SYDNEY — The growl came first, low and throaty, piercing the darkness that had fallen across the remote Australian desert. A baby’s cry followed, then abruptly went silent. Inside the tent, the infant girl had vanished. Outside, her mother was screaming: “The dingo’s got my baby!”
With those panicked words, the mystery of Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance in the Australian Outback in 1980 became the most notorious, divisive and baffling legal drama in the country’s history. Had a wild dog really taken the baby? Or had Azaria’s mother, Lindy, slit her daughter’s throat and buried her in the desert?
Thirty-two years later, Australian officials hope to finally, definitively, determine how Azaria died when the Northern Territory coroner opens a fourth inquest on Friday.
Lindy Chamberlain, who was convicted of murdering her daughter and later cleared, is still waiting for authorities to close the case that made her the most hated person in Australia.
To the rest of the world, the case is largely known for its place in pop culture: countless books, an opera, the Meryl Streep movie “A Cry in the Dark,” and the sitcom Seinfeld’s spoof of Lindy’s cry, “Maybe the dingo ate your baby!”
But to Australians, the case is about much more than the guilt or innocence of one woman. It is about the guilt or innocence of a nation — a nation that prides itself on the concept of a “fair go,” an equal chance, for all.
Did Lindy Chamberlain get a fair go? Or had Australians misjudged this woman? With doubts growing about just how fair and tolerant they truly were, many wondered whether they had misjudged themselves.
“It’s a bit like a really bad war,” said Tony Raymond, chief forensic scientist in an investigation that debunked much of the evidence used to convict Lindy. “You’ve got to learn from it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Australia is a nation that was, in many ways, born out of judgment, when Britain began sending its unwanted convicts to the continent in the 1700s. These social outcasts fought against what they considered the elitism of the British class system, cheered for the underdog and honed a sharp sense of injustice. Australia proudly dubbed itself “the land of the fair go.”
Prime Minister Julia Gillard once declared, “We will hang on to our Aussie mateship and our Aussie fair go in the worst times and in the best.”
But the fair-go mentality didn’t seem to apply to the Chamberlains.
Lindy Chamberlain’s husband, Michael, was a pastor with the Seventh-day Adventist church, a Protestant denomination that few Australians understood. In the absence of fact came rumors that spread with frightening ferocity, of child sacrifice, witchcraft, even Satanism.
The hysteria was reminiscent of the Salem witch trials in the U.S. Even a black dress once worn by Azaria was seen as proof that Lindy was an evil murderess — because what kind of mother dresses her baby in black?
Michael Chamberlain, who was divorced from Lindy in 1991, is now an author in a small town north of Sydney. When asked about the case, he is both weary and wary, carefully limiting what he says ahead of the inquest as he waits to see whether the system will give him a chance.
