Who's the Dingo Now?

Ayers Rock is an island mountain, an august mountain of radiant red rising more than a thousand feet from the horizontal plain near the geographic center of the Australian continent. Around it in every direction stretch seemingly endless miles of orange, white and yellow sand, interspersed by roughly hewn waddies, desultory copses of desert oak and tussocks of spinifex. The Rock is renowned for its propensity to change color spectacularly through the day, from twilight’s inscrutable bluish violet to midday ochre to a brilliant glowing crimson at sunset. The Rock’s centrality to Australia is not merely geographic, but laden with symbolism. It has long been a central actor in Aboriginal creation myths and has emerged as an emblem of Australia and Australian-ness, both domestically and abroad. In short, something about Ayers Rock - or Uluru as it is known by Australia’s native Aboriginal peoples - has long engaged, beguiled, and mystified mankind, as an entity both familiar and arcane.

In the shadow of the Rock, a cry escaped through the hot heady air shortly after eight p.m. on the night of August 17th, 1980. Sitting around a barbecue in Ayers Rock’s sole campground, Michael Chamberlain, a 36 year-old preacher on vacation for the August school recess with his wife and three children, heard the sound and leaned over to his wife Lindy and asked, “was that the baby?” Lindy Chamberlain walked down the footpath to their tent; a minute later the campers heard her cry, “My God, My God, the dingo’s got my baby!” A swiftly assembled search party of policemen, park rangers, tourists and Aboriginal trackers fanned out over the area that night, but that cry remains the last thing ever heard from nine-week old Azaria Chamberlain.

The disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, the ensuing trial and public condemnation of her parents for her murder, and their eventual exoneration was a shared experience - with little comparison - which brought Australians together and tore them apart during the twentieth century’s penultimate decade. Professor Stuart Piggin of the University of Wallongong’s history department posited in the late 1980’s that Lindy Chamberlain might be the most hated person in Australia’s two hundred year history. Julie Marcus, a professor of anthropology at the University of Adelaide wrote that, “[f]or months it was impossible to discuss any other topic and still, eight years later, in spite of the final outcome in the courts, everyone still has a theory…on whether the dingo could, or could not, have perpetrated such a dastardly deed.” The pervasive appeal of this case across Australian society as a cultural phenomenon constitutes an often-inscrutable puzzle for the outsider peering in, but the Chamberlain case, in all its singularity, can perhaps be best understood in terms of it having chafed at the raw nerves of Australian society. The fountainhead of this intensity of absorption lies far away from Ayers Rock in the post-war development of Australia and its efforts at foundational realignment as a multicultural society, built on religious, gender, and ethnic parity.

Lost in Translation

What might have been a simple summer eve’s snack for a dingo at the center of the Australian continent - stealthily snatched, ingloriously eaten, and swiftly forgotten - set off a veritable circus of human activity, conjecture and emotion, which would consume a nation for close to a decade and that remains a contentious issue to this day. Coverage of Azaria’s disappearance began with a short and unassuming column on the third page of the August 19th edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. The report is succinct, methodical and impassive, much as one would expect from a news story about a missing child, presumably dragged off by a wild animal to be, but its style stands in marked contrast to the flurry of ensuing media coverage. Something about the case immediately caught the public’s attention, and interest in the story soon snowballed across the nation. Lindy’s claim that a dingo had taken her baby was met with skepticism from the outset, and by October Lindy was telling the media, “I feel that I am the victim of a medieval witch-hunt.” The Australian press mobbed the Northern Territory government’s inquest into the disappearance and of Azaria, and coroner Denis Barritt took the unprecedented step of broadcasting the findings of the inquest on live television in February 1981. One story told by Chamberlain in her book, Through My Eyes, is useful in communicating the extent of public absorption in the case:
We also discovered later that the girls on the switchboard of a large well-known hospital in Brisbane, desperately wanted to watch the telecast of Barritt’s summary so they took a portable television into work, just in case the could catch the inference of a few words during phone calls. One of the girls told me later that normally the only time the switchboard was quiet in the whole year was during the running of the Melbourne Cup. Much to their surprise, as soon as the coroner started his actual telecast, the switchboard went silent and not one phone call came through until the end of his summation (This was about twenty minutes).

Taken out of its specific context, this passage is staggering in its implications, and invariably prompts one to ask, “why?” Public interest and media coverage would indeed continue unadulterated for the remainder of the decade. Before I set about answering this question, let me present another point of opacity that I find even more puzzling.

After the first inquest corroborated the Chamberlains’ version of events, public outrage and lingering suspicions led to a second inquest, which overturned the original findings and charged that Lindy had murdered Azaria. The Chamberlains were incarcerated on February 2, 1982, and after a sensational seven-week trial, a pregnant Lindy was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. Based on a close reading of the case and examination of the body of evidence turned up by the seven official inquiries into Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance, it does not surprise me that the fate of Azaria remains unresolved: no body has ever found, and key pieces of evidence contradict each other. The Chamberlains’ story of a dingo carrying Azaria away in its mouth poses some significant problems, but surely it is no more difficult to believe than the Crown’s claim that Lindy Chamberlain carried her baby from the barbecue to the car, slit her throat, zipped the body into her husband’s camera bag, only to return serenely to the gathering around the fire. Unless Azaria’s body is eventually found, it seems very unlikely that we will ever know for certain what happened on the night of August 17th. That being said, Lindy’s conviction by a jury “of her peers” as guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” is confusing, even troubling. Our status as outsiders to the world where these events took place somehow obfuscates the coherence of this chain of events. For reasons that are opaque to the culturally uninitiated, Australians were enthralled by this case, which they found as mysteriously captivating and teeming with symbolism as Uluru - that reticent monolith of red rock at their nation’s heart - itself. As National Times reporter Frank Moorhouse wrote in a December 1981 report on the “Dingo Baby” case:
All this folk fiction doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the death of Azaria, but it tells us a lot about ourselves: we are not only talking about the case, we are talking about ourselves.

Dingo Baiting

The previously referenced August 19th Sydney Morning Herald article provides us with a convenient and revealing point of entry. The story appears as a straightforward, fairly innocuous, news report:
Azaria Chamberlain, the 10-weeks-old daughter of Mr Michael Chamberlain, 36, and his wife, Lindy, 32, was taken from her carry basket in a tent near the Rock. Mr Chamberlain, as Seventh Day Adventist minister from Mr Isa, and his wife saw “a shape just like a dingo” slinking out of the tent at about 8:30 am on Sunday.

The author of the article introduces the religious affiliation of the Chamberlains within the first hundred words of the column, in a way that – especially when taken together with the queerly worded citation of “shape just like a dingo” seems to qualify the reliability of Michael Chamberlain’s testimony. This detail could easily be altogether innocent, though when viewed in the context of the subsequent suspicion and vitriol heaped on the Chamberlains because of their heterodox religious ideology, it begins to look suspicious. An examination of related documents, which, when taken in accordance with wider socio-historical trends, reveal numerous illustrations of similar implicit chauvinism on the part of “mainstream” Australian society against what were perceived as cultural outsiders: specifically, members of non-mainstream religious sects and women.

The circumstances of the Azaria Chamberlain case couched it in terms that were subjectively challenging to traditional Australian hegemonies. The facts of the case were profuse with symbols that themselves conveyed Australian-ness - Ayers Rock, dingoes, the camping trip in the Outback – such that the case itself became affiliated, and came to help define Australia both at home and internationally. Secondly, the trial involved, and forced Australians to engage with two different groups of cultural outsiders - members of non-mainstream religious sects and women – and their own perceptions of them. Irrespective of the guilt or innocence of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, it was their mischance to step inadvertently into a maelstrom of symbolic intimations and innuendos that uncovered tensions and prejudices buried deep under the surface of the Australian psyche.

Despite Australia’s latent inclusion in the amorphous concept of the liberal-progressive “Western” world, its geographic isolation and distinct historical development make this generalization inaccurate. The traditional mainstream of Australian society – white, Anglo, and male – had begun to slip in cultural dominance during the post-year wars, as a result of loosened immigration controls, the broadening of Australia’s religious discourse, and campaigns for women’s rights of the 1960’s and 70’s. The Chamberlain case galvanized attention, and illustrated attitudes, to these minority groups within Australian culture. These factors, combined with the questionable circumstances of Azaria’s disappearance, led many to presume the Chamberlains’ guilt.

The ardent attention to the case and whiplash public condemnation of the Chamberlains were, at least in part, the results of discomfort about the forceful momentum of cultural progressivism, which in the second half of the twentieth century began to overwhelm the cloistered and culturally autonomous mainstream Australian society, used to being able to define development in its own terms. Public reactions to the case provide a window into unresolved discomforts in the relationship between mainstream (White, Anglo-descended male) Australian society, and the country’s minority groups (women, and fringe religious groups). The articulation of feelings about the case, in turn, allowed – consciously or not – discussion and utterance of opinions on these deeper taboo topics.

Religious Heterodoxy

From the time of its founding by jailed prisoners from the British Isles in 1788, the established nation of Australia was overwhelmingly White, ethnically English, and religiously Protestant and Anglican. Lifting of the so-called “White Australia” immigration embargo for those outside of Western Europe in the 1960’s led to a swift and large-scale broadening of cultural and religious diversity in Australia. At the same time, religious diversity among “ethnic Australians” began to expand, as non-traditional Christian sects like Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism drew increasing numbers of converts at the expense of more conventional and orthodox denominations. Mainstream Australian society tended to ignore these dissenters from conventional religious norms. The result was that when Australians learned about the Chamberlains’ Adventism, their reaction was one of unfamiliarity and distrust. Adventist customs such as the observation of the Saturday Sabbath, ritual foot-washing, greeting with the “holy kiss,” temperance and vegetarianism were viewed with hesitation, as strange and anomalous behavior, clearly emblematic of their “otherness.” Mainstream Australian society, which had already marginalized and disregarded faiths they viewed as dissident, seized on symbols from the case and let the public imagination fill in for their paucity of knowledge. The Chamberlains, and indeed all Seventh Day Adventists, were characterized implicitly and explicitly as child-murdering practitioners of witchcraft. A rumor that the name Azaria actually meant some variation on “sacrifice in the desert” became so widespread and persistent that coroner Denis Barritt felt it necessary to declare in the televised announcement of his inquest’s findings, “I find that the name Azaria does not mean, and never has meant, sacrifice in the wilderness.” Religious discrimination derived from the case as well. Adventist churches were defaced by graffiti, and allegations of witchcraft and human sacrifice were extended to all members of the Chamberlains’ church.

This kind of narrow-mindedness influenced the case in a subtler, but perhaps even more detrimental way. Lindy’s calm and self-possessed demeanor throughout the trial was widely perceived as attestation of her guilt. Communications experts pointed to Lindy’s “stoney-faced reaction” to the television cameras and the dearth of “constant and profuse” tears as a main reason for the public’s hostility. It did not seem to occur to many that her “curious” faith might be what was providing her with the emotional resilience and resolve that they found so alien to their notions of what grieving should look like. This interpretation was portrayed in the American docudrama film A Cry in the Dark, which illustrates the cultural differences between Australia and the United States in its sympathetic portrait of Lindy. Portrayed by actress Meryl Streep, Lindy is presented as impregnably virtuous and sustained in her adversity by the strength of her faith.

The Case of the Castrating Bitch

A striking counterpart to the media frenzy aroused by the Chamberlain case can be found looking back two decades earlier in Australian history. In 1965, two women – Ro Bagnor and Merle Thornton, the wives of University lecturers – chained themselves to the foot rail of a Brisbane bar to protest a law that prohibited women from being served alcohol in public bars. The responding policemen’s first question to the women was, “Where are your children? Who are looking after them?” Their action set off other similar protests, in which young educated Australian women began to actively campaign against sexist and paternalistic social inequalities in the country. Another woman, Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the Commonwealth building in Brisbane. These public protests became sensationalized media events that set off strong public reactions, not dissimilar to the Chamberlain case. One Frederick White, in a letter to a paper, asked, “Would the ladies feel any guilt if some person had kidnapped one of their children while they were chained to the bar?” while a Queensland Labor MP suggested that these women’s “neglected” children should be committed to the state. Even while the Australian women’s rights movement gained considerable ground in the 1960’s and 70’s, many women were astonished to find that their outspokenness enraged their male friends, lovers and brothers, who vilified them as “castrating bitches.”

In the case of the Chamberlain trial, Lindy’s perceived dominance over her husband allowed members of the old male Australian hegemony to express their anger and resentment, no longer acceptable for explicit expression. Many men responded to the fact that Lindy was more outspoken than her more passive husband, and the suggestion that she had forced him to cover up the murder of his own child, with vitriol inspired by the earlier women’s rights movement and the concessions to women they felt has been forced upon them. Without any certitude of evidence, it seems as if many Australians felt that Lindy must be guilty for her implied crime of forsaking her maternal duty. The symbolism of witchcraft swirled around allegations that Lindy had “bewitched” her husband in order to sacrifice her daughter to the wild untamed desert. When Lindy then accused a dingo, the classic example of free and untrammeled masculine license - the emblem of both the wild and male subjugation over it – of eating her baby, she played into the symbolic discourse of male insecurity, and effectively labeled herself one of those “castrating bitches.”

Conclusion

Like Ayers Rock itself, the dingo is a symbol couched in ambiguity. In the denouement of the Chamberlain affair, an editorial cartoon published in The Age showed a dingo labeled “Northern Territory Government” dragging the lady Justice by the neck. After the Chamberlains’ exoneration from guilt, various sources were blamed for getting carried away with the truth and putting an (now presumably) innocent woman away in prison. The press, legal system, and government were all variously labeled “dingo” in an attempt to both endorse Lindy’s original story, and to assign culpability on some head other than the collective whole, who had all bought into the circus of the trial. However, what was essentially to blame for this whole confusing mess was the brazen masculinity of mainstream Australian culture’s kneejerk assault on what was viewed as an attack on its own abstruse insecurities. Who’s the dingo now, Australia?