Memory lane

August 17, 1980 Azaria Chamberlain is taken by a dingo at Uluru

On the night of August 17, 1980, several people heard nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain cry out. Azaria’s blood was later found on her mattress, and dingo tracks were seen in and around the tent where she had been sleeping alongside her brother Reagan. No one who knew the Chamberlains – Michael, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, his wife Lindy and their three children – ever doubted that they were good people and that, as Lindy always insisted, a dingo had taken their baby. However, the truth of the case was swiftly obscured by rumour, vested interests, misogyny and prejudice. “Everyone in Australia judged this woman before she ever got a trial,” said Ita Buttrose, who interviewed Lindy for The Weekly.

A series of court cases and inquests followed, and in 1982 Lindy was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with no parole. While she languished there, Michael, Aidan, Reagan and Kahlia (who had been born after Lindy’s arrest) could only visit three times a year. The family maintained she was innocent and fought relentlessly to clear her name, but it was not until February 1986 that justice seemed within reach. A British traveller who had fallen to his death and whose body had been savaged by dingoes was found at the base of Uluru, and just a short distance away was the now-famous matinee jacket that Azaria had been wearing on the night she was taken. “I did not kill my lovely daughter and refuse to be treated as a criminal any longer,” Lindy wrote from prison that year. And she was vindicated. Lindy was released, a royal commission was established and the Chamberlains’ convictions were quashed. Finally, in June 2012, in the case’s final inquest, coroner Elizabeth Morris delivered her finding that Azaria had unequivocally been taken by a dingo.