Abstract 

This article orients the theoretical framework of coercive control, cult psychology, and settler mimicry directly to a cohort of interrelated public figures in contemporary Australia: Tracey Howie, Neil Evers, Laurie Bimson, Brad Twynham, Colleen Fuller, Lisa Bellamy, and Jake Cassar. These individuals, associated with the so-called GuriNgai group and Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA), exemplify spiritualised settler cult leadership, weaponised cultural fraud, and charismatic identity appropriation. Drawing on coercive persuasion theory (Lifton, 1961; Hassan, 2016; Singer, 2003), psychoanalytic perspectives (Rahmani, 2019; Whitsett & Kent, 2003), and Indigenous critical theory (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watego, 2021), this article demonstrates how these individuals deploy shame, pseudo-kinship, and settler spirituality to undermine Aboriginal people, organisations, and sovereignty. The implications are profound: cultural misappropriation here functions not as mere misunderstanding, but as a deliberate campaign of symbolic violence and white possession enacted through spiritualised coercive control.

Introduction 

The appropriation of Aboriginal identity in Australia has taken on a new form: the settler cult. Groups such as the self-proclaimed GuriNgai and their affiliates within the Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) do not merely misidentify or misunderstand cultural protocols. Rather, they enact a psychopolitical performance of Indigeneity that draws upon cult dynamics, conspiracist frameworks, and settler desires for belonging. These performances are not benign. They constitute a deliberate subversion of Aboriginal governance, knowledge systems, and ritual authority. Through the frameworks of coercive control, ritual mimicry, and settler spiritual colonialism, this article argues that the GuriNgai and CEA exemplify an emergent settler cult typology; one characterised by charismatic white leadership, fabricated pseudo-kinship networks, spiritualised legitimacy, and targeted campaigns against legitimate Aboriginal people, culture, and organisations.

The GuriNgai and Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) can be considered cults not merely in a metaphorical sense, but through direct application of scholarly definitions from cult psychology, coercive control, and charismatic authority frameworks. Both groups exhibit key characteristics identified in the work of Lifton (1961), Singer (2003), and Hassan (2016), including tightly controlled information environments, elevated and charismatic leadership figures, pseudo-familial kinship structures, ritualised performance, and ideological totalism. These elements coalesce around a shared spiritualised vision of Aboriginal identity that is entirely divorced from legitimate genealogy, cultural law, and community recognition. 

Through elaborate mythologies, affective manipulation, and shame-based social controls, the GuriNgai and CEA construct a closed belief system that mirrors both spiritual and political cult dynamics. Their mimicry of Aboriginal ceremony and identity serves as both recruitment tool and epistemic weapon, seducing outsiders while erasing authentic Aboriginal voices. In doing so, they sustain an alternative sovereignty, a settler cult masquerading as Indigenous resurgence, operating within civic, environmental, and cultural governance frameworks. As such, their status as cults is not hyperbolic but evidentiary, supported by extensive psychological, sociological, and decolonial scholarship.

The GuriNgai movement, in tandem with the CEA, weaponises both environmentalist rhetoric and faux-Aboriginal symbolism to garner social, political, and economic capital. This paper evaluates the conduct, language, and structures of these groups through the lens of international cult scholarship and comparative studies of Indigenous identity fraud, Pretendianism, and conspirituality. By drawing on high-profile international cases such as Michelle Latimer (Canada), Sacheen Littlefeather (US), and groups like My Place and sovereign citizen movements, this analysis seeks to place the GuriNgai within a broader global pattern of settler cult mimicry and spiritualised white possession. Theoretical support is drawn from Lifton (1961), Hassan (2016), Singer (2003), and Indigenous critical thinkers including Moreton-Robinson (2015), Watego (2021), and TallBear (2013), whose work reveals the operations of settler desire beneath the veil of allyship.

This settler cult is not a fringe phenomenon. It has embedded itself within local councils, community media, public environmental campaigns, and cultural heritage governance structures. A comparative typology shows remarkable structural similarity to international Pretendian leaders like Michelle Latimer, Sacheen Littlefeather, and Joseph Boyden, where racial fraud is compounded by cultic adulation, institutional complicity, and spiritualised control. In each case, the adoption of a romanticised, performative Indigeneity, divorced from community, genealogy, and law, serves as a gateway to fame, wealth, or moral capital. Likewise, in the United States, spiritual grifters such as James Arthur Ray built neo-shamanic cults under the guise of “ceremony,” ending in tragedy. Such examples echo in the mimicry of sacred practice by GuriNgai actors, where fabricated kinship lines and ceremony are not just illegitimate but deeply dangerous.

The result is a counterfeit sovereignty inhabited by white saviours and spiritual interlopers masquerading as cultural custodians. This paper now turns to a detailed psychosocial analysis of the individuals who form the core of this settler cult system.

Tracey Howie: Walkaloa Wunyunah and the Cult of Faux Authority 

Tracey Howie, who has adopted the alias Walkaloa Wunyunah, presents one of the clearest examples of ritualised cultural fraud through settler cultic mimicry. Her repeated claims to descent from Bungaree and Matora have been consistently refuted by genealogical research and community testimony (Kwok, 2015, Guringai.org, 2025a; Bungaree.org, 2025). Nevertheless, Howie continues to publicly assert authority through Guringai Tribal Link, Wannangine Pty Ltd, Awabakal and Guringai Pty Ltd and more, performing pseudo-ceremonies and acting as a self-appointed cultural advisor to councils, mining companies, and developers. These acts function as public rites of legitimation that strategically obscure her non-Aboriginal ancestry, while circumventing established Aboriginal governance mechanisms.

Howie’s performative adoption of the ‘Elder’ identity mirrors the behaviour of North American Pretendians such as Michelle Latimer, who used media visibility and symbolic ceremony to bypass tribal verification and accumulate cultural capital (CBC, 2020). Like Latimer, Howie embeds herself within settler institutions through affective charisma, institutional recognition, and claims of spiritual insight. In doing so, she becomes a simulacrum of Aboriginal leadership, a settler Elder with ritual authority unmoored from community accountability (Watego, 2021).

Howie’s control mechanisms are consistent with Singer’s (2003) and Hassan’s (2016) typologies of cult leadership. She restricts access to what she claims is ‘cultural knowledge’ through her organisation, delegitimises dissenting Aboriginal voices as “lateral violence,” and weaponises trauma rhetoric to preserve her cultural centrality. Her ceremonial performances are not passive events but active interventions in the cultural-political field: each performance asserts her as gatekeeper to Country, a role she has no lawful or cultural right to occupy.

The mythic persona of Walkaloa Wunyunah is inseparable from Howie’s cultic function. It serves as both spiritual disguise and institutional strategy, allowing her to operate as the embodiment of a cultural lineage she does not belong to. This self-reinvention echoes the “sacralised whiteness” described by Moreton-Robinson (2015), wherein settler actors assert belonging not by proximity to community but through mimicry of Aboriginal cosmology and ritual authority. In effect, Howie’s role is not that of an advocate or ally, but of a cultic settler figurehead cloaked in Aboriginal symbology.

Jake Cassar: The Messianic Guru of the Kariong Mythos 

Jake Cassar exemplifies a different but complementary cultic modality, what Rahmani (2019) refers to as the “messianic saviour complex” rooted in spiritual narcissism and apocalyptic thinking. As the public face of the Coast Environmental Alliance and a prominent figure in associated groups like Save Kariong Sacred Lands and Save Kincumber Wetlands, Cassar blends environmental alarmism with conspiratorial and spiritualised settler activism. His self-fashioned identity as a land defender, Yowie tracker, and knowledge holder constructs him as a white saviour-figure mediating between land, spirit, and community.

Cassar’s rhetoric frequently draws on Aboriginal symbolism and pseudo-history, invoking sacred Dreaming stories, mystical connections to landscape, and cosmic narratives of planetary healing (Guringai.org, 2025g). Yet these are deployed within a conspiritual framework that centres Cassar himself as the true custodian of Country, replacing Aboriginal sovereignty with a settler esotericism based in Yowie stories, Egyptian glyph fantasies, and extra-terrestrial intervention. This reflects Taplin’s (2023) critique of the sovereign citizen superconspiracy as a totalising belief system that subsumes all forms of legitimate authority into the singular vision of the cult leader.

Cassar’s leadership style mirrors the tactics of American and Canadian eco-fascist leaders such as David Koresh and the Earth First! splinters, who used wilderness mysticism and ecological purity to justify authoritarian control (Robertson, 2017; Fetterman et al., 2019). Like Koresh, Cassar uses charismatic storytelling, emotional ritual, and prophecy to capture the imaginations of his followers. His narratives around Kariong’s supposed sacredness do not emerge from Aboriginal communities, but from settler fantasies about spiritual mystery and moral guardianship. In this sense, he does not ally with Country, he possesses it symbolically as active colonisation.

Moreover, Cassar’s affiliations with sovereign citizen ideology, his rhetoric of state betrayal, and his oppositional stance toward Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council (DLALC) constitute an anti-sovereign political theology. He positions himself and his followers as the true voice of the land, despite having no Aboriginal ancestry or cultural recognition. This is spiritual fascism masquerading as ecological defence.

Together, Cassar and Howie form complementary poles in the settler cult structure: one maternal, ceremonial, and pseudo-Aboriginal; the other paternal, prophetic, and conspiratorial. Both exploit institutional gaps in cultural verification to assert spiritual authority. Both erase Aboriginal governance through cultic simulacra. And both must be named, not as misguided allies, but as architects of a settler cult that weaponises culture for control.

Neil Evers and Laurie Bimson: Ritual Technicians of Settler Ceremony 

Neil Evers and Laurie Bimson serve as ritual facilitators within the settler cult structure, regularly performing pseudo-smoking ceremonies and land acknowledgements on behalf of the so-called GuriNgai group. These actions, conducted without any recognised cultural authority or genealogical basis, exemplify what Deloria (1998) described as the settler desire to ‘play Indian’, to enact Indigeneity without relational accountability. Both men present themselves as cultural stewards, yet their roles are entirely derivative, based on institutional relationships and settler validation rather than Aboriginal governance or Law.

Their visibility at civic events and within heritage consultation panels is not evidence of legitimacy, but of institutional complicity. Like cult functionaries, they provide the ritual infrastructure that sustains the illusion of legitimacy. These performances confuse public understanding, sideline actual Aboriginal voices, and reinforce the closed information system necessary for cult cohesion (Lifton, 1961; Singer, 2003). In this sense, Evers and Bimson function as the cult’s gatekeepers: maintaining the simulacrum of ceremony while deflecting scrutiny and co-opting public rituals of acknowledgment.

Brad Twynham: Corporate Mysticism and the Technocratic Turn 

Brad Twynham’s role in the GuriNgai network introduces a technocratic layer to the settler cult structure. With a background in cybersecurity and business innovation, Twynham rearticulates Aboriginal identity as a form of spiritualised intellectual capital. His rhetoric around “Indigenous innovation” strips cultural identity of kinship, struggle, and Law, and rebrands it as an asset class for entrepreneurial transformation. This is not cultural revitalisation, it is extraction by other means.

Twynham’s public talks and partnerships mirror the behaviour of other corporate-adjacent Pretendians, such as Gina Adams in the United States, whose identity claims have been challenged yet who used corporate and educational platforms to promote herself as an Indigenous artist and innovator. Like Adams, Twynham evades scrutiny by shifting the discourse from identity verification to visionary thinking. Yet this is precisely the sleight of hand at the heart of settler cultism: to replace relational belonging with managerial charisma.

Colleen Fuller and Lisa Bellamy: Mystic Fraudulence and Conspiritual Seduction Colleen Fuller and Lisa Bellamy each deploy mystical language and spiritual ambiguity to sustain their cultural imposture. Fuller has alternated between claims of Wiradjuri, Yuin, Darkinoong, Darkingjung, and GuriNgai ancestry, without genealogical evidence or community support (Guringai.org, 2023f). Her spiritualised rhetoric and trauma-based narrative exemplify Leroux’s (2019) framework of modular Indigeneity, an identity template adapted to context, audience, and political opportunity.

Lisa Bellamy’s activities blend conspiracist rhetoric, spiritual awakening discourse, and anti-Aboriginal sentiment under the guise of environmental defence. As a vocal supporter of Conspiracy Theorist Kate Mason, anti-vaccination and sovereign citizen ideology, Bellamy has propagated myths about land development, council corruption, and planetary restoration that cohere into what Hammonds and Kramer (2022) term a “cultic semiotic cluster.” Her rhetoric does not honour Aboriginal sovereignty, it hijacks it, replacing it with white esotericism and settler prophecy.

Both women anchor the affective arm of the settler cult: drawing followers through stories of pain, healing, and connection while severing ties to actual Aboriginal history, politics, and community. They are not simply frauds, they are unlikely charismatic agents of spiritualised settler colonialism.

The GuriNgai and Coast Environmental Alliance (CEA) do not merely operate as misguided cultural groups or ecological advocates. When viewed through the lens of cult psychology, their activities exhibit the full architecture of coercive ideological systems. They function as settler cults that mirror the manipulative patterns observed in high-control groups worldwide (Hassan, 2016; Singer, 2003).

Charismatic Leadership and Spiritual Authority

Figures such as Tracey Howie and Jake Cassar occupy the role of charismatic leaders central to the formation and maintenance of cult identity (Rahmani, 2019). Howie, under the alias Walkaloa Wunyunah, has publicly claimed descent from Bungaree and Matora, a genealogically refuted claim, while asserting herself as a cultural authority and spiritual custodian (Guringai.org, 2025a; Bungaree.org, 2025). Cassar, similarly, has woven an image of environmental messiahship, blending bushcraft mysticism with conspiracy ideologies to develop a loyal following (Guringai.org, 2025g).

Shame

Shame is deployed as a tool of internal control and boundary maintenance. Drawing on Brown’s (2020) trauma-informed cult recovery theory, these networks capitalise on the disaffection of their members, many of whom feel dislocated from mainstream Australia, offering belonging through a spiritualised Indigenous fantasy. Yet for actual Aboriginal communities, this dynamic generates epistemic violence and retraumatisation, as sacred sites, symbols, and governance processes are co-opted and redeployed against us. The result is a double colonisation: one material and historical, and the other psychological and symbolic.

Pseudo-Kinship and Manufactured Belonging

One of the defining features of destructive cults is the manipulation of family systems and communal belonging (Whitsett & Kent, 2003). In this case, the GuriNgai construct a fabricated lineage linking themselves to Aboriginal ancestors, creating an artificial kinship network into which followers are initiated. Individuals like Neil Evers and Laurie Bimson participate in reinforcing this mythology by presenting themselves as cultural knowledge holders and ceremonial figures, despite a lack of Aboriginal knowledge, culture, or verified decent(Guringai.org, 2023b; 2023c). These constructs of belonging are not benign: they directly replace legitimate Aboriginal sovereignty with a settler-derived simulacrum.

Totalist Ideology and Information Control

According to Lifton’s (1961) model of thought reform, cults enforce a closed ideological system that resists scrutiny. The GuriNgai and CEA exhibit this through selective sharing of misunderstood and/or decontextualised heritage reports, secretive decision-making, and strategic misinformation campaigns about Aboriginal people, culture, projects and Aboriginal Land Councils. Lisa Bellamy and Colleen Fuller have promoted conspiracy-laden narratives regarding land development that cast Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council (DLALC) as corporate or colonial villains (Guringai.org, 2023g; 2025f), thereby positioning the GuriNgai as authentic defenders of Country. These rhetorical inversions are classic mechanisms of ideological possession (Robertson, 2017).

Shame, Conversion, and Retention Mechanisms

As Singer (2003) describes, cults often convert through appeals to higher morality, only to retain members by inducing shame or guilt when they question doctrine. In the GuriNgai/CEA matrix, dissenters are accused of failing to honour sacred land or disrespecting ‘Elders’, terms strategically emptied of cultural specificity and filled with cult meaning (Deloria, 1998; Watego, 2021). Their ceremonies, largely invented or appropriated, are deployed as ritualised control mechanisms.

Spiritual Abuse and Coercive Persuasion

Tracey Howie’s spiritualised language, including claims of receiving messages from ancestors or acting as a Dreaming conduit, meets the criteria for spiritual abuse when it is used to assert control and elevate her unquestioned leadership (Guringai.org, 2025a). Jake Cassar’s messianic tone in public forums and his association with far-right-wing fringe movements and other conspiracist movements compound this dynamic, blending New Age metaphysics with nationalist and pseudolaw ideologies (Taplin, 2023; Hassan, 2016).

Milieu Control and Anti-Sovereign Doctrine

Cult dynamics rely on isolating members from critical information (Lifton, 1961). In the GuriNgai-CEA system, this occurs through the control of community Facebook pages, censorship of dissenting voices, and manipulation of council consultation processes. Brad Twynham’s use of corporate lingo and cybersecurity credentials adds a veneer of legitimacy to the network’s technological and rhetorical control systems (Guringai.org, 2023).

Sacralised Whiteness and the Myth of the Vanishing Tribe

Moreton-Robinson (2015) and Leroux (2019) both speak to how whiteness enacts its own Indigeneity through rituals of possession and mimicry. The GuriNgai and CEA actors cloak their settler status in faux-Aboriginal ceremony, pseudo-language, and appeals to environmental stewardship, enacting a psychopolitical simulation of Aboriginal sovereignty. The repetition of ‘custodianship’, ‘ceremony’, and ‘connection to Country’ in their media represents not continuity, but colonisation through aesthetic familiarity (Guringai.org, 2025d; 2025f).

Conspirituality and the Apocalyptic Imaginary

Cassar and Bellamy participate in what Robertson (2017) calls a “mind-virus”, an ideological contagion where pseudoscience, conspiracy, and spirituality intertwine. They frame themselves as lone defenders against impending global threats, often portraying Aboriginal Land Councils, archaeologists,governments on a local, state and federal level, and academics, as corrupt agents. This conspiratorial imaginary fosters high-arousal emotion and eschatological urgency, classic features of end-times cults (Fetterman et al., 2019; Hammonds & Kramer, 2022).

Conclusion 

The settler cults examined in this article, embodied by the actions and rhetoric of Tracey Howie, Jake Cassar, Neil Evers, Laurie Bimson, Brad Twynham, Colleen Fuller, and Lisa Bellamy, do not represent anomalies in a multicultural democratic society. Rather, they reflect an emergent and deeply entrenched structure of white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), spiritualised mimicry (Deloria, 1998; TallBear, 2013), and cultic psychological control (Hassan, 2016; Singer, 2003). Their ritual performances, pseudo-ceremonies, conspiracist narratives, and symbolic assertions of Aboriginality function not merely as fraud, but as settler-colonial counterinsurgency tactics in cultural form.

By deploying the apparatus of cult dynamics, charismatic leadership, control of information, emotional manipulation, and reconstitution of identity, these actors foster systems of belief that erode authentic Aboriginal governance while generating material and spiritual capital for themselves. What emerges is a parallel symbolic infrastructure: a counterfeit sovereignty inhabited by white saviours and spiritual interlopers masquerading as cultural custodians.

This system thrives through institutional complicity, media platforming, and the affective gaps left by dispossession and cultural erasure. It must be met not only with genealogical and political accountability but with an interdisciplinary understanding of its psychosocial architecture. The cultic behaviours of these settler actors are not incidental to their fraud, they are its operational core.

Future research and community advocacy must resist the framing of these actors as well-intentioned or confused. Instead, they must be understood as active agents in a new wave of colonisation, one that weaponises identity, ceremony, and care to obscure ongoing settler occupation. Only by naming the cultic structure can we begin to dismantle its hold.

JD Cooke

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