Lessons learned from Azaria Chamberlain

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Now this story is not from foreign shores, but it’s a story, as with many others in Correspondents Report, that deals with a universal truth, and a reporter’s attempt to understand it.

This week’s landmark ruling that a dingo did kill baby Azaria Chamberlain has certainly made headlines around the world.

Following events with particular interest has been our New Zealand correspondent, Dominique Schwartz, who was in the search party for Azaria on that fateful night 32 years ago.

DOMINIQUE SCHWARTZ: It’s not often, even as a journalist, that you find yourself a bit player in the making of history. It was certainly the last thing I was expecting as a teenager on a school camp in the Central Australian desert.

Like the Chamberlains, my fellow students and I were staying at the Ayers Rock Campground, as it was known then. Our day was spent scaling Uluru and walking around its considerable girth. We marvelled at its different moods and snapped photos at sunset with cameras borrowed from our parents.

Dinner and dark came hand-in-hand, followed by the evening ritual of trying to cram bodies and bags into an A-line tent with more head-room than lie-room.

I never heard that now famous and heart-wrenching cry, “A dingo has got my baby”. It was the beam of headlights piercing the tent canvas and the onslaught of cars churning up the campground which first alerted me to the unfolding drama.

Someone yelled for us to get our torches and within minutes scores of people materialized out of the night.

A ranger organised us into groups and we fanned out into the dunes and scrub – arms linked – looking for baby clothes, a baby or any sign of a dingo.

We scoured the desert for several hours, afraid of what we might find. But of course, we found nothing.

The next day, our holiday resumed. The Chamberlains’ long nightmare had only just begun.

Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton has said that Australians can learn a lesson from this week’s landmark finding that her baby daughter was taken and killed by a dingo.

The lesson: that Australia’s native dogs can be dangerous and that people should therefore take the necessary precautions when in their domain.

But there’s another lesson that might be learned from the Chamberlain’s 32-year battle for the truth: that people – and most definitely the media – should not rush to judge others as guilty, just because they don’t meet some preconceived ideal of an innocent, grieving parent, or because their story seems too fantastic.

It never struck me as implausible that a dingo might have taken Azaria and it didn’t seem odd to others campers that night, or the rangers. There was a sign in the communal bathroom warning of dingoes in the area, and a camper had told me that she’d seen one come right up to the shower block only the day before.

What was odd was the way in which so many Australians decided so quickly, that the Chamberlains must have killed Azaria, or at least played a sinister role in her death.

Rumours abounded about sacrifices in the desert. The Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists after all. Surely that made them guilty?

In the court of public opinion, you were either with the Chamberlains or against them.

There were reporters too, who fell into either camp.

Now the Darwin coroner has now delivered her finding, one that hopefully the public is more willing to accept given the documented cases since Azaria’s disappearance of dingo attacks on children, at least one of them fatal.

Of course, there’ll always be those who can’t accept that a dingo was to blame. So be it, says Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton. She has survived far worse – the loss of a child, and the wrongful imprisonment for the murder of that child.

So what’s got her through such trauma? A burning anger at injustice? The desire for revenge? No. Forgiveness, she says.

It’s not what many would consider a normal response, only this time Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton is winning more praise than criticism for her point of difference.

In Auckland, this is Dominique Schwartz for Correspondents Report.

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