NZ-born dad of Azaria dies aged 72
AUSTRALIA: New Zealand-born Michael Chamberlain, who fought a long and bitter battle for justice after his baby daughter was snatched by a dingo at Uluru in Australia in 1980, has died.
The 72-year-old died in Gosford Hospital in Australia on Monday evening as the result of complications from acute leukaemia, a long-term friend told Fairfax Media.
Stuart Tipple, who was his friend and solicitor for decades, said on Monday that Chamberlain had gone into a coma on Sunday night. His son, Reagan, and daughter Zahra were at his bedside.
Chamberlain’s son, Aidan, was travelling to Gosford from Western Australia, while his daughter, Kahlia, was flying from the Caribbean.
He had been full-time carer for his wife, Ingrid, after she suffered a stroke in 2011.
Michael Chamberlain was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in February 1944.
He moved to Australia in 1965, where he became a pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and married Lindy in 1969.
Their daughter, Azaria, was snatched from the family tent at Uluru in August 1980 and the couple were ultimately charged, Lindy with murder and Michael for being an accessory after the fact.
The Chamberlains were convicted, pardoned, exonerated and compensated and Michael Chamberlain, who remarried, went on to a successful career as a writer and an academic.
He lived in Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, and in 2016 was appointed a conjoint professor at the University of Newcastle, in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Lindy Chamberlain remarried, becoming Chamberlain-Creighton.
In 2014, speaking in Canberra, Chamberlain reflected on the also Lindy ‘‘gross injustice’’ that helped to shape his life.
‘‘The case represents a gross injustice but also freedom of forensic science, which eventually saw Lindy and I exonerated in 1988,’’ he said.
‘‘It was one of the worst perversions of justice and forensic science in Australian history. We had gone as babes in the woods. A Catholic lawyer described us as lambs to the slaughter.
‘‘We had lived by the credo that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. It was dead wrong.’’