Abstract
At dusk on the 17th August 1980, a Sunday, in the heart of the Australian continent at Ayers Rock, Lindy Chamberlain cried out “My God! My God! The dingo’s got my baby!” Lindy, wife of Michael Chamberlain, a Seventh Day Adventist minister, and mother of two sons Aidan and Regan, was referring to her third child, daughter Azaria, who was just nine weeks old. The ensuing inquests, court cases and media furore, in which culpability for the disappearance of baby Azaria was attributed to members of the Chamberlain family, or persons unknown, or the dingo, resulted in Lindy being convicted and charged with the murder of her baby, and husband Michael being given a suspended sentence as an accessory. Over seven years later, after several appeals, both were acquitted. The precise nature of Azaria’s fate has never been established and her body was never recovered.
Highlights
At dusk on the 17th August 1980, a Sunday, in the heart of the Australian continent at Ayers Rock, Lindy Chamberlain cried out “My God! My God! The dingo’s got my baby!” Lindy, wife of Michael Chamberlain, a Seventh Day Adventist minister, and mother of two sons Aidan and Regan, was referring to her third child, daughter Azaria, who was just nine weeks old
The ensuing inquests, court cases and media furore, in which culpability for the disappearance of baby Azaria was attributed to members of the Chamberlain family, or persons unknown, or the dingo, resulted in Lindy being convicted and charged with the murder of her baby, and husband Michael being given a suspended sentence as an accessory
Serious discussion of the case and its aftermath recognizes its centrality to Australian mythology: in The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), Professor Peter Pierce concludes that the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain is “the most contentious of all lost child stories etropic 2 (2003): Caltabiano: In Defense of the Dingo in Australian history, and the one that most curiously mingles and confounds the nineteenth and the twentieth-century master narratives of such tragedy” (178)
Summary
At dusk on the 17th August 1980, a Sunday, in the heart of the Australian continent at Ayers Rock, Lindy Chamberlain cried out “My God! My God! The dingo’s got my baby!” Lindy, wife of Michael Chamberlain, a Seventh Day Adventist minister, and mother of two sons Aidan and Regan, was referring to her third child, daughter Azaria, who was just nine weeks old. The dingo’s got my baby!” Lindy, wife of Michael Chamberlain, a Seventh Day Adventist minister, and mother of two sons Aidan and Regan, was referring to her third child, daughter Azaria, who was just nine weeks old.
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