Who bombed the Hilton? (29 page)

Amazingly, all the photographers standing in front of her outside the main entrance to the Palais don't do a thing but just snap away. The following day's papers are full of ‘photos of the woman sitting cross-legged, hands on knees in a yoga position in the middle of intense flames'.
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I don't know whether to write this off simply as ‘it was the '70s' or whether it's an example of hardline journalism to unflinchingly record the brutal truth, but it's a scene that is hard to digest. The spectators must have been aware of what was about to occur. How many ways are there to interpret the petrol, the robes, the expression of joy on sweet Lynette's face? The photograph that adorns the front page of
The Age
of her burning — her arms slightly raised, her skin already black with her skull beginning to show — leaves little to the imagination.
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Of all these burnt Margiis, Lynette is the only one I can get any intimate sense of. Her short biography is one of ongoing heartbreak and despair, like some luckless character in a Greek tragedy. Intensively sensitive as a child, Lynette Phillips so wanted God that, she later wrote, she cried ‘tears night after night wanting to know that reality'.
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This rich girl from a good Jewish family may in fact have been reeling from the unpleasant separation of her extremely successful parents just after she turned six. From that point on she remains conflicted, her loyalties painfully split between them. By the time she starts high school, first at SCEGGS, a private girls' school, and then at North Sydney Girls High, a selective state school, teachers regard her as a ‘lovely' and ‘gifted' girl who is also ‘very frightened'.
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By her final year of high school in 1971, her father is so perturbed by her mental fragility he takes her to see a psychologist. The assessment in part reads, ‘Lyn is still well aware that you and Mrs Phillips are in a contest about her. She is unable to commit herself to either side of this conflict because the penalties for doing so would be enormous.' The psychologist added that in his view Lynette ‘would exploit the situation to her own disadvantage'.
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Therapy does not help. The following year she drops out of Medicine at the University of New South Wales after only a few months and starts to travel, unravel and take drugs. There are three patchy years
of rattling back and forth between Asia and Sydney until eventually, in 1975, she winds up with a faith healer in the Philippines. This leads on to vegetarianism, which leads her to the Margiis. She joins the Australian Ananda Marga in 1975 and, interestingly, unlike our friend Timothy Jones, continues to see her parents on a regular basis. In fact she frequently has her Margii comrades over for extended stays at Mum or Dad's well-appointed homes. Her parents are understandably relieved that at least she's off drugs and appears to have some purpose. Lynette is taken with the social services agenda of the religion, as are her parents. However, it will be said that even within the sect she remains troubled. Another sect member, Bruce Dyer, will tell a reporter some months after her death that she could not find her niche and ‘she did not have a special skill to offer'.
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You have to wonder what kind of special skill one needs to shine in a religion like this. I wouldn't have thought yoga, meditating a lot, doling out soup or collecting money for disaster victims would have been such a stretch for someone who was capable of becoming a doctor. This statement reads to me like someone trying to play down her unstable personality. The fact is, Lynette appears to be a perfect candidate for a cult — passionate, fragile, single-minded, fanatical, devoted and rich.

By September 1977 her mother, Millie, worried
again, offers to pay for Lynette to go to a clinic in Switzerland and sends her off with a clutch of credit cards. Lynette appears to love the idea, but it's a ruse. She disappears after a few weeks and goes on a spending spree across Europe. Millie cancels the credit cards. At the start of the New Year, Lynette, still in Europe, goes on an Ananda Marga women's retreat which she describes in long letters to each parent as giving her peace, serenity and the strength she craves.
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By late February, after the Hilton bombing, her horizons once again begin to darken and churn. She finds out that a Margii friend of hers, a German girl, Erica, has burnt herself to death, and she writes to her father Harold, ‘It was quite a shock to hear the news.' Apart from being quite spaced out about her future, she was completely calm and normal, ‘emanating a peacefulness and positivity seldom experienced before'. She then adds a disturbing postscript, which must constrict her father's heart — ‘but for me the burning is going to take too much time. Five minutes of petrol flame would be too easy for me and of no use to anyone.'
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A few days later, coinciding with the Margii arrests in Bangkok and Manila, she writes that while she believes that the members of Ananda Marga and Prout are perfectly harmless, she also believes ‘some troublemakers were sheltering under Prout's umbrella'.
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Despite, or because of, her consternation, she joins Prout. In April, Lynette attempts to visit Sarkar
in prison and flies into Calcutta airport. The Indians don't like the look of her and deport her. It's at this stage that her father, a British citizen, arranges for her to get a UK passport and she travels to London and scores a transcribing job at the BBC. A Mrs Sheila Barton says of Lynette's time there, ‘She seemed an ordinary, pleasant girl and talked about how she'd like to help people.'
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By June 1978 she travels to Copenhagen, to the world headquarters of Prout, and works for both them and Ananda Marga. She keeps writing to Millie and Harold, sending them epic 20-page sagas and ringing them every few weeks. In a letter to her dad in July she says she finds the work for Prout ‘boring' and ‘mundane'.
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Harold suggests they meet up and Lynette agrees so he books his ticket to fly to Europe on 9 August.

It is here that things become so hopelessly sad. Could her death have been prevented if she and her father had met? But fate conspires against them. Some time in July, Lynette goes to visit a training camp for Ananda Marga nuns deep in the cool dark forests of Sweden. She is smitten both by the location — an exquisite tiny village near a limpid lake — and by the Margii who runs the training. He is so taken with her, he offers to train her as a nun for free, instead of having to pay the going rate, an offer which is very ‘unusual'. In a letter to Harold she makes it clear she has considered such a vocation before and now may be
the time to undertake the months of gruelling practice involving ‘intensive meditation, study and discipline (4 am rise, cold washes etc.)'.
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Then silence. In early August Harold calls Prout's Copenhagen office in anticipation of his arrival on 9 August, only to be told that Lynette has left to begin her training as a Margii nun and will not be back for months. He cancels his flight. A few days later he gets a letter from his daughter telling him she has indeed taken the plunge to become a nun.
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Whatever happens next unhinges her sufficiently to set herself on fire in nine weeks' time. It's difficult to track her movements. Despite the fact the training is meant to take three to nine months, she apparently leaves Sweden and the training camp a few weeks later accompanied by a middle-aged Brazilian woman, the same one who will be deported from Britain on 26 September and who will also eventually self-immolate.
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What has Lynette's tragic trajectory and suicide got to do with Michael Brandon and his confiscated passport?

‘Campaigns of violence and intimidation'

Lynette's self-immolation in Geneva hits the British papers on 3 October and the grisly photograph of her on fire is published in Australia the next day. Two things propel her death into critical local significance by 12 October. The first is an almighty diplomatic stoush between Britain and Australia over the circumstances of Lynette's deportation from the UK, and the second is that a Mr Peter Henry of Sydney (who has gone into hiding), a member of Ananda Marga (and Prout), sends an unambiguous threat to Canberra that he will self-immolate within days unless Michael Brandon's passport is immediately returned, among other demands.
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Once again one is flung into the vortex of
accusations and counter-accusations that swirl cyclonically each time an act of violence, in this case self-inflicted violence, is attributed to the sect. The world organisational secretary for Proutist Universal (Acharya Tadbahvananda), based at Prout's headquarters in Copenhagen — a ‘stately home in the wealthy suburb of Rungsted', where Lynette had worked — states that, ‘We do not encourage or appreciate such activities' and denies ‘that the act of self-immolation is discussed openly in the Prout movement'. Tadbahvananda adds that had he known what she was going to do, he would have ‘forced her not to do it [and now] she has thrown her life away needlessly'.

Journalist Ian Frykberg, reporting this conversation, immediately offers an opposite account, stating that another Copenhagen Prout member, Mr Richard Gay, said that, ‘He and Miss Phillips had discussed self-immolation and the seven members of the movement who had already committed the act.'
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Frykberg also confirms that there are clear connections between Prout HQ and the ‘two Prout training centres in Australia'. While the Acharya is busy denying he had any idea of Lynette's desperate quest to suicide, he also feels it important to note that there are 10 Prout trainees at each centre in Australia and ‘we are very happy with our membership in Australia — it is growing all the time'.

Gary Coyle, the secretary of the Sydney office
of Prout, admits he was totally aware of Lynette's intention and on 29 September, a few days before her death, had received her ‘typed self-immolation proclamation' and forwarded copies of it to Australian newspapers that day, but they did not run it. Other Australian Ananda Marga members Ainjile Morrison and Bruce Dyer also admit they knew of Lynette's plan after they were contacted by Lynette's mother Millie on 1 October. They went to Millie's home and attempted to call ‘all the Ananda Marga places in Europe they thought she might be'. They spoke to the London leader, Barry Green, who hadn't seen her and was ‘very opposed to her plan'.
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Contradictions abound as to who knew of her intention to set herself alight — and indeed, who supported it.

Further confusing things is her motive. Given that Sarkar is now free, her protest makes no immediate sense. It's Frykberg who makes the possible connection the following day. The Acharya in Copenhagen avows Prout's non-violence policy and asserts that, unlike the Ananda Marga, it is not a religion but a political movement: ‘Prout is against religion because it demarcates society. The movement's aim is to give the political power in the world to moralists.'

The Acharya also reiterates that he was unaware of and did not appreciate Lynette's self-immolation, but adds, Frykberg notes, in the ‘next breath', ‘we of course understand the thoughts that must have driven
her to do it'. Acharya Tadbahvananda, who Frykberg describes as ‘the man in charge', then goes on to talk about how many members have been ‘framed' in recent cases where violence has been alleged, ‘particularly Australia'. Frykberg points out that ‘even in Copenhagen the recent events in Australia alleging Ananda Marga involvement are well known'. The ‘man in charge' asserts ‘opponents are using Australia to squash the sect by getting the Australian Government to ban it, and then hoping that other governments will follow'.
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Which could imply that Lynette's act of annihilation in Geneva is a protest against the ‘framing' of Duff and of the Yagoona Three, as well as Michael Brandon's cancelled passport.

It will emerge that immediately prior to her death Lynette had written long (unsent) obsessive letters to sect members in Australia detailing her compulsion to self-immolate. These seem to suggest a potential link, but one she herself wants to obscure. She writes that her act ‘grew from a burning desire, an inner need to do something to help stop the criminality of our exploited lives … [and] it was inspired by the sacrifice of seven others for the same cause',
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and she also stresses that her plan has been devised in secret. As far as her father, Harold, is concerned, this is an outright lie she has concocted in order to protect the sect both here and abroad. He and his estranged wife believe Lynette, mentally vulnerable, has been brainwashed by
Prout and manipulated into the act. He believes that the fact that all her letters were posted to Sydney after her death ‘indicates a military-style conspiracy and that someone was with her [in Geneva] all the time to remove her diary after she died and post it off to the sect office in Sweden'.
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