At first, the group continued running the resort, but as more members turned up, it was closed to the public.<\/p>\n Within weeks, Mrs Lawrence was out of a job.<\/p>\n “You could see that the writing was on the wall, and I was given my ‘don’t come Monday.'”<\/p>\n In the months that followed, up to 80 children arrived at Karri Valley, and a development application was put to the shire to create a school on the property.<\/p>\n Ken and Bev Lawrence owned a property opposite Karri Valley resort when members of the Rajneesh movement moved in. (ABC news: Jacqueline Lynch)<\/p>\n Mrs Lawrence said the children had been sent there by their parents, with only a number of adults present at the commune.<\/p>\n She and her husband, Ken, would drive past the resort and see the children dressed in pastel clothes.<\/p>\n “You’d see them running around occasionally, or they’d be standing at the fence,” Mrs Lawrence said.<\/p>\n “I did call it an orphanage originally, for kids, because that was basically what it was like; it was frightening.”<\/p>\n It’s an aspect of the Rajneesh sect former member Bruce Menzies regrets.<\/p>\n Although he kept his family together during his time in the sect, he said many children were separated from their parents at the encouragement of the guru.<\/p>\n Bruce Menzies said his time with the Rajneesh movement was one of spiritual growth. (Supplied)<\/p>\n “Many of us parents were so focused on our own thing that we didn’t pay as much attention to the kids as was desirable, I can certainly say that in hindsight,” he said<\/p>\n Geographic isolation leads to lack of critique<\/p>\n Mr Aron said that through things like geographic isolation, cults remove the opportunity for members to hear outside critique, which might lead them to question their leader.<\/p>\n “It’s an organisation or a structure which denies people their autonomy, their independence of thought, their ability to make decisions,” he said.<\/p>\n “Everything is controlled \u2026 to the point that people lose their own sense of identity, their own sense of self.”<\/p>\n Reflecting on his time with the sect, Mr Menzies has to try to separate these troubling aspects from the spiritual growth and connection he did experience with the group.<\/p>\n Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh owned nearly 100 Rolls Royces and would do daily drive-bys past his disciples. (Wikimedia Commons: Samvado Gunnar Kossatz)<\/p>\n He was living in Fremantle with his wife and sons and working as a lawyer when he was drawn to the movement.<\/p>\n “We were really at a stage in our lives where we were looking into a crystal ball and wondering what it all meant,” he said.<\/p>\n Mr Menzies and his wife sold their home, giving money from the sale to the movement, and travelled to India to be closer to the guru, living in the Pune commune.<\/p>\n Listen to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n In 2007 four people disappeared from an isolated blue farmhouse on the outskirts of the WA town of Nannup. They left behind a letter on the door and a trail of bizarre clues.<\/p>\n He formed close friendships as he embarked on what he calls a psychological and spiritual experiment, with meditation at the centre of his practise.<\/p>\n “Many of us became very good friends, very close because we shared the dream.”<\/p>\n Mr Menzies eventually moved to Oregon after the group bought a cattle ranch in Antelope and transformed it into a commune.<\/p>\n “The dream was creating an ideal society; we built a city essentially on that large piece of dirt,” he said.<\/p>\n Locals came together to fight back against the commune<\/p>\n Tensions between the Rajneesh and the Antelope community escalated, and there were allegations of corruption, wire-tapping, murder plots and bioterrorism.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in Western Australia, Pemberton locals were hearing stories of the chaotic unravelling in Oregon, and fears grew that the same would happen to their tiny town.<\/p>\n The Rajneesh organisation bought and established a commune at a 260-square-kilometre ranch in Oregon in 1981. Some 2,000 people moved there. (Getty Images: Matthew Naython)<\/p>\n That fear escalated when Bhagwan’s right-hand woman, Ma Anand Sheela, visited Pemberton, later appearing in a 60 Minutes interview where she told the local community it was “tough titties” if they did not want the sect there.<\/p>\n Ma Anand Sheela, the group’s second in charge, was eventually jailed for her involvement in a mass poisoning. (Supplied: Netflix)<\/p>\n Ms Piper recalls the local hall “bursting at the seams” when a series of meetings were held opposing the group’s presence in Pemberton.<\/p>\n “When there is something threatening the whole town and our livelihood, everyone got together, and they were all against it in the end,” she said.<\/p>\n The group’s development application for the school was knocked back by the shire, and the orange people left Karri Valley Resort as quickly as they arrived.<\/p>\n Rosalind Piper remembers Pemberton locals coming together to fight the presence of the Rajneesh movement. (ABC news: Jacqueline Lynch)<\/p>\n For locals like Ms Piper, that dramatic year has become a blip in the town’s sprawling history and something people still laugh about down at the pub.<\/p>\n “It became a catch phrase, anything you disagreed with ‘tough titties.'”<\/p>\n But for Mr Menzies, the collapse of the movement meant re-entering a world he’d forgotten how to live in.<\/p>\n “When the whole thing imploded, we had to come back into normal, ordinary society,” he said.<\/p>\n “A lot of my time after that was trying to make sense of the whole experience.”<\/p>\n Follow Expanse: The Nannup Four on ABC listen<\/a> to hear every episode of season six.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/48de0863f11e36301ef17ee422e7ceb8.jpeg\")
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