Beverley “Beve” Spiers, who styled herself as “Aunty Goolabeen, Darkinooong Elder”, was a foundational figure in the settler spiritualist movement centred around the Kariong/Gosford area of the NSW Central Coast. From the late 1980s until her death in 2014, Spiers promoted a fabricated Aboriginal identity and constructed a mythological narrative around the so-called Kariong glyphs. She claimed the site was a sacred Aboriginal-Egyptian interstellar portal, home to the “Grandmother Tree” and ancient carvings that connected to star-beings from the Pleiades. Spiers frequently referred to herself as the last speaker of the “Darkinooong language” and claimed to receive messages from a higher consciousness through the landscape, including the rocks and trees (Goolabeen: Saving Kariong Sacred Lands, 2023).

Goolabeen – Saving Kariong ‘Sacred Lands’

While her claims were unsupported by any credible Cultural, archaeological, genealogical, or linguistic evidence, Spiers’ spiritual mythology resonated with a growing settler conspiritualist movement. She attracted followers from environmental, New Age, and fringe conspiracy circles who embraced her teachings as authentic Aboriginal spirituality. These claims, though entirely disconnected from the real history and cultural authority of the area’s Aboriginal peoples, laid the foundation for a broader settler-colonial mythology now actively weaponised by a new generation of cultural appropriators and activists.

The death of Spiers in 2014 did not mark the end of the fraudulent spiritual empire she constructed at Kariong. Rather, her legacy has metastasised, adopted and reframed by a new generation of settler activists and conspiracists who have fused spiritual appropriation, environmental posturing, and far-right ideology into a potent settler-colonial revival. Through myth-making, ritual performance, and public disinformation campaigns, the followers of Goolabeen have not only endured but intensified, transforming Kariong into the epicentre of a broader project of recolonisation cloaked in the language of sacred protection and Aboriginal allyship.

As documented extensively on guringai.org (2023), the current network of Goolabeen’s ideological heirs includes figures such as Jake Cassar, Nina Angelo, Lisa Bellamy, Colleen Fuller, and the GuriNgai group: each of whom has played a role in perpetuating falsehoods about Kariong’s history, asserting illegitimate custodianship, and undermining the sovereignty of both culturally and legally recognised Aboriginal people and authority in the region, including the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council (DLALC) (Premier NSW, 2020; NSWALC, 2018).

Jake Cassar and Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA)

Jake Cassar, in particular, has rebranded himself as an environmental defender, invoking the mystical narratives seeded by Spiers to justify his opposition to DLALC’s development projects. He platforms fraudulent Aboriginal claimants like Tracey Howie, who falsely claims descent from Bungaree and Matora (bungaree.org, 2025; Watt & Kowal, 2019), and partners with identity fraud groups like the GuriNgai, amplifying their messages through protests, social media campaigns, and coordinated petitions (guringai.org, 2025a). Cassar’s rhetoric of sacred defence conceals a deeper project of spiritualised land possession. His invocation of “saving Kariong Sacred Lands” is not about protecting legitimate Aboriginal heritage, it is about preserving a settler fantasy of Aboriginality that serves his own spiritual and political capital (Ingram, 2008).

False Custodianship and the Patyegarang Proposal: The Role of the Non-Aboriginal GuriNgai in Undermining Aboriginal Sovereignty on the Northern Beaches of Sydney

Nina Angelo, closely affiliated with both Cassar and the Strongs (Steven and Evan), continues to publicly promote Goolabeen’s spiritual legacy, often speaking of the “wisdom” passed down by Beve Spiers. Angelo’s version of allyship is laced with appropriation, retelling myths of Egyptian arrivals, star ancestors, and Kariong as a “portal,” all while excluding the voices of real Aboriginal custodians. This is a hallmark of what guringai.org (2023) aptly terms settler conspirituality: the fusion of New Age belief systems, white spiritual supremacy, and anti-government conspiracism under the guise of reconciliation and cultural respect (Leroux, 2022).

Save Kincumber Wetlands, Coast Environmental Alliance, and the Denial of Aboriginal Sovereignty 

Lisa Bellamy further entrenches this dynamic. Publicly active with Save Kariong Sacred Lands, the Indigenous Aboriginal Party of Australia, and other activist nodes, Bellamy has cultivated an image of political allyship to Aboriginal people. However, her affiliations expose a stark contradiction: she regularly collaborates with known white identity frauds, spreads disinformation about DLALC and Aboriginal governance, and has, according to guringai.org (2023), used white supremacist language cloaked in progressive rhetoric. Her spiritual activism functions as a shield for deeper settler anxieties about land ownership and identity, ones that find expression in her aggressive promotion of the fraudulent “GuriNgai” label and denunciation of legitimate Aboriginal authorities (Ingram, 2008; Watt, Kowal & Cummings, 2020).

Alt-Right Conspiracies and the “Pretendian” Phenomenon in Australia

Steven and Evan Strong, whose work on the so-called “Kariong glyphs” helped seed the pseudoarchaeological mythos adopted by Spiers and her followers, remain central figures in the movement’s broader cosmology. Their writings and Youtube content frame Aboriginal people as the “original star race,” spiritual stewards of ancient alien knowledge, whose culture proves that Australia—not Africa—is the birthplace of modern humans. On the surface, this might seem pro-Aboriginal. In practice, it reduces Aboriginal culture to a prop for white esotericism, instrumentalised not for justice or sovereignty, but to validate fringe spiritual theories that centre the Strongs themselves as privileged interpreters (Carlson & Day, 2023).

Coast Community News, the GuriNgai Group, and the Reframing of Aboriginal Custodianship on the Central Coast

Colleen Fuller, a long-time identity fraud, continues to propagate the Goolabeen mythology under the guise of GuriNgai “cultural education” and Aboriginal tourism. Her fabricated lineage, thoroughly debunked by genealogical research and rejected by descendant communities (bungaree.org, 2025), provides a false legitimacy to settler-led projects that seek to erase and replace the historical Aboriginal peoples of the Central Coast. Fuller, like Spiers before her, leverages public ignorance and institutional laxity to insert herself into local government consultation processes, heritage assessments, and cultural education programs; all while silencing and displacing the real Aboriginal voices with whom she claims kinship (Lissarrague & Syron, 2024; Aboriginal Cultural Authority, 2021).

Indigenous Identity Fraud and Conspirituality on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Hornsby Shire, and Central Coast of NSW

This network does not operate randomly. As guringai.org (2025c) outlines in Prepping for Sovereignty, the activities of Cassar, Angelo, Bellamy, and others form a coherent ideological movement that mirrors far-right sovereign citizen logics: rejection of state authority, mythic appeals to pre-colonial law, performative Indigeneity, and conspiratorial narratives of cover-ups and truth suppression. The Kariong site becomes a convergence point for this ideology—framed not as a contested Aboriginal cultural landscape, but as a sacred zone of white awakening, a place where “the veil is thinnest” and new consciousness can be born. Such rhetoric displaces Aboriginal law with settler spirituality and undermines decades of community struggle for recognition, protection, and justice (NSWALC & NTSCORP, 2011; NSW Parliament, 2022).

The False Mirror: Settler Environmentalism, Identity Fraud, and the Undermining of Aboriginal Sovereignty on the Central Coast of NSW

This contemporary phenomenon mirrors Philip Deloria’s (1998) foundational insights in Playing Indian, in which he describes how white Americans historically perform Indianness to access a spiritual authenticity they feel themselves to lack. In Kariong, a similar mechanism is at work: a white Australia estranged from belonging constructs an alternative Indigeneity through spiritual fantasy, performative activism, and fraudulent genealogies. The result is a spiritualised settler colonialism in which Indigenous people are rewritten as obsolete, their authority dissolved into the universal (Fforde et al., 2021).

This is not a fringe phenomenon. Goolabeen’s legacy has infiltrated local government consultations, land-use planning, school curricula, community events, and environmental campaigns. The Central Coast has become, in effect, a staging ground for what guringai.org (2025d) calls the reframing of Aboriginal custodianship—a project that replaces real Aboriginal law with counterfeit ceremony, and real Aboriginal people with mythic pretenders. This extends to the broader settler environmentalist movement, including groups like Save Kincumber Wetlands and Coasties Who Care, who co-opt the language of land protection while denying the sovereignty of Aboriginal landholders and aligning with far-right and anti-vax ideologies (guringai.org, 2025e; 2024).

Prepping for Sovereignty: Settler Conspirituality, Identity Fraud, and the Recolonisation of Indigeneity in Australia

The spiritual framing of Kariong as a “portal” or “cosmic doorway” thus functions as a device of erasure. It abstracts the land from its history, detaches it from its people, and delivers it into the hands of those who claim to feel its energy, rather than those who have borne the intergenerational burden of colonisation. The contemporary Goolabeen followers, now dispersed across movements like the Coast Environmental Alliance, the GuriNgai, Save Kincumber Wetlands, and Save Kariong Sacred Lands continues to traffic in this form of harm: claiming to speak for Country while silencing the voices of its true custodians.

The appropriation of Indigenous identity by the non-Aboriginal “GuriNgai” group

Conclusion

Goolabeen’s legacy is a cautionary tale about how spiritual longing and settler anxiety can congeal into a potent form of cultural appropriation that masquerades as allyship. What began as a fringe spiritualist narrative has, through decades of repetition and legitimisation by false claimants and institutional complicity, evolved into a well-coordinated movement of identity fraud and neocolonial land assertion. At Kariong, settler conspirituality has forged a mythology so compelling to some that it overrides genealogical truth, cultural law, and community recognition. The symbolic capital of faux-Indigeneity is weaponised to displace real Aboriginal custodians and undermine lawful Aboriginal governance. If left unchallenged, this movement risks reshaping not only how Country is understood, but who is permitted to speak for it. Decolonisation must begin with listening to those who carry the true cultural authority, and by confronting the ongoing settler appetite to reoccupy the sacred—this time not with guns, but with ceremony, crystal, and stolen kinship.

White Possession, Settler Conspirituality, and the GuriNgai Cult: Indigenous Identity Fraud as Neocolonial Violence in Contemporary Australia