‘Be careful’: Family’s warning before mother died (2025)

Melbourne myotherapist Rachael Dixon had already had a bad experience taking magic mushrooms at a healing retreat.

So when she told her partner she was going to consume them again on an upcoming trip, he gave her a warning. “I just said, ‘be careful’,” Richard Mountain says.

It was April 2024, and Dixon – a 53-year-old mother from Ringwood in Melbourne’s east – was attending a $500-a-head retreat run by self-described healer Deanne Mathews.

It would be Dixon’s last. She died after drinking magic mushroom tea, although the tea was never determined as her cause of death.

Speaking to A Current Affair, Dixon’s partner, Richard Mountain, said she had felt unwell after consuming psilocybin – a naturally occurring psychedelic compound in some species of mushrooms – on an earlier trip before the fatal retreat, which was hosted at Clunes, north of Ballarat.

“The previous trip she’d been on, she told me ... she didn’t feel great, she felt terrible and had a bad experience,” he told A Current Affair.

He said he was concerned the psilocybin was being given out with no idea where it was being sourced from and “no qualifications to prescribe it”.

Dixon had begun feeling sick shortly after consuming the drink, then collapsed, Mountain said. She died soon after on April 13, 2024, and had no health conditions that he knew.

Mathews was in March this year fined $3000 but spared a criminal record after she pleaded guilty to trafficking the psychedelic drug. She was not charged over Dixon’s death, and this masthead does not suggest she ought to be.

Mountain described Mathews’ punishment as “an insult”, and said the healer had not contacted him.

Prosecutors earlier told Bacchus Marsh Magistrates’ Court that participants at the retreat had been aware of what they were consuming before Dixon died.

Dixon’s son, Matt Mountain, also knew his mother would be consuming psilocybin during the tea ceremony.

He said she had attended up to five of the ceremonies before her death, and was sometimes “micro-dosing”.

Matt Mountain remembered his mother as loving, supportive and always there for him.

“I miss everything ... probably the little things that you don’t realise at the time, you probably take for granted,” he told A Current Affair. “Having a coffee before she’d go to work, walking the dog together.”

Mathews hired a room at the Soul Barn Creative Wellbeing Centre at Clunes to host the event. Her defence lawyer, Jon Ross, told a court last month: “Since this matter, no such events have been held.

“This is not a prominent feature of what she does. This was at the time a very small subset of her practice,” Ross said.

A year on from Dixon’s death, Matt Mountain says if he could tell his mother one thing, it would be: “I miss you.”

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For Richard Mountain, the message is different but clear: “Don’t go on the retreat.”

Mathews has been contacted for comment.

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