Welcome to Banjawarn, the outback station once home to a Japanese doomsday cult

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Before September 11, 2001, when Australians were told to be alert but not alarmed, there was Banjawarn — the birth of our terrorist era.

The phone rang early in the morning.

Someone in Japan was asking Rosarie Day if her family was bleeding from their ears and noses.

The anonymous voice on the end of the line told them to turn on the TV, but they didn't own one.

It was 1995, and on the remote sheep station Banjawarn, more than 700 kilometres north-east of Perth, the only connection to the outside world was a telephone.

"What's this load of crap?" station manager Sharon White said, when her elderly mother told her about the call. The country was in drought and Ms White had sheep to shear.

But more calls would come, and a friend with a TV tuned in to see mayhem in Japan, where there was news of a terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway.

So the family called their lawyer, who informed federal police, and so began the investigation that would uncover the murderous plan of a doomsday cult.

On a spring day in 1993, 25 members of Aum Shinrikyo joined the customs queue at Perth Airport. They had arrived from Japan with crates of unusual cargo in tow.

Their $30,000 worth of excess baggage included gas masks, protective gear and hydrochloric acid in containers marked "hand soap".

The cargo was discovered and two members were charged with carrying dangerous goods on a plane, but the group was free to enter Australia.

They installed themselves at Banjawarn, the million-acre property they purchased earlier that year.

Japanese men were soon spotted in the northern goldfields — a day's drive from Perth — where, among the stockmen and gold prospectors, they might have seemed out of place.

Up close, they appeared young and gaunt, as if they hadn't eaten in days, according to Bill Leaver, who delivered mail to remote sheep stations in the region.

Each week, Mr Leaver drove thousands of kilometres along dusty roads delivering mail and groceries to some of the most remote properties in the country.

He had over the years nurtured relationships with his customers, some he considered friends, often having a cuppa with them while they read their mail and made any urgent replies.

But at Banjawarn, the new owners were "stand-offish".

Mr Leaver said he heard strange "repetitive" tapes playing and once saw a man cutting the station's lawn with scissors.

One woman he spoke to said she was purging demons from her body by drinking mustard and salt water.

"I remarked they must have been very bad demons."

He once delivered barrels of hydrochloric acid to the station.

Some stations would occasionally order a small amount of the chemical for their swimming pools, but at Banjawarn there was no pool.

The people at Banjawarn seemed to have no interest or skill in running a sheep station; Mr Leaver noticed the water points weren't being checked and sheep weren't being sheared.

Sharon White is a tough woman with red dirt in her veins.

Her early life was spent on a sheep station on the Nullarbor. Now in her 60s, she has been running Banjawarn for a quarter of a century.

Her family bought the property from Aum Shinrikyo in 1994.

She said Banjawarn's notoriety made it hard to attract workers; sometimes casual workers opt out after they read about its history on Google.

"They say, 'We're not going to work there, they must all be crazy'. We might be a bit crazy, but it's not from that [Aum Shinrikyo] stuff."

When Ms White, her mother and three sons — Neil, Ryan and Ben — first arrived, they found odd things in the homestead, including laboratory equipment and containers of chemicals.

She moved them out of reach of her young children without thinking too much about it and got on with station life.

Sheep were dying in the drought and Ms White worked long hours moving them off the property.

Most cult members returned to Japan in late 1993, but several had remained at Banjawarn as caretakers.

She remembered them as friendly people who did very weird things.

"You'd come home and they'd be standing on their heads mediating, or starving themselves to death for three days."

After the Tokyo subway attack, Ms White's perception of them shifted from odd to "evil".

"I lived for a short time with mass murderers and I didn't know it. Goes to show you never can tell."

Sarin gas is colourless and odourless but deadly.

Within seconds, people exposed to it start vomiting and choking; some become blind and paralysed.

On March 20, 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo boarded five trains on the Tokyo subway and pierced bags of the gas with the tips of their umbrellas.

The attack occurred during morning peak hour and caused chaos and panic across the city.

Considered the first use of a weapon of mass destruction in a terrorist act, the attack killed 13 people, permanently injured 50 and temporarily blinded thousands.

Prosecutors in Japan later said they believed the day was chosen to divert police attention from a raid they were planning on Aum Shinrikyo's headquarters.

The killing was, to those who made it happen, a way to inch closer to heaven.

Aum Shinrikyo's founder and leader, Shoko Asahara, preached a kind of Buddhist Hindu Christian apocalyptic mash-up, in which a nuclear Armageddon would end the world and his followers would be some of the only survivors.

The cult recruited some of Japan's brightest young minds, and at its height in the early 1990s it had tens of thousands of members.

The question of why so many young, university-educated people, especially scientists, were attracted to the group has puzzled onlookers for decades.

One consensus, outlined by Professor Susumu Oda in the New York Times, was that they were looking for something more than the materialism of mainstream Japanese culture at the time.

Another theory is that Asahara's focus on the sciences appealed to cult members who could experiment with technology well beyond what academies would allow.

Aum Shinrikyo members experimented with chemical weapons, used drone technology and tried to enrich uranium using a laser process.

They believed these technologies would help them survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

And to prepare for the doomsday prophecy, they carried out many of their experiments at Banjawarn Station.

Blaise O'Shaughnessy believes Banjawarn was purchased by the cult because of its location "away from prying eyes".

A retired detective superintendent with the Australian Federal Police, he was one of two officers sent to Banjawarn to investigate soon after the Tokyo attack.

While documents in Japan linked the suspects to Australia, it was the phone call from Ms White's lawyer to the AFP which sparked the investigation.

It would continue for months and the crime scene's isolation created a unique inquiry.

Next to the house the police built a brick barbecue to cook on, which still stands today.

Mr O'Shaughnessy said a trip to the local watering hole put the investigation in peril.

While staying at the Leonora pub — "a real eye-opener" — a briefcase with sensitive case information was stolen from his car.

Officers had warrants to search every house in town but found the briefcase the next morning on a smouldering rubbish pile, luckily still intact.

"We didn't know if there was reason for us to be concerned, if there was something more sinister going on," he said.

They decided it was just local opportunists who broke into the car.

Despite the hiccup, Mr O'Shaughnessy and his colleagues would find evidence that members of the cult made and tested sarin gas on sheep at the property.

They would also discover the group had plans to create nuclear weapons and had been digging up uranium on the station with an excavator.

He said this was "the birth of our terrorist era" and the discoveries had had a lasting impact on Australia.

"There were a lot of recommendations made which, I believe, are behind a lot of the current terrorism legislation."

The AFP evidence contributed to the Japanese prosecution of Aum Shinrikyo and a US Senate inquiry into the cult's use of weapons of mass destruction.

Legal proceedings against those involved in the gas attack stretched on for more than 20 years.

In 2018, after many years on death row, 13 cult members, including Asahara, were executed.

Aum Shinrikyo never entirely disappeared; it was classified as an illegal terrorist organisation but still exists today under the name Aleph.

Twenty-five years after the Tokyo attack, conspiracy theories involving Banjawarn still persist.

Like most stations in the region, it has transitioned from sheep to cattle.

The shearing shed has collapsed and only the frame remains of the old homestead where the cult members worked.

The homestead door, which had "laboratory" in Japanese written on it, was taken by investigators and displayed at the AFP museum in Canberra.

The only trace of Aum Shinrikyo remaining at Banjawarn is small Japanese writing on the inside wall of the machinery shed — instructions on how to turn the generator on.



Looking back, Ms White said the episode in 1995 was nothing more than a minor interruption to the quiet way of life she and her family appreciated.

But the media frenzy that followed the AFP investigation, "that pissed me off".

Locals like Ms White talk about Aum Shinrikyo's time at Banjawarn with such nonchalance that one wonders if even stranger things have occurred in the vast, mysterious desert.

Topics: cults, history, law-crime-and-justice, people, human-interest, leonora-6438, kalgoorlie-6430, wa, australia