The death of Azaria Chamberlain will always be our national shame

IT captivated not only Australia but the world and almost four decades later it continues to spark debate. The disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain is a story ingrained into the national consciousness.

The camping area and tent the Chamberlain family stayed in at Ayers Rock in the Northern Territory.

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AZARIA Chamberlain was just nine weeks old when she disappeared. But the tragedy started by her short life has filled 220 boxes in the labyrinth of underground storage in the National Library of Australia. And counting.

The Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton collection, secure and under strict climate control, is one of the biggest personal files held by one of the most esteemed libraries of the nation.

If importance to Australia’s story could be measured by square metres, Manning Clark, the best-known historian with 198 boxes stored on nearby shelves, falls slightly shy of Lindy.

In the boxes are pertinent parts of the Azaria story. Her hospital name swatch. A lengthy handwritten letter from a former detective apologising for his prejudice.

And 20,000 letters — mostly of support and regret — that the family received.

If there was an expectation we might relegate the Azaria Chamberlain volumes to history alone, the death of her father, Michael, this week shows each anniversary or death will ignite the shame the nation should always feel.

“The letters express a collective grief,” researcher Dr Deborah Staines says. She was given access to the letters for an academic study.

“They show the public’s empathy for Lindy and her family’s suffering. And they felt they were witnessing a modern-day witch hunt. A persecution. It’s an archive of feelings that documents how this event was hurtful to the nation.”

Michael reiterated his own hurt just last year. Azaria’s death was the start of the darkest part of his life which he said he wouldn’t “wish on anyone”.

Azaria would have turned 36 last June. Michael was 72 when he died on Monday.

He’d spent exactly half his life living in the cold shadow of his little girl’s death.

Lindy and Azaria Chamberlain

When Azaria’s life ended on August 17, 1980, Lindy and Michael were on a camping holiday at Ayers Rock with her and her brothers — Aidan 6, and Reagan, 4.

Until then Lindy would never have warranted a spot in the national library. Few of us do.

When someone mentions the words “Azaria Chamberlain” we don’t immediately imagine the face of a baby girl.

Instead, most over 40 play in their heads a slideshow of photographs which appeared in the newspapers for a decade — a canary yellow Holden Torana beside a pitched tent, a jumpsuit, a little jacket, a dingo.

And we recall TV footage of a terse Lindy with Michael at her elbow, marching up and down courthouse steps.

Everybody had an opinion. It was the subject of tearoom conversation and dinner party argument. People then were largely informed by last night’s homogenous TV bulletins and this morning’s newspaper stories.

Front page of 'The Sun' newspaper. February 23, 1984.

A 1984 Gallup Poll quizzed Australians: “Do you believe that Mrs Lindy Chamberlain is guilty or not guilty of the baby Azaria murder charge?” The response was overwhelming — 76.8 per cent believed she was guilty. Only 31.8 per cent believed she should be pardoned.

Azaria’s disappearance made headlines internationally. It had, at the time, as much attention as the O.J. Simpson trial would attract 15 years later.

“The dingo’s got my baby,” screamed from posters and was later to be the best-known line in the movie Evil Angels starring Meryl Streep. What must have been a true moment of terror for the family seemed cheapened by the cry which seemed inauthentic coming from an actor struggling to master the broad Australian accent. It was to become as recognisable as Crocodile Dundee’s “That’s not a knife; this is a knife.”

It seemed the further away from the Red Centre you were geographically the more likely you were to think the dog didn’t do it.

For years, much of the public preferred the credibility of a wild dingo over a mother whose defiance was mistaken for guilt.

The ingredients were powerful — a missing baby, a little-understood wild dog species, the exotic Red Centre, speculation of a cultish religion (then, Seventh Day Adventists weren’t part of mainstream denominations) and accompanying allegations of hilltop atonement sacrifices. It was extraordinary speculation.

In 1980, most Australians knew of Ayers Rock only from postcards sent by retired relatives on holidays. Or from the handful of richer schoolmates returned from the Year 10 trip. Much of white Australia was not to apply the name “Uluru” to the place until 13 years later.

We all knew that spiders, snakes and crocodiles might take human life in this country. But deadly mammals, we thought, belonged on every other continent except here. Here, nature covered with fur was not an apex predator.

The camping area and tent the Chamberlain family stayed in at Ayers Rock.

Michael & Lindy Chamberlain leave NSW Supreme Court. Picture: Colin Murty.

Twenty-one years after the death of Azaria, any remaining doubts that wild dingoes could take human life were put to rest after a nine-year-old boy was killed on Fraser Island in Queensland. He’d been stalked near his family’s campsite and, when he tripped, two attacked him. His little brother was also mauled.

In the months after Azaria disappeared, park rangers, police and the coroner accepted a dingo took her. To city kids then, dingoes were shy, mysterious creatures. They weren’t yet features of zoo enclosures.

But the predatory nature of some of these animals was well-accepted by people who knew. Aboriginal Australians knew for decades that they could attack and kill children. And white Australians from farms knew how dangerous they could be.

Their opinion and evidence was overlooked in favour of the fledgling and, it was to emerge, flawed forensic science that turned the spotlight to Lindy and off the wild dog.

Garry Rodgers, a Canadian-based retired homicide detective and forensic coroner, wrote recently the case against the Chamberlains was the “worst travesty in a miscarriage of justice that I’ve ever heard”.

“This is a classic case where jurors bought the CSI stuff over an outlandishly stupid premise of how Lindy was supposed to have killed her baby. It defies all common sense,” he wrote.

There was talk also that NT authorities were worried what the tragedy, if nature was responsible, would do to their tourism industry. They didn’t have the reef or rainforests to mine for the emerging 1980s tourist dollar. Their pervading red dust and rudimentary camp sites could not be associated with native killers. A murder was preferable.

It took 18 months and two coronial inquests to result in Lindy Chamberlain being committed to trial for murdering her baby daughter. Michael was charged with being an accessory after the fact.

Lindy & Michael Chamberlain enter Supreme Court in Darwin.

On October 29, a heavily pregnant Lindy was found guilty of first degree murder and sent to prison for life. Michael was given an 18-month suspended sentence.

Less than a month later, Lindy gave birth to Kahlia who, despite an appeal, was removed at birth and sent to live with foster parents.

In early 1986 Azaria’s missing matinee jacket — a knitted cardigan — was found in Uluru. It was uncovered in a search for missing body parts of a climber who died in a fall in an area full of dingoes’ lairs. And its discovery supported the Chamberlain’s defence case.

Lindy was released from jail and a Royal Commission set up. The pair was cleared of any involvement in Azaria’s death after a 14-month inquiry. It was determined that there was evidence to support she was taken by a dingo.

The Chamberlains were granted a pardon, but were still not declared innocent. That took a new act of Parliament to be passed to allow them to return to court and clear their names.

On September 15, 1988, the Northern Territory Supreme Court quashed all convictions and declared them innocent. The NT Government paid them $1.3 million in compensation and $400,000 in legal costs. They were also given $19,000 to repay them for their car which was dismantled for evidence.

Lindy in the Coroners Court during the first Inquest, wearing the Policeman's hat. Picture: Sunday Night, Channel Seven

Two years ago, the National Museum in Canberra took possession of that vehicle in a ceremony watched by family, lawyers, academics and journalists. It was added to the museum’s vast array of artefacts from the story’s set.

The museum director told the gathering that the collection would help ensure the story would never be forgotten.

On Dr Staines’ last trip to Darwin she spoke to a security guard who said: “She did it you know.” Librarians were delighted she would use their archive to analyse media coverage of the time. And a reporter confessed his anguish the miscarriage of justice had happened in his home town.

“The Chamberlain case is a kind of trauma, an embedded and permanent damage. We hurt the family and we hurt ourselves by denying the truth of what actually happened and blaming an innocent woman,” Dr Staines says.

On the 25th anniversary of Azaria’s death, Lindy pleaded: “Please do not lose sight of the fact that this is a real case, with a real child and real family behind all the court cases and media attention.”

People did overlook the family’s personal trauma. In psychological manuals, the word “trauma” was only just starting to be replace “shell shock”, as experienced by the veterans from World War One.

One of the Chamberlain boys was for a brief time rumoured wrongly to have involvement in Azaria’s death.

Lindy told a magazine that Aidan was made “angry with life” by the rumours.

“The rumour went around that I was in jail because I was covering for either of the boys,” she was reported as saying. “We hoped Aidan didn’t know about the rumours about him, but of course he did find out.”

Lindy Chamberlain and her children with their Holden Torana. Picture: National Museum of Australia

The memory of Azaria was finally, fully returned to her family on June 12, 2012. After a fourth coronial inquest, it was officially recorded that Azaria’s death was “as a result of being attacked and taken by a dingo”.

While the abiding sense now is that our justice system failed, goaded by a public mob re-enacting outcries from a medieval time, it is certain that the voice of the people also helped find the eventual justice the Chamberlains sought. At one point a petition calling for Lindy’s release containing 131,000 signatures was presented to the governor-general Sir Ninian Stephen.

Michael Chamberlain lived only 1672 days beyond the final inquest that defined Azaria’s actual cause of death.

But about then he started living another heartache. His second wife, Ingrid Bergner, who he married in 1996, had a massive stroke.

“She’s paralysed. She needs care in every way. This is a hell of a thing to happen,” he told a journalist last year.

Michael and Lindy Chamberlain with a poster portrait of Lindy and Azaria.

“I’m looking after my profoundly disabled wife in what is essentially our hospital home.”

The National Disability Insurance Scheme had enabled him to return to work at Newcastle University in 2015. Not long after, though, he was diagnosed with leukaemia. Its complications took his life.

The National Library of Australia does not discuss the contents of the Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton collection without her say-so. She rarely gives that. But while the contents are relatively private, its place in the library says a lot.

Michael certainly wanted us to keep remembering the case so it might not be repeated.

As he left the court after the final 2012 declaration that Azaria was killed by a dingo, he said the battle to arrive at the legal truth of his daughter’s fate had taken too long.

“However, I am here to tell you that you can get justice, even when you think that all is lost. But truth must be on your side,” he told journalists.

“I cannot express strongly enough how important it is to pursue a just cause even when it seems to be a mission impossible.”

Although his chapter ends, the story isn’t closed. Not because there is more to sort, but because many of us need to remember we got it so wrong. It will remain Australia’s unfinished business.

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