Before Azaria: A Historical Perspective on Dingo Attacks

Abstract

Simple SummaryWhen nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from a central Australian campsite in 1980, few accepted her mother’s claim that ‘A dingo’s got my baby’. Dingoes, it was popularly believed at this time, simply did not attack humans. A recent spate of dingo attacks has repudiated this widespread narrative—but when and why did it arise? Analysis of historical Australian print media shows that, in fact, dozens of accounts of dingo attacks were published between 1804 and 1928. It is difficult to separate the empirical events from the cultural milieu in which they were reported, but some of these historical accounts are credible, resembling those of modern attacks. It is also evident that up until the early 20th century it was a commonly held perception that dingoes did occasionally prey on humans. By the 1920s, however, a popular belief had taken hold that dingoes were far too timid to attack even children and had never represented a threat to human safety. This cultural shift in the image of the dingo may be traced to the reduced frequency of human–dingo interactions in the more settled regions of eastern Australia, where a veritable war of destruction waged by pastoralists nearly eradicated the population. Intensive shooting, trapping and poisoning may also have selected for dingoes that were more wary of humans, such that the changing public attitude towards the dingo reflected the reality of rural life.This paper investigates the origin of the once popular belief in Australian society that wild dingoes do not attack humans. To address this problem, a digital repository of archived newspaper articles and other published texts written between 1788 and 1979 were searched for references to dingoes attacking non-Indigenous people. A total of 52 accounts spanning the period between 1804 and 1928 was identified. A comparison of these historical accounts with the details of modern dingo attacks suggests that at least some of the former are credible. The paper also examined commonly held attitudes towards dingoes in past Australian society based on historical print media articles and other records. Early chroniclers of Australian rural life and culture maintained that dingoes occasionally killed and ate humans out of a predatory motivation. By the early decades of the 20th century, however, an opposing view of this species had emerged: namely, that dingoes were timid animals that continued to pose a danger to livestock, but never to people. This change in the cultural image of dingoes can possibly be linked to more than a century of lethal dingo control efforts greatly reducing the frequency of human–dingo interactions in the most populous parts of the country. This intensive culling may also have expunged the wild genetic pool of dingoes that exhibited bold behaviour around people and/or created a dingo population that was largely wary of humans.