It was August 1980 when Lindy Chamberlain, camped with her family at Uluru (then called Ayers Rock), heard her baby daughter Azaria cry out. When she went to check on her she saw a “dingo” run out of the tent dragging something into the dark. She checked another tent and found the other children safe — but Azaria was missing. It was then that she called out “a dingo has got my baby”. Dingoes, badly managed back then, frequented the camping ground and often stole food. These dingoes were also said to be “cross breeds” and “camp dogs”.
Today there is a new inquiry into the death of Azaria Chamberlain, 32 years after her disappearance. The third inquest 17 years ago left an open verdict as to the cause of death. Lindy Chamberlain was released from jail after serving three years on a jury’s verdict. Michael Chamberlain was given a suspended sentence. After a series of failed appeals, the last of which was at the High Court in February 1984, Lindy began serving her life sentence. When the matinee jacket that Azaria was wearing was discovered at Uluru in 1987 and after intervention by Senator Bob Collins, she was released.
A Royal Commission cleared the Chamberlains of all responsibility and the NT Parliament offered them a pardon, which does not clear them of guilt, in 1987. A supreme court in Darwin declared the Chamberlains’ innocent in 1988 and two books a film and a TV series later in 2012, the Northern Territory coroner, Elizabeth Morris, agreed to hold a new inquest.
New evidence will be tendered in this inquiry that shows there have been significantly more dingo attacks and deaths due to attacks since the last inquest.
Before the inquiry begins, just as public opinion had declared Lindy Chamberlain guilty, now dingoes are seen as “guilty” by a public increasingly hostile to the bush.
It should not be dingoes “on trial” at this new inquest but their bad management by Australians and the poor research by Australian scientists. Dingoes that killed nine-year-old Clinton Gage on Fraser Island in 2001 had previously badly scared a German backpacker in the late 1990s. She was given a holiday around the Whitsunday islands — where I met her in 1998 — funded by Queensland National Parks by way of compensation, and to keep her out of any headlines that could damage tourism in the area.
Apart from pets of the breed, it is these dingoes on Fraser Island — said to to be the home of the “last full blood” dingoes in Australia — that are responsible for most of the recent attacks, and only fatal attack. The island has been logged, burnt and “developed”, steadily reducing food available to dingoes and increasing their conflict with people.
Though clearly a native dog and widespread across Australia, the dingo is to this day considered an introduced species by most scientists. It was first described by Meyer as a species in 1793 and given the scientific name Canis (the dog family) lupus (wolves) dingo — then Canis dingo and later Canisfamiliaris (domestic dog) and later again Canis lupus familiaris reflecting the ongoing scientific ambiguity to this animal.
Similarly the fossil record is oddly regarded, with individual bones that are dated back 8000 years overlooked with only complete skeletons aged at 3200 to 4000 years giving the “currently most accepted date”. In a strange parallel with the “out of Africa” theory for the origin of humans, dingoes are seen as “out of Asia”. Their apparent absence from Tasmania is often used as evidence that they must have arrived with a later Aboriginal people or, as more commonly stated, with Asian seafarers.
Of all native Australian animals, dingoes were the greatest threat to an economy that “rode on the sheep’s back”. Given they were efficient killers of sheep, successive state governments have invested in dingo trappers, aeriel baiting and shooting. A massive dingo fence was constructed from 1880 to 1885 and stretched 5200k from Dalby on the Darling downs of Queensland to the Eyre Peninsula on the Great Australian Bight and complemented with many thousands of kilometres of other “dingo proof fencing”. 
Frederick McCoy was the first “director of the Museum of Natural and Applied Sciences” in Melbourne and published prolifically on geology and paleontology. In 1881 he published a paper The Dingo in which he describes dingoes as a unique ancient dog and not related to wolves as domestic dogs are. He cites their dentition, skull structure and habits — that they do not bark or growl like domestic dogs when vexed and only come on heat once a year.
In this first paper McCoy states:
“The announcement, many years ago, of my recognition of the bones and teeth of the Dingo in the Pliocene Tertiary strata (layers) of Colac, and other Victorian localities, in company with similarly mineralised remains of Thylacaoleo, Diprotodon … and other extinct genera, therefore excited great interest, as proving that the Dingo is one of the most ancient of the indigenous mammals of the country, and abounded as now long before man himself appeared.”
The specimens he refers to may still be in the Museum of Victoria collection labelled with the localities where they were found. With dingoes still seen as killers of sheep and children and costing taxpayers to bait, trap and shoot there appears to be a scientific “prejudice” that maintains them as “introduced”.
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, as would most Australians, assumed that the dog that fled the tent on that dark night was a dingo and not a dog. There are many assumptions about this animal that “so inconveniently” has been a native predator on this landscape so often described as “predator free”.
Though understated by modern researchers, many naturalists and some scientists believe that dingoes have a vital ecological role in the Australian landscape. They could do much more to regulate the populations of feral animals, even foxes that they are known to kill.
It is a pity that government bodies that manage places where dingoes and people interact are not a whole lot smarter about the way they manage this interaction. It is a challenge met by countries all over the world that manage to maintain wild carnivore populations from Japan to Europe and the US. They combine well-funded science with community involvement and innovative management. This approach is conspicuously missing from Australia where a likely reaction to this inquiry will be to shoot more dingoes — again — just as was done not long after Azaria went missing in 1980.
This is one of those stories that will never stop being talked about.
It will be on that short list of Aussie moments:
– Ned Kelly being hanged
– Gough Whitlam being sacked
– Donald Bradman’s batting average
– Simpson and his donkey
– the dog on the tuckerbox
– and Azaria Chamberlain taken by a dingo (and her mother being
accused of murder but finally redeemed)
It passes into Aussie folklaw -and is still being talked about 30 years later.
It will be still be talked about in 30 years from now too, I am guessing,.
Lionel, you may not have written the headline but dingoes didn’t get a “bad rap” from Azaria’s death. That came later and we brought it on them. It’s amazing how the general population can be swayed around after 30 years of Hollywood-supported campaigning. Your opening paragraph tells Lindy Chamberlain’s version of the story – the version rejected outright as lies and fabrication by a properly constituted jury of her peers. Those twelve people who sat and heard all the evidence in the court room decided that Lindy had butchered her baby in the front passenger seat of the family car. That she had murdered the child and conspired with her husband to cover it up. The jury said the dingo didn’t dunnit. Don’t you remember that?
You must recall that the Chamberlains exhausted every available avenue of legal appeal – and at every stand their call was rejected. Uncomfortably, because it seemed so shocking that a new mother would kill her baby child, the Australian community was asked to accept that Lindy was a fully lawfully convicted murderer – who would be hung if the capital punishment crowd still had their way in this country. What other resort did the Chamberlains have than to head for the parliament and some malleable principles? The tawdry casting of uncheckable doubt on the forensics, hopeless in the legal process but dynamite in tabloid-land, corralled the Darwin parliament into a dispensation. They could let her out of jail but they couldn’t make the facts of the court case and its findings go away.
What the Coroner in Darwin is now being asked to do is take that dispensation – that ‘special dealing of Providence’ with the Chamberlains, and twist it into an assault on providence – the beneficient care of nature. It’s convenient to give dingoes a ‘bad rap’ because we don’t want to deal with it. Aren’t we pathetic?
An ‘Open’ finding would walk the fine line for me.
Lionel, exactly what are you trying to say, you strange little person…
If memory serves me correctly, some facts of the Chamberlain case are
now forgotten but still odd:
1) The original coroner’s inquest found that the baby’s jump suit had been
buried by persons unknown and found some time after the disappearance
of Azaria. That finding alone led to the obvious question – who did that?
2) Lindy gave a TV interview to (Mike Willacy I think) in which she
described what she glimpsed as a ‘young dog’, and then calmly proceeded
to describe how the dog would have peeled the jump suit off Azaria
like peeling an orange.
3) These events aroused suspicions fed by the media with other speculation
for police to investigate the car and Michael’s camera bag which tested
positive to a reagent for foetal blood (Joy Kuhl was the scientist who
did the tests).
4) Finding foetal blood then opened up the whole theory of murder and
the disposal of Azaria by the Chamberlains.
So it turned out that Joy Kuhl destroyed her samples and the German
reagant for foetal blood was a dud batch, and the British expert on scissors
cutting the jumpsuit and bloody hand prints was also a dud and the rest is
history.
However scissor cuts on textiles and dog bites are impossible to confuse
with each other.
A couple of difficult to overcome questions remain : how did a coroner find
that a person(s) unknown had buried the jumpsuit? and was the evidence
of scissor cuts on the jumpsuit ever disproved?
Perhaps others with a better memory could set my mind to rest.
The big question in this case was the lack of the Prosecution to say why, let alone put forward a possible scenario. I was one of the people who always believed that Lindy did not kill her baby. There was never any history of an ‘unhealthy’ aspect to her personality. She had two other children (boys) of whom nobody came forward to say they were ‘concerned’ about her mothering. There was not a hint of post natal depression that could/perhaps explain her mental state. There was no domestic violence history. Nobody came forward voicing any concerns, and most importantly, that little baby looked loved and cared for. Lindy’s ‘wooden’ expression during the first Inquest was quite understood by anyone who’s experienced terrible grief. In the eyes of the media, she couldn’t win! It was despicable!
The only negative attitudes to Lindy came from the sensational media, who even offered some bs about what Azaria meant, to inferring that just because they were Seventh Day Adventist people, it was a ‘cult’ or something similar and sinister. This was also total bs.
The role of the media over this issue was as vitriolic and nasty as what msm have been over Julia Gillard. The Ju’liar stuff , the emphasis on the size of her rear or ear lobes etc is testimony to how sinister the media in Australia is to women. These two cases aren’t the only ones by any means, but are a good example of the misogynist and ruthless roles played by key journalists, and the apathy of the rest of us for not demanding that it stop? If the media were carrying on like this with males, the opposition would’ve been swift and complete! But, we were all part of the travesty that led to Lindy’s demise!
I hope that finally Lindy and Michael will achieve their goal – to have a real reason on the death certificate of their much loved daughter. If there was any ‘fault’ at all, it was perhaps questionable whether that sort of holiday was suitable for a small baby. But, that doesn’t excuse the horrific bs that the Northern Territory police and those in the tourist industry went on with in order to turn people off holidaying in the NT.
@KEN LAMBERT – I don’t recall Lindy giving the account of “peeling the jumpsuit off like an orange”? I think those words were spoken by an expert on dingoes or wild dogs in general. When you’re in an awful state of shock and duress, you often speak quite coldly about the event/s. I recall this when my much loved sister died. I felt like I was ‘outside’ what was happening. I went about like a ‘robot’ and even sewed something her children wanted for her coffin. I don’t remember sewing that. I do remember buying the materials, but that’s all! It is an awful state of unreality to be in. Nearly 23 yrs later, I still don’t remember it! A real insight into what emotional pain and shock can do. I’m not ‘unhinged’ or anything, I just have empathy!
Wouldn’t be the first time that ‘shabby’ actions took place re court cases. There’s been a few well documented murder cases where the Prosecution behaved ‘somewhat questionably’? Take the most recent. Gordon Wood released last night and aquitted of murder. It was some questionable aspects of that trial. The Judges concurred, that some of his actions raised ‘questions’ or ‘suspicion’ but that’s not good enough to convict someone of murder – Beyond reasonable doubt!
Good on you Lindy. Now, maybe your little girl can rest in peace! She’d possibly be having babies of her own now, and this must be part of the tragedy of such loss!