Colt clan incest case

The Colt family incest case concerns an Australian family discovered in 2012 to have been engaging in five generations of incest beginning with the parents of the matriarch, "June", being brother and sister. June met and married "Tim", who emigrated from New Zealand in the 1970s. They all lived on a farm near Boorowa, New South Wales. The family members' true identities remain unknown to the public; the name "Colt" is a pseudonym used by New South Wales courts and government agencies, as are all of the family's given names.

"June", born in 1948, and "Tim Colt", born in 1943, were originally from New Zealand. June, who was the product of brother-sister incest, married Tim in 1966. The couple had seven children together: Martha, Frank, Paula, Cherry, Rhonda, Betty, and Charlie, before moving to Victoria in the 1970s. Tim Colt began to rape Betty when she was 12. In 1997, Betty, wanting to know if June could donate a kidney to a granddaughter, found out that her mother June was inbred.

The family grew to nearly 40 members ranging from grandparents to mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, nephews, and siblings, all engaging in various forms of incest. Many of the children suffered from deformities and medical problems. School attendance was transient and happened only when welfare officers visited the family, and once there the children needed remedial teaching. Some children tortured animals, mutilating their genitals, as a pastime.

Children and adults had regularly engaged in sexual activities which conceived children, some with genetic deformities. Most of the children had fungal infections. In order to hide the pregnancies, the girls would sometimes miscarry on the farm, or fatherhood was attributed to outsiders from outside Australia coming to the country for work or tourism. There were incidents of the girls being tied to trees and raped by the boys. They had no access to running water, showers, toilets or hygiene products.

The case has been described by Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans as "like nothing I've ever seen," and was considered by many to be so shocking that, in a rare move, the New South Wales Children's Court allowed full details to be made public, albeit with all names changed to pseudonyms for the children's protection, including the family name of "Colt."

After the death of June in 2001 and Tim in 2009, the family was led by Betty Colt. Betty and her younger brother, Charlie, had twelve children together. The family received multiple welfare payments, including disability and family support.

Starting from the 1990s, the family was known to frequently relocate between South Australia, Western Australia, and Victoria before locals became suspicious of their activities. They relocated to New South Wales, thirty kilometers (19 miles) outside of the small town of Boorowa, three and a half hours southwest of Sydney. The police ultimately discovered nearly forty members of the family living under squalid conditions in tents and shacks. They sometimes performed as a musical band that was originally formed by Tim.

Knowledge of the family came to authorities in June 2010, which led to seven "risk of significant harm" reports. However, an official investigation was not opened until July 2012 when a child reported overhearing another child at a local primary school speaking of an unkempt girl, living in the bush, who was pregnant with a child fathered by a brother. The child overheard the girl state that one of her sisters was pregnant and they did not know which of her brothers was the father.