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I've never seen anyone who so frequently uses the word ''Ha!'' at the end of sentences. We now know Dave has picked up that writing style from a paedophilia book, which is very creepy.

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Berg was also fond of overusing "Ha!", in his writings, as an interjection emoting amusement or hilarity in a given subject.

Many of these practices and writing styles in particular have become commonplace throughout The Family.

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When Dave starts projecting paranoid conspiracy theories, evidence is often gathered that might support that opinion, but anything that appears to contradict this theory has a tendency to be viewed as a deliberate attempt to obscure that truth. I feel something similar occurs on the RR forum, where my accounts have been dismissed as my "interpretation", representing the conditioning of my father, or even a deliberate attempt to disseminate false information.

This post will seek to address the facts as I understand them in relation to comments made on both forums.

It has been claimed on the RR forum that Dave has fabricated his connection with the COG and never actually joined. The current view seems to be that he minimised it and may have an association that precedes coming to Australia.

There is no doubting the COG represents a significant influence over my father. He claimed initially to have only joined them very briefly, I think three weeks was the figure. This certainly minimised a more significant association. But the quest to find a link that preceded him coming to Australia raises the risk that an agenda may interfer with a real discovery of the facts.

I was too young to be a direct witness to my father's life before he came to Australia, but I have relatives who were, and my memories of meeting the COG were vivid enough to be sure there is no connection prior to the one that occured while we were living in Queanbeyan. This dates back to mid 1972 at least. He was working for the Bible society (Public Relations Officer and journalist) and made contact with the COG as a result of them introducing themselves to the church establishment (Minister's Fraternal?). We made several trips to Sydney to meet them, and as Dave now admits, a few stayed in our house where he would have joined, except they told him they were not equipped to accommodate a whole family. I would not be surprised if they picked up that he was not exactly a team player.

"Mo letters" are what the printed articles were referred to in the COG, that were commonly distributed as tracts for donations. A far as I am aware Dave received a single personal letter from the COG leader and I recall it coming because Dave had painted the name Children of God on the side of a tiny caravan we were travelling in (late 1972 - early 1973). The COG in Sydney were upset by the unauthorised use of their name and sent a letter demanding that he remove it. Dave wrote to the leadership to protest this. The reply purporting to be from Mo himself, advised that there was no law against him using the name, but for the sake of expediency it might be better to accommodate the wishes of the guys in Sydney. The name was subsequently changed to Gypsies for Jesus, or Jesus Gypsies.

My parents went through a very difficult period in Broken Hill. In 1974 my father asked me to come with him to Adelaide where he said he was going to join the COG. I was in year four and wrote a letter to my teacher about this, before deciding to stay with my mother. Dave now says he was in the group for about three months. This may be true of his period under the direct leadership of the "colony" in Adelaide. I understand it was not a happy fit for either my father or the people he was trying to work with. He was sent out on outreaches, which allowed him to return to Broken Hill and visit us.

In the end as Dave has acknowledged he exploited a loophole that allowed him to operate as an independent "colony" by listing myself and my siblings as his disciples. He opened a PO Box in the name of the Children of God and received "Mo letters" directly from Sydney. Due to our remote location, direct contact with the organisation was minimal. The odd outreach team come to stay for brief periods and there were a couple of contentious visits with COG leaders.

I recall a family Bible study when reading a passage from one of Paul's epistles that mentioned how one should not eat with adulterers, and Dave explained that on this basis the COG would no longer stay at our house. Perhaps Cherry's resistance to the COG helped strengthen Dave's hand on this matter. I don't know. There have been suggestions that the free sex doctrine was well established long before this. Brian will tell you that the COG in the early seventies was not very well connected or directed, so it could have taken time for the "liberties" that were being exercised at the top to filter down as a doctrine and even then, the "all things are lawful but not all things are expedient", line and "according to each person's faith" seemed to result in a certain slipperiness that I understand made it difficult to nail down the issue, particularly for someone on the relative fringes in an Australian outback town. Dave claims it was not until the Arthur letters that the issue was plainly stated. I know that he's made this a defining point of difference ever since.

But perhaps there were other issues. I know that the COG were critical of Dave working in a "system job" as an editor at the Regional Advertiser, that they felt he had a problem with pride and needed to "forsake" his writing. This prompted him to parcel up and send off to the COG what I remembered to be a paraphrase of the book of Jeremiah, and what Dave says was a book titled "All Systems Woe". He also used unsold advertising space to print Mo letters in the paper. I delivered thousands of these papers and as Dave indicated, this resulted in our names being listed in the COG newsletter, New Days News "World Shiner" list (circa 1975).

It's difficult to date exactly when Dave left the COG, (I think this is true of many xJCs as well) but I do recall him commenting on how he was surprised that he was still receiving literature after a final confrontation with the leaders, and kept the PO Box active for some time after this. By late 1976 Dave had moved to Alice Springs to begin working on an alcohol rehabilitation centre through the Aboriginal Congress. The PO Box would have been closed down around this time.

It seems a final COG publication was included in the Regional Advertiser earlier in 1976 and this has been the basis to suggest Dave was still involved with the group at this time, and that I have lied about some dates. I have a vague recollection of a Babylon Bob cartoon strip, or something of a prophetic nature, which Dave justified for its content. Remember the contact address was actually Dave's PO box. Like the Children of God caravan, there was an element of thumbing his nose at the COG whilst also proving himself to them. The reprinting of entire articles in the Baby Book series of 1997 is another example of this.

Many ex-JCs carry mixed feelings about their time in the Jesus Christians. I don't doubt the same is true of Dave in relation to the COG. Dave kept the individual Mo letters in folders covered with wood grain contact paper. But he received a massive paper back compilation from COGs that we bumped into in Townsville in late 1977. Perhaps this was where he also received two leather bound volumes, red and blue that must be what Malcolm recollects? In 1998, soon after expelling the entire Oz team, Dave purged a lot of stuff before moving house. This included a box of the COG lit described, which Craig collected, but which I subsequently disposed of.

There is speculation regarding the use of cartoons to lure in young people - associating this with pedophiliac practice. You can pick up practically any newspaper and find political cartoons and comic strips. This seems to be the medium of social commentary, satire and subversive comment, which appeals to people of all ages. But since I was the primary illustrator, and I was a relative young person I tended to use illustrations that appealed to me. My sources were initially the COG artwork, however I enjoyed Asterix and Obelix as a kid and Mad comics as well as the Simpsons would become a later influence for the Liberator, among other sources.

As for Dave's use of the exclamation "Ha" to emphasise a point. It seems to convey derision and a petty need to score. It may be that it's something he picked up from the MO letters. But I can't figure out the significance of the connection that is being made with what I understand is a victim of COG pedophiliac practice, other than to suggest they may both be mirroring back the expression used by the leader of that organisation, unless it was a more common Americanism of that era.

Dave has sought to blame me for questioning the ambiguity of quotes he made regarding pedophilia for the various allegations that have followed, and even suggested I initiated this discussion out of the blue. This is not true. The original discussion began in response to a poster on the JCs forum who asked why the JCs considered it a sin for consenting homosexuals to enter relationships comparable to heterosexual marriage. This woman suggested that morality needs to be based on an understanding of minimising harm with the example of rape in which the use of force against someone is manifestly wrong. Dave was trying to suggest some things are immoral just because God/society says so. The problem was that in comparing pedophilia to homosexuality and in the argument that so-called "seduction" negates the issue of force, Dave appeared to fail to grasp the issue of coercion and the sense of real harm that occurs when an adult abuses the trust of a child.

Perhaps in Dave's mind he was just having an intellectual discussion and so it was not fair to try and analyse what he says beyond that. But a point is not justified just because you can spin an argument to defend it, and the isolation of Dave-speak from the real world seems to be part of the problem. How else can you explain the whipping trial that went ahead it seems against the good counsel of his own members? Dave seemed to lose sight of the forest with his interest in the trees in this conversation, and I felt the same myopic logic resulted in a convicted pedophile operating without the necessary supervision required to stop him from re-offending in India. The experiment to see if a pedophile who was accepted into a community where he would be denied the private liberties on his own and where he was surrounded by healthy adult child relationships may assist his rehabilition, failed. There were no community children in India, and so it seemed he was largely unsupervised when he went on to trains to sell Easy English books.

The response against this individual when he voluntarily confessed his crimes was swift and absolute. It may be argued that he should have been handed over to Indian authorities and the involvement of the group that this person came from in handing him over to Australian authorities represents an attempt to distance himself from the situation, but the severity of the jail sentence would not support a claim of the minimising cover-ups that appeared to be common in the Catholic church.

I recalled Dave's resistance to informing community members of this person's history for fear that the stigma may interfere in his acceptance into the community (although Cherry's counsel ultimately reigned.) And one parents horror in discovering they had left their two children in his direct care in ignorance, and overstated the extent of that problem, for which I apologised. However, the account of another pedophile being sent on outreach with a mother and her children some years later who had not been notified of his history suggests the original issue that I raised might have represented a relevant concern.

The main point in the forum discussion where Dave denied "force" in relation to the coercion inherent in pedophilia, was that it might reflect a blind spot in his own behaviour in influencing young people to do things they may not have otherwise chosen to do. Dave has argued that parents have had a whole childhood in which to influence their son or daughter's thinking and if they have failed in this regard he is entitled to compete as an influence. Children are exposed to all kinds of influences and we can't wrap them up in cotton wool. But I don't think its normal for a 12 year old child from an Indian village to be told they can come for a visit to Australia where they will be sent to school, but find themselves sent out to flog literature on the street instead and told, when they beg to return home, that they are choosing between serving God or Satan... much less be maligned, when after some thirteen years service, for having joined with ulterior motives and leaving when she saw the prospect of a better life and taking their husband with her. [Comments posted by Ross and defended by Dave]

I think comments where Dave minimises the nature of sexual perversion in the COG comes from the perception that critics have exaggerated the common experience, and individuals should take responsibilities for their complicity in the activity they were part of. Strangely this seems to result in Dave trying to blame xJCs for things they did under his leadership and acting like a victim when confronted by anyone who takes offence at his various attempt to demean and demonise those who oppose his excesses.

I am not seeking to join a lynch mob or have anyone publicly flogged for his "errors of judgement". But the truth is the truth and it might be in Dave's interest to swallow a little pride and accept a little personal responsibility for his actions, instead of always blaming other people for his failings.

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Many ex-JCs carry mixed feelings about their time in the Jesus Christians. I don't doubt the same is true of Dave in relation to the COG.

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I recall a family Bible study when reading a passage from one of Paul's epistles that mentioned how one should not eat with adulterers, and Dave explained that on this basis the COG would no longer stay at our house.