By Sid Astbury, DPA/Sydney
Australians are still in thrall to a 1982 murder trial in which Lindy Chamberlain failed to convince a jury that a wild dog killed her 9-week-old daughter Azaria.A fresh inquest is about to report in the far-north city of Darwin and Chamberlain is hoping that today the coroner will accept her version of what happened.She hopes the coroner will recommend that the death certificate be changed to accord with what she said happened on August 17, 1980, at an Outback camping ground.“It gives me hope this time that Australians will finally be warned and realize that dingoes are a dangerous animal,” Chamberlain said at a one-day inquest in February. “Since the loss of Azaria I’ve had an abiding fear and paranoia about safety around dingoes.”The 1982 murder conviction was overturned in 1986. In 1988, all charges against Lindy and her then-husband Michael were quashed.The last inquest in 1995 ended with the coroner clearing the Chamberlains of involvement and leaving the cause of death as “unknown.”In the 1982 trial, the prosecution maintained that there was no precedent for a dingo killing a human. Since then, dingoes have been found to be responsible for the death of a child.Nine-year-old Clinton Gage disappeared from a campsite on Fraser Island, Queensland, in 2001. That led to a cull of dingoes and warnings to campers against the dangers of wild dogs.Chamberlain was exonerated in 1988, the same year Meryl Streep and Sam Neill starred in the Hollywood film A Cry in the Dark about the child’s disappearance at Uluru, formerly called Ayers Rock, 450 kilometres from Alice Springs.At the time, Australians were split over Chamberlain and her story that a dingo entered their tent and carried the boy off.Some bumper stickers read “The Dingo Did It” while others insisted that “The Dingo Is Innocent.”In the ensuing decades, the focus of interest has been a readiness to disbelieve Chamberlain.As in other similar cases, more tears and less stoicism might have aided the defence case. Chamberlain did not publicly wail and rent her clothes, and that was taken as a pointer to her guilt.Many Australians were uncomfortable with the strong Christian beliefs of the Chamberlains and there was talk of witchcraft and a human sacrifice.Suspicion of Chamberlain seemed to overwhelm other factors. Outside the tent were dingo tracks and fellow campers told of a growl and then a baby’s cry. Azaria’s torn, bloodied clothing was found in the desert nearby.At the February inquest Rex Wild, a lawyer assisting the coroner, said a dingo was Azaria’s most likely killer. He expects Northern Territory coroner Elizabeth Morris to officially report that finding.