Behind the scenes | S6 host Dominique Bayens in conversation

'Crafts in the loss, robust argument, nothing like that.'

'The crammen have propaganda so very happy.' 'And we can find out what it means for us in Australia.'

“'I think we're like a kangaroo caught in the headlights.'”

'Three and a half hours of red and national breakfast condensed into a pop to the shops.' 'Maybe a tea break or a walk of the dog.' 'You can find the new breakfast rap podcast by searching for red and national breakfast in the ABC list now.' 'A-B-C-Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.' Hello, Dominique here again, host of Expans, The Nannup 4.

And I'm joined by my colleague from across the ditch, Phil Vaien, post of radio, New Zealand podcast, The Lodge. And just like me, Phil's been making a podcast about a cult. This time, in remote parts of New Zealand. And in both the cases, these cults have upended lives and caused all kinds of damage to followers and their loved ones.

So we thought we'd like to sit down together to compare notes, answer your questions, and really just pull back the curtain and show you a bit of what goes into making a podcast like this. We've gathered some audience questions as well to help guide us and we're going to let you in on the process. Phil, hello, good to be here with you.

“So I got to ask first of all, Domin, what started you down this pathway?”

Because it's quite a peculiar one. Why did you go after these characters in the first place?

Well, the case of the Nannup 4 was something that I'd heard about over the years pretty much since I moved to this part of Western Australia, the south-west corner of the state. And I'd really only knew what was in the news headlines about this idea of a bizarre death cult. And I was really curious to find out more about who these people were and what led to the disappearance. But also what impact their disappearance had left on the people around them and the town of Nannup itself. It's a complicated and tangled web and I just tried to do as much as I could to kind of unpeak that web a little bit.

What about you? Where did you start? Well, I got this tip, classic news tip, right? From someone who I guess you described as being on the kind of fringy edge of an alternative community, saying that there was the small group of people who had escaped, that was the word used, from this high-demand cultic group, based in an old hunting lodge. I way up into the remote parts of two-way Panama, the South Island.

So I heard stories of supernatural powers being offered at this place, this wellness centre, people being promised they could fly. People thinking that a guru there who they were all based around could cure them without medicine. And I guess the thing that galvanized it for me was I got shown a series of photographs of a man in his 30s. This guy started off with a kind of a small mole under his eye. And there were these series of pictures taken over weeks and months where this mole got bigger and bigger until it was a growth which obscured his eye.

And so these were taken by the members of the cult to show that their guru, the grandmaster, would be able to cure cancer. By the time I saw these photos, he had died after receiving treatment, life force energy treatment from the guru I pinged Wong.

I have to say for legal reasons that I pinged Wong was never charged with anything over this.

So did you even begin with that? Yeah, I guess there was a big flood at the start because there were like four people who had escaped and we sat down and this kind of this hotel conference room. Beautiful beige walls and you know, no character whatsoever to hear all these stories. And then I guess a matter of just trying to double check, work out what was true if anything was an exaggeration to turn out none of it was. I mean, like a cults have got to be one of the strangest manifestations of people's kind of search for meaning, I guess.

“I maybe this way were also interested in them, you know, what would you say was the kind of weirdest sort of almost disturbing part of your investigation?”

There was so many moments where I was shocked. I learnt things that hadn't been in the media or reported on before. So we've got Shantel, McDougall, Simon Cadwell, her partner, their daughter, Lea McDougall and their friend Tony Poppitch were the four people who disappeared.

And she had met Shantel through a home school in group.

“And she went to Shantel's for a play date where she actually met Simon Cadwell for the first time.”

But after she left, she received a phone call from Simon, where he said to her, oh, you know, Shantel's got end time syndrome, essentially she believes that the end of the world is coming. And it's such a small moment, but it was one that really painted the picture of what kind of a person Simon was doing something like that. It's like drawing a wedge between your partner and their friend. It was just little moments like that that really stood out to me and made me feel like, gosh, this man, he was 18 years older than her.

She was just 17 years old when she met him and I just don't know how much of a chance you stand against someone like Simon who is so spiritually dominant. I don't know about you, but I found, but surprises around every corner, you know. And you sort of started after about the fourth or fifth surprise, you started going, well, this anything could happen here. You know, it was when I went back to someone who I'd interviewed 20 years before, who just left the cult. And what happened to her that cult, she'd come from California with her mum, her mum had taken this alternative treatment, had died.

They'd paid the grandmaster IPing one $1.5 million for the privilege of that.

She was completely wrung out. I got this phone call in the middle of the night from here going, "Ah, Phil, you've got to help." The cult members are around our motel room and they're saying, "Come back, come back, all is forgiven." And I'm going, "Just call the police off. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Just call the police." And then, like, all this time later, I'm talking to her again. Just throw out this kind of speculative question, I suppose. I said, "You know, it's still going. Would you ever consider going back?"

“And once my surprise she said, "Yes, I really would. I think IPing Wong was ahead of her time. I still think she's got so much to offer."”

How did you manage to build that trust with them and get to the point where you're receiving phone calls in the middle of the night from them? I guess this is kind of cliche and you recognize this. And I have to say, it's largely untrue my experience and unfair. There's this idea that followers of cults are these passive victims with no agency, that they're strange and weak and diluted creatures. And what I discovered was that they're actually just regular people, you know, and they've been sucked into something they couldn't prevent. And it was easy enough to get in and impossible to get out.

So, you know, I tried not to fall into that trap of pre-judging, which is easy to do, because it's a kind of, it's a classic kind of journalistic tale, isn't it? You know, kind of rabbit, evil, cult leader, and these kind of minions, you know, who don't really have a story, but, you know, these were not dropouts by any stretch of the imagination. You know, they were doctors, lawyers, engineers, I could say, "Well, be people, but they somehow got themselves embroiled." I think that's something that I've thought a lot about over the making of the Nanophor is the, I think it's a human trait, but also a trait definitely that journalists have of wanting to really make everything black and white.

“But it was really important to me because I think that podcasting is the perfect medium for it to explore the nuance and try and hold these two truths at one time.”

So, you know, it's kind of a lot of head to have reassured quite a number of people in a story which was originally well-trampled by the rest of the media. How did you get to manage to get people to talk after they'd had, you know, all the channels banging down the door?

I really began by speaking to the McDougall's first Shantel's parents, so it was a few conversations and then eventually they agreed to be part of the podcast.

I remember you, I remember in the podcast, you got quite emotional when they agreed to talk to you. Where did they're well out from, do you think? I mean, I'm just an emotional person to be honest. I feel I wear my heart on my sleeve, which probably comes across a little bit in the podcast, but I think, because I'd had a few conversations with Jim McDougall, where it really hit home.

And I was also aware that being part of this six-episode podcast that's also been turned into a podcast, it would be asking a lot of them and they would be really vulnerable in that experience.

So both of these stories that we looked into, they did happen, as you were saying, quite a long time ago. Did you find yourself dealing with people's memories? Well, older memories are supposed to recent memories. It wasn't something that happened last week, it was something that happened last decade or the decade before. Was there an issue in terms of reliability, you know, people remembering back to 2007? Absolutely, yeah, there was a lot of instances where people, yeah, I mean, I can't even remember what I did last week with a phone, what I did 20 years ago.

I was actually amazed that some of these people did have these really vivid memories. I will say one of the things that we did to sort of get around that we had really thorough fact checking. I think we triple quadriple checked everything that was in the podcast and there were ways that we were able to, you know, if you said that this happened then we can go back and find something similar or, you know, people had things written down in their diaries or had made certain phone calls that were recorded.

Yeah, but it was tricky and that's something that we kind of acknowledge that some of the people I interviewed couldn't remember the exact timings of things, but they had really strong memories of certain moments that really stuck with them.

What about for you? This has happened over so many decades.

I guess I was lucky because I got two bites at this story, so I did the original story back in 2004, so I had interviews to draw on interviews from the people who left. I actually got an interview with Open Wong as well. And so I had that as a base, so when I went back to it last year, I had the accounts I suppose from the time, which is good. Like you say, the beauty of a podcast is, you can actually go to different people and if they do have conflicting recollections of the same event, you can play them and then people can get this kind of 360 degree kind of view of this thing that is remembered because nothing is ever remembered perfectly, but you get very close to that by having, you know, a number of people.

“And it's really important when they do admit that, oh, I can't remember that to play that as well, I think, because people understand that memory isn't 100% reliable, you know.”

I'm wondering because I know you brought a lot of your own personal experience into the lodge and dealing with alternative medicinal therapies.

How did your own experience kind of inform the way that you interviewed and put the podcasts together? Yeah, I mean, it was kind of a little bit reluctant for me because it was really personal, so I had this awful time 10 years ago where I got cancer, lymphoma. And as well as doing, I'm fine now, by the way, thank you. And as well as doing this standard kind of conventional stuff like surgery and radiation, I also got on ball with some pretty wacky alternatives.

“And I debated with my colleagues and my boss about where the or not, I should put this into the podcast, but I did end up talking about it because I think it was relevant.”

And I talked about how I found myself one evening, just after my diagnosis, lying out on the veranda under the trees, we got to live in a forest full moon. Surrounded by the, I don't know, I'm surrounded by these, you know, light workers who were with light. And I don't know whether what they did had an effect of felt pretty strong at the time psychologically. I was, you know, I was in a pretty vulnerable space, I guess at the time. But completely at odds with my hard nose kind of journalistic brain, but it did help me to understand, I suppose, how people when they are disparate.

And I felt desperate then, do reach out to stuff that otherwise they might not if they weren't in that situation.

“I'm really fascinated by the draw of these gurus, right?”

I haven't come across many of my life, but the guy that you were looking at, a tall kind of, gotish, looking kind of Englishmen, is that right?

This is something I still am thinking about of how he was sort of actively thinking about and cunning in the way that he went about things. And how much of it was just things that he truly believed that he was bringing people along for the ride with.

But I think what's really struck me was when I spoke to people, one person I spoke to said, you know, whenever we were at a party together, he always had his crowd of people around him.

And he could really spin a yarn and tell a great story. And I think that's maybe one of the aspects of him that kind of followed through and drew people to him throughout his life.

“I think in this day and age, the concept of coercive control is so much more broadly understood and that it's actually not a matter of would you have fallen for him or would have you been gullible enough to fall for him?”

It's about the fact that people like Shantel are actually preyed on. And certainly in Cadwell's case, he used some pretty textbook techniques to exert that control manipulation, isolation, that kind of separation from family and friends.

He isolated Shantel. He tried to disconnect her from her family. He kept tabs on her movements and activities. And I just think what chance does a 17 year old have against that?

Yeah, true that. I think it wasn't really, and I struggled to kind of understand how people could kind of look to her as a leader. What did you learn about her in that way? So yeah, I don't think she had that much risk, but that's it's a really personal thing though, isn't it? It's like chemistry. So what is charismatic for one person isn't for another? And so I came face to face with her twice. We doorstep drawn an escalator on a shopping mall in Croatia where she was just about to give a teaching and then her law is agreed to an interview. But I didn't get to sit in the same room as her. I was at her HQ at the lodge surrounded by her followers, which was weird.

“And she beamed into me from one of their satellite clinics in Germany. And I found it really hard to understand how she took anyone into anything. But I think it's something to do with the fact that she undercommunicated.”

And that allowed her followers to kind of fill in the spaces and bring their own philosophy and adapt what she was saying and kind of come up with their own solutions.

It's almost like when you speak in these really vague terms, but with this real sense of surety, I wonder if you know people that are in these vulnerable times of their life, that's just a really comforting thing. So I'm before we go down, maybe we should put some lessons out there for people who might be on the edges of one of these high demand groups. And others who might know people who are, do you have any kind of advice I suppose? I mean, I'm not an expert, but I've interviewed experts and I know that at times of uncertainty, like we're experiencing now, Colt recruitment actually goes up because people are looking for really simple answers to these huge problems that don't really have simple answers.

And it's a time when Colt leaders are able to take advantage of that and say we have the answers and we can protect you and come with us and we'll look out for you.

“And that's a really tempting position to be, and I think for people who are vulnerable and looking for a place to belong and looking for that certainty.”

I would say to anyone who is seeing their family member or their friend perhaps getting tied up in a cold or, you know, I guess perhaps having these extreme beliefs all of a sudden. The advice that I got was just to keep talking and never shut those people out or what about you, anything that you learned. One little nugget, if someone who's offering you alternative wellness treatment be a cult or not. And they say my way of the highway, you shall not have any other treatment other than mine, red flag, run away.

Well, it's been really great chatting to you, Phil. And if expans listeners are interested, you can check out Phil's podcast, just search the lodge wherever you get your pods and thank you as well to everyone who made this episode happen. Tim Watkin, Blifemore, Peerworth, Sue and Grant Walter who also mixed the episode.