Born to be wild

Nach den jüngsten Angriffen auf Menschen und dem Jahrestag eines weltweit bekannten Justizfalls wird es dieses Jahr viele Diskussionen über Dingos geben.

Expect to see a lot of news this year — across the world — about dingoes. August will mark the 40th anniversary of baby Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance during a family camping trip at Uluru, central Australia.

Since then, there have been many movies and books about mother Lindy Chamberlain’s wrongful conviction for the murder of her baby girl.

As a journalist in Sydney at the time, I never once doubted the mother’s story of a dingo stealing the baby from the family’s tent. I can remember the newspaper headline screaming the result of the first coroner’s examination: “DINGO DID IT.”

Sadly, that judgement was overturned, aided by a powerful media bias against Lindy Chamberlain and false forensic evidence presented at her trial. It caused one of the greatest injustices in my memory, against a strong woman who was accused of not showing enough grief. She was released from prison several years later — after the baby’s cardigan had been found near a dingo lair at the base of Uluru Rock — and declared innocent at a retrial.

Forty years later, and despite numerous recorded dingo attacks against humans — a nine-year-old boy was killed by dingoes in 2001 on Queensland’s Fraser Island, while only last Easter, a year-old baby was taken from a camper trailer and badly injured at the same tourist location — most Australians still don’t understand this wild animal.

Neither cute nor cuddly, the dingo howls and behaves like a wolf, although scientists still disagree as to whether they are a separate species. Part of their DNA tells us that they probably originated from domesticated Asian dogs brought to the continent by seafarers about 5,000 years ago, or arrived via a land bridge that once linked Australia and Papua New Guinea. Aboriginal settlement began at least 45,000 years before the dingoes arrived, but they are nevertheless part of Aboriginal culture and storytelling.

Young dingoes were partly domesticated and became valued, especially by women, for protection and their ability to find underground water in north and central Australia, where dingoes are most commonly found. They were also prized for their skill at catching traditional foods such as goannas and kangaroos. However, stories tell of adult dingoes returning to the wild at two or three years of age, probably to find a breeding mate. They are, quite simply, dogs that are born to be wild.

Dingoes are protected in Australia within national parks. Elsewhere, they can be shot, trapped or poisoned to stop them killing farm animals, especially lambs. Thousands of kilometres of dog-proof fencing, some continuous across different states, have been maintained for over 100 years in an attempt to keep dingoes under control. All of which makes the injustice to Lindy Chamberlain even more poignant.