EXTRACT FROM AUTHOR'S FOLLOW UP
This week Azaria Chamberlain would have turned 40-years-old. It also marks almost four decades since the infant was taken from an Uluru campsite by a dingo.
The ensuing saga of searches, court cases and accusations against the Chamberlain family divided Australia, as recounted in John Bryson’s celebrated account, Evil Angels: The Case of Lindy Chamberlain, which was subsequently made into a movie of the same name.
To mark the tragic anniversary, Bryson explains how things could have turned out very differently.
In mid-1980, Lindy Chamberlain was in Mt Isa and preparing to give birth to her third child. She was born on June 11, 1980, a girl her parents called Azaria, ‘helper of God’.
The family were Seventh-day Adventists. The father, Michael, was a pastor. They liked camping and decided to visit Uluru, then known as Ayers Rock, in the Central Desert when the babe was a few weeks old and could travel in a bassinet.
At around this time, the rangers in charge of the park and the camp at the Rock were alarmed by dingo packs which they described as forming a ‘Bohemian class’ of opportunists, now unafraid of humankind, troublesome and dangerous. The chief ranger, Derek Roff, wrote to his superiors warning that “small children and infants must be considered possible prey” and advising that the worst offenders should be culled.
He received no acknowledgement. Indeed, all copies of Roff’s letter were later removed from the departmental file, in effect a cover up to foil any efforts to make it public.
If, as the rangers expected, their department had acted on the warning and brought the packs under control, the many families visiting the Rock during the rest of the year could have enjoyed their visits without fear, able to recount memories of the Rock’s brilliance at dawn and dusk, of campfire cooking, new friendships and the galaxies of stars above the nighttime desert’s impenetrable darkness.
And a swaddled baby girl may have grown into adulthood, married at an age approved by her church, brought up her children, and most of us would never have heard of her.
From a Darwin correspondent involved in the case .
From a Darwin correspondent involved in the case .
