August 17: On This Day in World History … briefly
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
1980: Baby snatched by dingo
Alice Lynne ‘Lindy’ Chamberlain-Creighton (née Murchison; born 4 March 1948) is a New Zealand-born woman who was wrongfully convicted in one of Australia’s most publicised murder trials. Accused of killing her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, while camping at Uluru (then usually known as Ayers Rock) in 1980, she maintained that she saw a dingo leave the tent where Azaria was sleeping. The prosecution case was circumstantial and depended on forensic evidence.
Chamberlain was convicted on 29 October 1982, and her appeals to the Federal Court of Australia, and High Court of Australia, were dismissed. On 7 February 1986, after the discovery of new evidence, Chamberlain was released from prison on remission. Both accused were officially pardoned in 1987, and their convictions were quashed by the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in 1988. In 1992, the Australian government paid Chamberlain $1.3 million in compensation. In 2012, a fourth coronial inquest found that Azaria died ‘as a result of being attacked and taken by a dingo.’
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and Michael Chamberlain continued to push for a resolution to the investigation into the death of Azaria as being caused by one or more dingoes without human interference. A new inquest began in February 2012 and new figures on dingo attacks on Fraser Island were collated by the Queensland Government’s Department of Environment and Resource Management and provided as evidence at the Azaria Chamberlain inquest. Coroner Elizabeth Morris said that the new evidence in relation to dingo attacks on infants and young children had helped convince her to reopen the investigation.
After 32 years of intense media interest and public excoriation, the Chamberlains stated they remained unsatisfied with bare acquittal and presumed innocence, and were keen to finally, and definitively, determine how their daughter died. On 12 June 2012, an Australian coroner made a final ruling that a dingo dog took baby Azaria Chamberlain from a campsite in 1980 and caused her death. Coroner Elizabeth Morris apologised to the Chamberlain family while an amended death certificate was immediately made available to them.
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