How Lech Blaine's Australian family fought to guard children from vengeful 'archangel'

Australian writer Lech Blaine felt blessed as a "miracle" child. He had the unconditional love and adoration not only of his parents - who had struggled to conceive naturally - but his three foster siblings.

But he knew nothing of what was to come: being haunted by the "monster" figures of his siblings' infamous biological parents.

Michael and Mary Shelley - self-styled Christian fanatics of no fixed abode - were determined to reunite with John, Steven and Hannah, believing they had been taken from them unfairly, despite authorities finding they were not cared for properly.

The pair went as far as kidnapping their first-born, sending death threats to the Blaine family and politicians, trespassing, and calling their own children traitors.

Blaine - a writer who has documented his life in the memoir Car Crash - embarked on a decade-long project to recount these intense encounters between his family and the Shelleys, as well as the curious histories that led them to one another in his new book, Australian Gospel: A Family Saga.

In the 1960s and '70s, Mary and Michael were mixing in Sydney's socialite circles - whilst married to their respective partners - before they had nervous breakdowns and met at a psychiatric hospital.

It is believed Mary was suffering from bipolar and postpartum depression and while Michael's diagnosis - if any - remains unknown, Blaine believes he had narcissistic personality disorder.

"He was this remarkably high-achieving, charismatic student and then businessman, and got married quite young, but kept sleeping with lots of women in Sydney and then was doing a lot of drugs, drinking a lot. And I think [he] burnt himself out by his late 20s and left his first marriage, remarried another woman. That marriage lasted about a year and at that point, he was declared bankrupt and that's when everything ... came to a head," Blaine told Nine to Noon.

"[Mary] was essentially kidnapped as a child, as an 11-year-old, by her father from a boarding school in the UK and flown to Australia and she didn't see her mother for another decade after that, and so there was a long pattern of trauma in her past and quite manipulative, charismatic men controlling her destiny."

In the years after the pair left the hospital, they began to formulate their own belief system.

"It was a New Age, hippie-ish experimentation with different lifestyles, and in that process, they started to read the Bible together, and Michael had somewhat of an epiphany that he was in fact the Michael the Archangel in the Bible, and that he was a New Age kind of Jesus.

"So, they got rid of all their belongings, [and] they hitchhiked to far north Queensland in 1980."

In 1982, their first child, Elijah (now John), was placed into foster care. But Michael was determined to get him back, and not only managed to track down his first foster carers but also convinced a teenage hitchhiker to help him in the kidnapping in 1983.

"This teenager who had no previous history of fanatical Christianity suddenly believed that if he didn't do this mission that he was going to hell and that if he did do this mission then he was going to heaven, so that... gives you a little bit of an insight into how persuasive Michael Shelley could be when he wanted to be," Blaine said.

"He was very much not looking to build a massive followership, but he would occasionally recruit people when he needed them to do specific things - usually as a way to protect Michael from further legal persecution."

They evaded capture for four days before being arrested. Next, their second child was placed into foster care, which continued a tirade of harassment and threats from the pair that Michael would have rather described as "prophecies", Blaine said.

"He was detailing .. really specifically the ways these people would die, the ways their children would die.

"And so these politicians, but also their families, were exposed to really ... extreme safety precautions because they believed there was a strong possibility they could be attacked by Michael Shelley and his disciples."

When it came to the birth of their third child, Hannah, the Shelleys decided to escape to New Zealand, where Michael helped Mary secretly give birth in 1990 to keep authorities off their back.

"They left without any indication that they'd just delivered a baby in this motel room and then they proceeded to do essentially what they did in Queensland, which was check into motels and then do runners ... - and they did this pretty much all the way from Wellington to Auckland."

Eventually, the couple were arrested, and Hannah was taken to Australia and reunited with her siblings, who at this point were already with Tom and Lenore Blaine. The couple wanted a big family but could not conceive naturally.

But just 48 hours after welcoming Hannah to their family, Lenore heard the news she was not expecting: she was pregnant with her own child, Lech.

"It was a really magical early childhood. If anything, it was hard to go out into the real world because my early childhood had just been so adoring, and I had to learn ... that nobody else would think I was as much of a miracle as what my parents and siblings did, but I always did know that my siblings were fostered.

"As much as we didn't know the full extent of everything that had happened with the Shelleys or what they were doing still, we knew that they were out there somewhere. But for the time being, we felt they didn't know where we were, so we were safe and happy and very much loved by our parents."

The Shelleys spent a decade in New Zealand before going back to Brisbane and continuing a so-called campaign of terror against public servants, before Michael found out where his children were via his mother who had kept in touch with them, Blaine said.

"From that point onwards, it was just really intense.

"So Mary would stand outside our house at night. She would leave letters, death threats to my parents. Michael was sending letters berating my parents for their various failures of dieting and failures of parenting … they're rocking up to Parliament and accusing my parents of being child molesters on television."

The accusations took a toll on his mother's mental health, he says, but the vitriol "went on and on for a few years and we were just completely under siege".

At one point, Hannah agreed to speak to her biological mother through the screen door, and Mary was happy having just a moment to see her daughter, but Michael was enraged when he found out, Blaine said.

"When you read all these letters, you can see how much Michael Shelley was the one really making the decisions.

"And so occasionally Mary would show these flashes of pragmatism and rationality and then Michael would swoop in and derail any attempt that she made to have ongoing contact with her children. For him, he could never swallow his pride and he could never, as hard as it would be, accept that it was an imperfect situation."

In creating this "creative nonfiction" book, Blaine bore the responsibility of telling a very personal story which his siblings entrusted to him as he sought medical and court records, reviewed letters, spoke to family members, friends of the Shelleys and social workers, and even wrote to Michael himself to see what he had to say.

Through the process, he unexpectedly found some empathy too.

"I felt like there was too much in the back story that needed to be established for the story to make sense and for people to have empathy for not just my parents, but the Shelleys.

"I felt like if they went, walked in the Shelleys' shoes growing up, and before they'd had their nervous breakdowns, that they would see them as three-dimensional figures rather than ...monsters, which is how I saw them as a 10-year-old boy.

"It's not like I was consciously on a mission to empathise ... I didn't want it to be, 'My parents are the heroes, and the Shelleys are evil.' I wanted there to be ambiguity on both sides."

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