The West Australian 22 Mar 1937 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article41288055
I thought this article was an appropriate one, with the recent announcement that there will be a new inquest into the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain.
Azaria was a nine-week-old baby who disappeared from a tent at Ayres Rock in 1980 during a family camping trip. Her parents were accused of murder and her mother Lindy ended up jailed, released some years later when a new and vital piece of evidence was uncovered. The case still remains unsolved, although most people have their own opinion of what really happened.
Can you imagine the effect such an event would have on your family? The Chamberlains had other children at the time of the disappearance and Lindy gave birth to another child in jail. Their family broke down after her release from jail and the children missed out on spending their childhood with their mother. Both Lindy and Michael Chamberlain have since remarried.
The officials in 1980 who were investigating what happened seem to have done a dreadful job of finding the facts, and have been blamed for the open-ended nature of the investigation so far. Unfortunately, Lindy Chamberlain cut quite an unsympathetic figure in court. That doesn’t mean she did it although I am sure that didn’t help sway public opinion towards her.
There are many documented instances of dingoes attacking adults, and children have been attacked and even killed by dingoes, most notably on Fraser Island where there is a large population of wild dingoes that have been habituated to humans.
The two-year-old in this article from 1937 was quite lucky to be found unharmed if a dingo was tracking him. I expect that back then the dingoes would have been far more wary of humans. They were more likely to shoot a dingo then than allow it the table scraps.
Having seen dingoes in the wild I have no trouble at all believing that one could take a small child. Once wild animals realize people mean food they expect to get food from all people. We don’t feed animals when we are camping, but if we stay in popular campgrounds this can be quite a battle at times.
We have had crows stealing teabags from the table and kangaroos opening the esky, all while you are standing right there. We have had a mangy dingo target our 7-year-old and his dinner one night and have to be moved on, kookaburras steal about-to-be-bitten sandwiches out of hands and meat right off the sizzling BBQ hotplate, startling the cook. Anyone who has been camping will know that animals of all shapes and sizes will come hoping for a handout.
The problem is that animals don’t understand the difference between things people want them to eat and things people want them to leave alone. If people encourage an animal to come for dinner they can’t expect it to leave hungry. The ‘don’t feed the animals’ signs in campgrounds are there for a reason. The Chamberlain family seem to have been the unfortunate victims of years of people teaching the dingoes people meant food. Hopefully the findings of this new inquest will help the Chamberlains find some sort of closure, and perhaps hold to account the ones whose mismanagement of the initial case caused such heartache for them.
Buried words and Bushwa. 
As to the above – I fully believe that a dingo was responsible for the Azaria case.
And also thanks for the warning – on a scale of 1-10 for arachnophobia I have a level of 350!
Cheers
Pet dingoes are lovely, but the ones in the wild are quite scary. I was quite young when Azaria went missing and was not really sure who to believe (no doubt influenced by the media). Now with a bit of experience I have no doubt that Lindy was telling the truth.
I’m no spider fan either. Australia is not a good place to be scared of spiders, that’s for sure!
One camping trip a gigantic Orb weaver set up home in our toilet tent. I only noticed it once I was inside and it was between me and the door (in the dark). I let out a pathetic and embarassing girly scream and the Man of the House had to hold the door flap open for me to run out under it.
He teased me until he was packing up some canvas days later and nearly put his hand on one, cue a girly scream from him. Yes, I teased him right back!
Orb weavers are totally harmless but terrifyingly huge and spin massive webs in the trees. It is ridiculous to be scared of them but….. *shudder runs up spine*……eeek!
Eeek spider and snake scaredy cat here. ~lots of spine shudders here~
I too was quite young when Azaria went missing, but all these years later I believe Lindy is innocent. I had not heard there was another investigation, but will be interested to hear the verdict. A family ruined by many years of others’ ‘mistakes’.
Having also been to Uluru I can see how easy, even back then, it would be for a dingo to take a child and it’s never seen again. the place is massive!
It’s funny, isn’t it, you see Ayres Rock on the telly or in photos and it looks like a big rock in the desert. Once you are standing next to it it is more like a huge red wall in a forest.
We have photos on the wall of many of the places we have been, the one of the rock has the kids pointing comically at it and is self explanatory, but everyone asks what the one next to it is. It is of the creek and scrub you see at one point when you face away from the rock. Unless people have seen it they barely believe it is like that there.
I can imagine hundreds of people looking for a tiny body in such a place and not being able to find it.
It is terrible to think of what the family went through due to the mistakes of others, hopefully they will get some sort of resolution, although I suspect it will be a hollow victory.
I never believed the dingo baby story and still don’t. The campsite was crowded, there was no evidence of dingos in the area. My sister was on a plane with a local police officer who said the sons did it. I think this is the most likely. The boys were old enough to be jealous of the baby adn old enough to do it, albeit possibly by accident. a friend of mine had a bad cold once and his parents found his brother covering his face with a pillow – nearly killed him. I think the parents covered this up to protect their kids. The police at the time trusted the parents as religious people. It was not incompetence – country coppers just weren;t prepared for such an incident.
Interesting theory. A crowded campsite doesn’t necessarily negate the dingo theory though. When we were camping at Kings Canyon a dingo picked the busiest time of day to come around scavenging. It was so used to people it just didn’t care. I have also heard someone suggest that one the locals dogs (of which there were many) may have been the culprit.
Thanks for commenting.
Someone should have seen or heard something. Scavenging is a far cry from dragging away a baby almost as big as a dingo itself.
Azaria was only nine weeks old and weighed under three kilos at birth, an adult dingo is between 15 and 20 kilos. I believe any hungry dog that size would be able to pick up a baby without difficulty. Their main diet is kangaroo and wallaby, a wallaby is a similar size to a dingo, and a kangaroo can be as big as a man. As mentioned in the Morling Report in 1987, Aboriginal trackers noticed dingo tracks around the childrens tent.
So much time has passed, unfortunately we will never really know what the physical evidence could have shown if it was managed differently.
You are right, the police weren’t prepared for such an incident, but the Chamberlains weren’t trusted because they were religious, quite the opposite, they were regarded with suspicion because of it. Even as a child I noticed this in the media reports.
That was the real problem with this investigation, people interpreted the evidence through the filter of their own opinions and prejudices instead of on its own merit. The only way it will ever be resolved is if a tiny skeleton is found either in the back of a dingo lair, or in a shallow grave with Lindy’s drivers licence.
Or a confession by someone who really knows.