Warning: this article discusses sexual assault and may be distressing for some readers.
The latest generation of the notorious inbred “Colt” family have begun to question their disturbing heritage, years after the family - who had their origin in New Zealand - first made headlines around the globe.
The sick secrets of the Australian family, which had its genesis in the union of New Zealanders Tim and June Colt and were all given pseudonyms by the Australian courts, were exposed in 2018 when eight were arrested over child sex, incest and other charges.
Authorities revealed at the time that: “The children and young adults have cognitive or physical disabilities related to their genetics”.
Each new revelation exposed fresh horror, their grim existence laid bare by photos showing their squalid life in the Aussie bush.
Now social media messages from one of the youngest members of the Colt family, Ruth, have revealed a family still coming to terms with its perverse history.
The messages, uncovered by the Daily Mail, show the 19-year-old asking her father: “Are you and mum brother and sister?”
She then added, “do you know who my dad is?” and “hi uncle how are you”.
The news outlet also reported that Ruth shared feelings of loneliness and talked about missing her family.
Ruth’s mother is Martha, one of the matriarchs of the clan.
The horrific family history of the Colts is one of a sexually voracious patriarch who fancied himself as a travelling minstrel but really was a rapist of his own daughters and granddaughter.
Three of the late Tim Colt’s daughters have been dragged through court trials, assaulted in prison and ostracised in communities because they have inbred children – the products of rape and sexual relations with their own father and brothers.
But growing up in an isolated family in which they were groomed and preyed upon for sex by their male relatives, the women really never had a chance.
It had been stated in the original 2013 judgment by NSW Children’s Court president Judge Peter Johnstone that the Colts descended from a New Zealand brother and sister.
The siblings were the parents of June Colt, who was the wife of Tim Colt.
June and Tim, who married in New Zealand in 1966 and emigrated to Australia, had seven children, with Martha being the youngest.
Five of these would be charged: Betty, Charlie, Rhonda, Roderick and Martha.
The other three charged were the grandchildren of June, who died in Victoria in 2001 - Derek, Cliff and Raylene.
Martha Colt, a court-appointed pseudonym to protect the identity of the clan’s children – was given a maximum two years prison sentence for lying about the paternity of her five children, whom DNA testing proved all to be the product of sexual relations with a biological relative.
While it was assumed Martha, who openly shared a “marital bed” with her brother Charlie, had given birth to five of her brother’s children, a bombshell revelation emerged at her trial.
Not reported until now because of suppression orders on the Colt incest family matters, Martha’s trial heard that her children were likely fathered by Charlie, her own father Tim and another brother.
Further evidence at the trials of other Colt siblings attested that it was likely Martha’s father Tim Colt, also was the father of his daughter Betty’s 13 children.
He also likely fathered four of his daughter Rhonda’s children and probably fathered his granddaughter, Raylene’s child.
The complicated family history of the Colts is believed to go back generations, and will probably never entirely be told.
Now broken apart, the once close-knit clan who had few friends outside the family appear on social media today to still be socially isolated from anyone but one another.
Many Colts – now grown into adulthood – had showed marked improvement in personal hygiene and health since they were taken from their camp in the scrub.
But they are still overshadowed by deprivations from their childhood: no education, unfamiliarity with toilets, showers or toothbrushes, shuffling gait and unintelligible speech.
Some have low-slung ears or misaligned eyes as a result of inbreeding and they look decades older than their calendar age.
The Colt family travelled around the country to perform at town halls, festivals and country shows, and even produced records with album covers featuring the patriarch and three children.
Tim Colt had the audacity to name one of the albums a collection of family “love songs”.
At the trial of Roderick Colt, for raping his niece/half-sister Petra, the court heard it was not in dispute that Petra was the biological child of Tim Colt and Betty Colt.
The trial heard Petra Colt told police in 2013 that she had never gone to school, she lived “in a cult” and that “all my aunts, uncles and cousins have all been sleeping together”.
Tim was also believed to be the father of Betty’s daughter Raylene’s daughter, Kimberly.
At Martha Colt’s trial, Judge O’Rourke said that despite “intergenerational incest in her family”, Martha Colt had spoken about “her childhood in idyllic terms and family harmony”.
“Clearly it was anything but,” Her Honour told the court, “[it was] isolated, insular, profoundly disturbing and dysfunctional with very little contact to the outside world.
“Incest clearly existed in this family unit.”
Judge O’Rourke said Martha Colt had “no friends outside her family [and] never formed close friendship bonds because of the closeness of the family”.
She had little schooling, and was “literate with difficulties”.
The family had moved from state to state, possibly to evade detection, always living in remote regions away from cities and large towns.
The Colts avoided doctors, and were secretive about the paternity of their children.
When one of the Colts became pregnant, and the infant showed clear signs of inbreeding, they were told to lie to the doctor.
After June Colt’s death in 2001, the extended family moved to a remote part of the Western Australian wheat belt where they lived until Tim Colt died in 2009.
Not all of the Colts would leave WA after that, with Roderick staying in WA, his lawyer later claiming he had “broken away” from his family’s “nomadic lifestyle”, married and got a job.
In late 2009, the Colts paid around $100,000 for a piece of NSW bushland, accessible by a series of roads that disintegrated into dirt tracks, with no access to electricity or sewage.
Charlie Colt and his nephew Cliff partially cleared the land and the Colt women, principally Betty, then in her early 40s, Martha aged around 29, set up “house”.
The living quarters comprised of three old caravans, two sheds and two tents.
None of Martha’s children attended the local primary school, but some of her older sisters Betty and Rhonda’s 18 inbred children did.
In mid-2010, Roderick Colt drove 4000km from WA across the Australian desert for a week’s holiday at the Boorowa farm.
On this occasion he raped his niece/half-sister, Betty’s daughter Petra, who was then aged 17, a court would later find, hearing that all three shared a biological father.
The court was told that Petra had a fight with Betty, went for a walk and was dragged by Roderick into his car and raped as she fought him off.
He then threw her and her clothes out of the car and called her an “ungrateful b**ch and a pig”.
Petra would say her uncle Charlie had also sexually assaulted her from when she was a child, and she had been told to “keep her mouth shut”.
Between February 2010 and mid-2012, authorities received seven risk of significant harm reports in relation to the children’s neglect, hygiene, lack of medical attention or truancy.
Then one of the children who did attend school told a classmate “my sister is pregnant and we don’t know which of my brothers is the father”.
The Colt clan’s world was edging towards the brink of oblivion.
On June 6, 2012, caseworkers and police arrived to inspect the farm, and reported finding “very dirty and hazardous” living quarters including the tent in which Martha slept with Charlie.
They found a filthy makeshift kitchen, children who were “dirty, wore dirty clothing” and who were “unable to make eye contact, their speech was difficult to understand”.
The children, they observed, had “very poor dental health and hygiene”.
Wagga police inspector Stephen Radford would later describe smelling urine and faeces in living areas and said there were no toilets or showers.
The Colt adults were asked to fix exposed wiring, broken windows and dangerous stoves and the next day caseworkers returned with two camping toilets and a shower.
By the following day there had been “a significant clean-up”, but the game was up for the unknowing Colts.
Five generations of incest and hillbilly-style living was about to be dissolved.
On July 18, 2012, Boorowa farmers watched a convoy of police in four-wheel drives, a police bus and an ambulance drive up an old stock route out of town towards the scrub of old bushranger territory.
While arrests and public exposure would follow later, the world the Colts knew was over.
- Additional reporting, news.com.au
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