On Saturday, February 8, 1986, The Daily Sun in Brisbane was headlined: ‘LINDY FREE’. New Azaria inquiry called.' The paper celebrated the occasion with a large colour photograph of Lindy as she was driven to jail three years previously. The Sydney Morning Herald proclaimed: ‘I’LL BE WAITING FOR LINDY’; The Weekend Australian said: ‘LINDY IS FREE - TOP-LEVEL INQUIRY’: while The Courier-Mail adopted a family orientation: ‘LINDY’S SO EXCITED: MOTHER.’ This event marked another chapter in the saga of Azaria Chamberlain.
A month later, the topic had become prime-time television: ‘LINDY: THE TWELVE WORDS IN 60 MINUTES THAT MADE A NATION GASP’ was the headline of The Sydney Morning Herald's television review of the exclusive Sixty Minutes interview with Lindy Chamberlain:
It took some time for Ray Martin to pluck up the courage on Sixty Minutes (Channel 9) and ask Lindy the $255,000 question.
‘Let me ask you what every Australian would,’ Ray began.
‘Did you kill Azaria?’
The nation gasped.
Five years, two inquests, one trial, two appeals, three years in jail, one telemovie and several definitive books had been boiled down by Ray into a mere 12 words - each of which was worth about $21,000.
Was Lindy about to break down and confess? The nation leaned forward and held its breath.
As it turned out, Lindy leaned back, fixed Ray with the Darwin squint and said: ‘No way.’
And that, basically, was it.
Deprived of a world exclusive breakdown and confession, Ray
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filled up his documentary with world exclusive footage of Lindy’s first few days of freedom and excerpts from some of those spooky interviews she gave just after Azaria’s disappearance.
It was a treat for the voyeur in all of us, though perhaps some might have taken exception to Ray’s interview with the sobbing Aiden. Despite the amounts of money involved in the whole exercize, you’d think the boy would be left alone to cope as best he could with growing up in the middle of such a dreadful mess.
The Packer organisation’s huge payout to the Chamberlains for their story provoked some rare public discord within the ranks of Sixty Minutes. ‘Jerusalem’ George Negus announced last week he was dead against cheque-book journalism, packed his bags, drew his expenses and joined the rush to Manila ...
Maybe we should be grateful that George drew the line at interviewing Lindy. She, too, appears to be a middle class mum ready to go to extraordinary lengths for her own cause - that of clearing her name. Tomorrow on Sixty Minutes she will protest her innocence in an address to the nation, after which viewers will be invited to send in their verdicts to Channel 9.
Considering that in a recent telephone survey of Channel 9 viewers, 95 per cent said they were in favour of the return of the death penalty, Lindy’s optimism is astounding (Coleman, 1986).
This article is not concerned with the truth of the case, that is, not with whether the conviction of Lindy Chamberlain was justified or not, but rather with accounting for the primacy of the case in the public arena as an endless object for speculation. There are three foci: how the case has been produced as a story; how the criminal charge has been addressed; and how the legal consequences have been handled.
Since the facts of the case are familiar, it need only be said that the essential details are: the disappearance of the baby, Azaria Chamberlain, from a campsite near Ayers Rock in August, 1980; and the eventual conviction of her mother for murder and her father with being an accessory after the fact of murder.
The case has been marked not only by massive interest speculation up until the conviction, but also since that legal resolution. Many explanations for the ongoing interest have been offered. Certainly the unusual set of circumstances and the exotic location of the events have contributed in no small way to the high profile given to the case, but there has dearly been more to it than that. One aspect that is overlooked is the fact that the incident was fairly mundane - a child disappeared and her parents were suspected of involvement. Such an event is not uncommon, although usually a body is found. Such cases are conventionally dealt with as ‘a welfare problem’ through intervemionary agencies and psychiatric consultation, except in cases where excessive violence has been employed. Under these circumstances criminal charges may be laid, often reluctantly. The Azaria case, in contrast, has not been treated via such routine mechanisms at any stage. Lindy’s initial cry, ‘The dingo’s got my baby!,’ which alerted an international audience, lifted the carpet from various contemporary social conventions and the scene was set for their interrogation.
Four commentators have speculated on the significance of the case. Frank Moorhouse has argued that it can be seen as a psychic drama which tapped deep myths in the human psyche and Australian identity, fundamentally those alluding to the interstices between nature and culture, our most primeval fears (Moorhouse, 1981/1982). Noel Sanders has argued that the case stirred the popular unconsciousness of the nation and its beliefs about life and death through the generation of jokes and black comedy, in a way that has ‘exceeded the official discourses’ and ‘subverted the official attempts at closure’ (Sanders, 1982:54). Dianne Johnson has suggested that the case has involved ‘the making of Lindy the witch’ (Johnson, 1985:90), arguing that the witch is a figure which ‘has permeated our cultural forms’ (Johnson, 91) embodying the power and threat of female sexuality. Johnson draws an analogy between medieval witch hunts and the course of the case, and reflects on the role of motherhood in this. At one point she says:
(mothers) are often confronted with their own potential for destructiveness - embodied so savagely by the idea of Lindy killing Azaria with scissors despite her professed love for the child (Johnson:98).
What is raised here, although not developed, is the implicit problematicity of the category ‘mother,’ that problem being reflected in the only explanation for maternal killing given in her article as too close an identification by the mother with the child,
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where the murder might be read more as an act of suicide. Karen Goldsworthy (1986) has argued a related case, namely that Lindy has been seen as violating the concept of motherhood both in terms of the legal charge and in terms of her public image which combined ‘ideal’ qualities of ‘mothering’ with girlish and blatant sexuality:
Concentrating simultaneously on her sexuality and on her maternity (her public image), challenged and violated the largely unconscious but deeply ingrained conviction that motherhood is good and female sexuality is not good and never the twain shall meet (Goldsworthy: 31).
In short, these accounts direct attention towards exotic aspects and interpretations of the case. In contrast, it can be argued that the case was a mundane case which has raised some mundane questions. The continual refusal to address the mundanity of the case reflects the taken-for-grantedness of those concerns and the uncertainties which they repress. Fundamentally, there has been a refusal to address the possibility of the act of infanticide; in its wake, or perhaps in response to that refusal, has been the address of certain legal processes on which this case and subsequent ones have relied.
In mundane terms, the case is not best understood as reflecting a subterranean set of fears, nor as popular rupture of official discourse, nor as a manifestation of elemental female sorcery: rather it has raised central issues of family life and legal process. The Azaria Chamberlain case, especially when seen in the light of recent cases of child murder in the United Kingdom and Australia (e.g., Splatt, Murphy, Gallagher), can be seen as a definitive and significant break in certain contemporary discourses of motherhood and the law.
The Narrative Form
The case has been obsessively followed in the media, particularly in the press, television and books. Yet the focus of attention has largely been with the context of the case rather than the events themselves since the context has provided the possibilities for interest and exoticism. Indeed, had the disappearance occurred elsewhere, for example, at a shopping centre, a car (cf. Louise Brown in England), the immediate interest would have concerned the search and then the possibility of infanticide. In this case, however, the coverage was structured by the context of the events
over and above the events themselves. In this way, the case offered various elements relevant to Australian-ness which could be tapped and transformed into new ways of telling tales about ourselves.
Consequently, this process has not focussed on a single moment nor a single definitive statement, but has become an ongoing serial of episodes and possibilities, entailing frequent shifts to new areas and aspects of the case, to new forms of evidence, and to new public and official interventions. It has become a saga, a narrative that resists closure, so that points of closure as powerful as a conviction failed to stem the flow and there is no reason to believe that even the discovery of the body would be any more effective.
While the exploration of psychic stimuli and national unconsciousnesses may be illuminating, it might be argued that the motive for the endless telling of Azaria stories lies in the pleasures to be obtained from the production and circulation of the serial itself: the satisfaction lies in the act of storytelling rather than in the truths offered by such stories.
In the Azaria case, the form of the saga is that of a mystery serial without a resolution. The story has and can have no ending. The pleasure lies in that impossibility. The absence of a resolution enables it to work as a vehicle for multiple forms of circulation. That is to say, the possibilities for variations and speculations are greater than the status of the story as a crime.
Stories have involved simultaneous attempts to incorporate the case into, yet distance it from, everyday life. Thus, on the one hand, Azaria has become a household name and the Chamberlain family has been represented as the archetypal good-looking family unit, while on the other, bizarre aspects that mark the case out as different have been emphasized, for example, through invoking the agent of the Rock or the dingo, and through speculation on the unusual name and unusual religion. This process has entailed a double movement of inclusion and exclusion, a mechanism important both at the level of narrative as a mystery story and at the level of cultural placement, that is, using the story to both confirm Australian identity as something unique, yet as something intangible.
Representations have chiefly turned on the figures of the family and of family life, of the dingo, and of the legal proceedings. The theme of family has constantly recurred in snapshots and endless media pursuit of the family members, in accounts of the family in terms of the ideal nuclear family unit, in the literal retreat of the family into a Seventh Day Adventist sanctuary.
A Crime of Infanticide
Legally, the case has been a question of infanticide, the death of a baby at its mother’s hands, or in social work terms, Non-Accidental Injury (NAI) with a fatal result. Yet curiously little interest has centred on this aspect. The context of the case offered the possibilities for speculation over and above the actual events, but discussion of NAI has been remarkably absent. Even jokes have been exclusively constructed around the figure of the dingo, rather than, say, around a grisly figure of Lindy (in contrast to the Mrs. Tebbitt jokes in the wake of the Brighton bombing).
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Similarly, the movements to free Lindy have been mobilized around legal questions or compassionate grounds rather than over a concern with infanticide.
Legally, the killing of a child under twelve months by the mother constitutes the criminal charge of murder. However, the law on infanticide, where it exists, and it does not in the Northern Territory, modifies the charge to that of manslaughter should there be evidence of puerperal psychosis, a term that broadly covers post-natal depression, problems concerned with lactauon, and so on. In these cases, extenuating circumstances are given a priority, and therefore actively sought. Even a guilty verdict is often given the rider ‘but insane,’ Given the framing of this code, cases of infanticide tend to be dealt with according to the most lenient interpretation of the law.
Frequently such cases do not reach a criminal court, but are handled by psychiatric and social welfare agencies. With reference to the Chamberlain case, a Dr. Mcllrath (1984) noted that:
Several women in Australia who killed their babies have been given immediate releases or nominal sentences. The difference with Lindy Chamberlain is that it is believed she told a lie (Mcllrath, 1984).
As a phenomenon, infanticide is spoken of in terms of mental disturbance, with reference to the perpetrator, and in terms of instinct, with reference tq society. Sonia Humphrey (1984), in addressing the case, dwells on the mother-child relationship and its role in psychiatric typing of parents who kill their children: baby batterers who get carried away; the spectacularly insane; or the puerperal psychosis sufferers. In this schema, the irrationality of the act and the absence of accountability is crucial; the act is beyond the bounds of rational behaviour.
Humphrey argues that women typically have no memory of committing the crime, since they enter a dissociative state in which:
... the crime is blocked, but eventually, because a blank in the memory is too disturbing to live with, an alternative version is invented and becomes to the best of the victim’s knowledge and belief, the truth (Humphrey: 1984).
This account draws a parallel between the individual repression
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of an act of infanticide, and social repression of the phenomenon. Indeed, the term infanticide is heavily censored from language, appearing in the legal code but virtually absent from the biosocial discourses of welfare, psychiatry and other interventionary agencies. It is reserved for other contexts, either anthropological (as in recent furore over female infanticide in China - e.g.,. Newsweek, February 21, 1983), or historical (as in demographic tables of mortality rates and childcare in other times).
This is an important indication. Murder of young children by parents is declared out of court as a possible parental action in contemporary (= ‘civilized1) society. In histories of childhood, the term infanticide is replaced by the term infant mortality at the time when civilization is deemed to have arrived. Previously, by various accounts, the inhabitants of other places and other times must have been knee-deep in dead babies.
In antiquity infanticide was so common that every river, dung-heap and cesspool used to be littered with dead infants. Polybius blamed the depopulation of Greece on the killing of legitimate children ... Ratios of boys to girls ran four to one, since it was rare for more than one girl in a family to be spared (de Mause, 1975:87).
18th century pediatrician William Buchan said ‘almost one half of the human species perish in infancy by improper management or neglect’ (de Mause: 1986:86).
Similarly, various commentators of pre-contact Tahiti claim that ‘the numbers of infants destroyed range from three-fourths to two-thirds of all those born’ (Oliver, 1969:424). In these historical contexts, infanticide is seen as a barbaric but customary practice beyond individual control. This is reflected in de Mause’s schema of evolutionary trends in parent-child relations (de Mause: 87-88} which are represented as a shift from impersonal social facts to personalized interventionary practices:
Infanticide mode (Antiquity)
Abandonment mode (Medieval)
Ambivalent mode (Renaissance)
Intrusive mode (C 18)
Socialising mode (C 19 to now)
Helping mode (just beginning)
This shift from social fact (unalterable ‘instinct’) to interventionism reflects the psychologization of the social. It corresponds to a concept of rational behaviour against which perpetrators' behaviour can be measured. In anthropological contexts, infanticide can be accounted for socially by referring to factors such as overpopulation or scarcity of resources, or the dislike of female babies, the perpetrators are absolved from individual responsibility because they are members of irrational, collective societies.
In contemporary societies, the case of severely handicapped children poses a limit case for the rational explanation and it is no coincidence that another terminological shift is employed, namely, euthanasia (cf. Kuhse and Singer, 1985; Human Rights Commission, 1985; Tonti-Filippini, 1986). While pressing external reasons can be given, such as the severity of the condition, life expectancy, stress on careers, rejection by parents, decisions about such children are formulated around the rationality of those concerned. Such criteria were made explicit in the case of Dr. Arthur who was charged with causing the death of a Downs Syndrome baby who was severely handicapped and ill, and who had been rejected by his parents. In interpreting the acquittal:
The British Medical Journal’s legal correspondent, relying on a definition of murder given by Lord Coke, suggests that it could be argued that killing is only murder if the victim is a ‘reasonable creature’ but it seems likely that the definition of ‘reasonable’ in this context would result in the same lack of agreement (Shepperdson, 1983:156).
Thus, the categorization of an unlawful killing appears to shift depending on whether either the victim or perpetrator can be defined as being beyond ‘human’ (= rational) terms. Clearly this entails using the appropriate agencies, or ‘playing the game.’
When perpetrators do not play the game, the penalties are severe: Lindy was punished because she told a lie. A recent case in Britain involved a Downs Syndrome baby, named Louise Brown, whose parents had only reluctantly accepted her. The baby and the family car were subsequently reported to have been stolen. The car was recovered, but the baby was not found, and her parents (and in-laws) were convicted of manslaughter, and received harsh sentences. This legal hardline was explicitly adopted because the parents were seen as having failed to co-operate, firstly, with welfare agencies concerning their inability to cope with the baby’s condition, and, secondly, with the police regarding the alleged abduction and the presumed disposal of the body. The question of rights is also a perennial one, and, in infandcide as abortion, it is the rights of the child that are given precedence.
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The involvement of relatives in the Brown case suggest that there had been agreement within the family about the baby’s fate, yet this was ignored in the trial. Thus even in such situations where severe and permanent strain will result from the condition of a baby, mothers are given no options or choices. Shepperdson cites the concern of Down Syndrome mothers who did keep their children, but were retrospectively angered by that lack of choice:
‘They didn’t ask me if I wanted her.’
‘They said ‘Well, you can’t leave him here’ (in the maternity hospital) (Shepperdson: 153).
One stepfather said, referring to R.V. Arthur, ‘It’s not murder, because there was family permission’ (Shepperdson: 155).
These examples suggest that although a model of rational society is in play, the model of family and motherhood/parenthood cuts across this to negate the justification of infanticide. The mechanism for employing that cross-cut is the notion of the rights of the child.
The Chamberlains, in their apparently passive acceptance of the disappearance immediately after the event aroused particular public resentment and curiosity, largely because their passivity was interpreted as the waiving of any rights of the baby from the outset. Such actions might be read as exercising parental rights and reasons in disposing of the baby, a position reinforced by their Seventh Day Adventist view of divine intervention in the event, and an associated belief that death is merely a ‘suspension’ of life, a sleep. In such a frameowrk, infant death may not be the disturbing spectre that it poses for other groups.
With the disappearance of the term infanticide has come a denial of the problem, or, more accurately, the fact of its occurrence. The phenomenon was reluctantly re-discovered especially by medicos concerned with the repetitive pattern of injuries to children presented as either accidental or self-inflicted, which became subsumed under the term ‘battered baby.’ The calculation of the incidence of mortality, however, has been remarkably illusive. MacKeith (1985) compiled the following range of estimates:
4 per cent (Kempe et at, 1962)
1.4 per cent (California Pilot Survey; Gil, 1968)
1.3 per cent (Skinner and Castle, 1969)
3 per cent (Gregg and Elmer, 1969
6 to 14 per cent (Moszer and Bach, 1969)
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13 per cent (Barnmishandel, 1969)
10 per cent (Cooper, 1972)
Two comments may be made on these figures. One is that they suggest that over the last ten years doctors are revising their ideas on the mortality rate of NAI in an upward direction. The other is that these mortality figures are largely based on children who have been seen in hospital and hence on children who have suffered more severe injuries.
At a guess, for the UK the case mortality is at least 3 per cent (MacKeith:65).
Interestingly, mortality is generally distinguished from injury in that each is seen as a quite distinct phenomenon; i.e., infant murder is not simply seen as an injury that has had an unexpected outcome or that went too far. Commentators are at pains to separate the phenomena, and mentions of mortality are rare in such discussions. This is curious since those discussions implicitly do not distinguish the events - most infant murders occur to children who have been subject to NAI; alternatively, the apparatus of welfare surveillance is mobilized particularly in cases where one infant death has already occurred. Clearly there is a reluctance or inability to address the issue of infant murder directly.
Emphasis is placed on the interventionary mode (the helping mode) where welfare agencies are positioned as extensions to the family unit: family life itself is seen as sacrosanct even when a risk factor has been established. As two English social workers commented during the enquiry into the death of Jasmine Beck-ford at her parent’s hands:
There are instances of children being brutally beaten in spite of being regularly seen, and murdered an hour or so after a family aide has left (Adye-Curran and Wass, 1985).
Reasons for injury and death from the viewpoint of parents - lack of money, inadequate housing, dislike of the child, misbehaviour by the child, depression, are carefully noted but rejected as legitimate or rational reasons: parenthood retains a purity that physical disruption cannot disturb. Essentially, those who deal with NAI are concerned to make parents cope with the stress of parenthood - through registers of at risk children, welfare and health visitors, care orders, and so on. Fundamentally, there is liLtle choice for parents who wish to dispose of children they cannot handle or have not accepted.
Considerable changes have occurred for dealing with NAI, especially since the enquiry into the death of Maria Colwell in 1974. However, these deal exclusively with the child abuse aspects of the problem and not with the perpetrators of fatal NAI. Although the early profiles of parents who endangered children (where associated factors of poverty, deprivation and mental disturbance are crudely assembled to explain the issue) have to some degree been challenged because NAI is now recognized as occurring throughout society, but the implications of this have not been taken up. The vacuum for dealing with fatal NAI has been highlighted in recent cases: Chamberlain, Beckford, Brown, Henry, Stock, the Kerry babies {e.g., see Deer, 1985; Ford, 1985; Harris, 1985; Holland, 1985; Joyce, 1985 a and b; McCrystal, 1985;
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Preston, 1985). In all, the central issue of infanticide has been swept under the carpet. Fathers who kill can be dealt with in the more conventional discourses of violence and victim, and receive longer prison sentences (as in the Brown, Beckford and Stock cases), but there is considerable reluctance to talk about mothers who kill their infants. There are apparently no discourses available except the most general anthropological, which speak in terms of a collective need, or in the highly individualized sociowork terms, of a child abuse syndrome. At the level of popular representation, models of perfect mothers or wicked witches may be employed, but this works merely by drawing on folk models where others do not exist.
Overall, it is clear that the category of infanticide has been either repressed or channelled into welfare protocol. The latter can deal with children at risk but they do not come to terms with parents who may or do kill. Although it is too late for the preventative rationale of social work once a child is dead, there is a clear reluctance to deal with such fatalities and their perpetrators. This is not a failure or the squeamishness on the part of social work, but a product of the absence of available discourses or legitimated terms of debate circulating in arenas of intervention from which to draw.
In the Chamberlain case, the inability to address the question of infanticide was profound. Certainly, infanticide was not the charge. The two inquests were almost solely concerned with the capacities of dingoes to kill infants. This led to a popular belief that it was the dingo who was on trial. When Lindy was charged, the charge was murder, since the Northern Territory does not have a category of infanticide or of manslaughter. Had the case occurred in another state, it is unlikely that any charges would have been laid; rather the case would have been handled as a welfare problem
Legally, there were no mitigating provisions available to the Chamberlains in the circumstances of the baby’s death. Yet it is not clear that they would have taken up any such provisions. Throughout the trial, they asserted their innocence and rejected any assertions of infanticide. They rejected claims both that the baby was physically or mentally handicapped (where a defence of a mercy killing could have been argued), and they rejected any suggestions that Lindy had suffered from post-natal depression or the child from any signs of violence (where a plea of unsoundness of mind and extenuating circumstances could have been mounted). Publicly-circulating claims about the baby and her mother
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scarcely surfaced at die trial, the only interest being in the meaning of her name. This may partly have been a legal strategy since certain kinds of evidence could have strengthened the case of either the defence or the prosecution. Indeed, no motive was offered, the Crown opening the trial with the words:
The Crown does not venture any motive for this case - we do not assess that Mrs. Chamberlain had any ill-will towards the child. We simply say to you (the jury) that the evidence we will put before you is that for whatever reason, the baby was murdered by her mother (Shears, 1982:185).
This amounts to a frontal attack on that absences of discourses with which to address infanticide, since the Chamberlains had rejected the only acceptable and conventional terms. Under these circumstances, and in the light of other factors - the anachronistic nature of the Northern Territory legal code, the reliance on circumstantial and forensic evidence, and the absence of a body - a conviction seemed unlikely. There was considerable surprise at the verdict as it flashed across television screens during the evening of October 29, 1982. The conduct of the case illustrates above all the lack of guidelines to deal with and even to interpret the act of infanticide and its consequences in contemporary Australian society.
Legal Aspects
The legal form of the case is characterized in a review of the television drama documentary that was made about the events as
(in) the final courtroom scenes ... the case for and against the Chamberlains crystallised - the mountain of circumstantial evidence, Lindy Chamberlain’s contradictions of what happened and forensic expert Professor Cameron’s graphic description of Azaria’s fate versus the Chamberlains’ simple honesty, their religious background and unshakable belief in the dingo theory (Yeldham, 1984).
Furthermore, the legal handling raised some interesting features. Since the Seventh Day Adventist Church financed the costs incurred by the Chamberlains during the inquests, trial and appeals, highly respected legal representatives were engaged who produced sophisticated legal tangles. There have been four key features: the attempt to balance legal process with populist representations; the ambiguous role of forensic science; legal fallout following the conviction over jury and appeal systems; and the role of public pressure.
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The Legal Process and Popular Representations
The first inquest opened with the immediate presentation of some incriminating evidence which disputed the dingo theory: that the baby has lost up to 20 per cent of her blood; that examination of the clothes indicated that a person and not a dingo had removed the body from them; and that damage to clothing was not consistent with dingo actions.
Nonetheless, the inquest still primarily centred on establishing whether a dingo could have taken the baby, disposed of the body and removed the clothes. In his findings, coroner Barritt concluded that a dingo had taken the baby but that unknown persons had disposed of the body. Much of his statement concerned the conflict between conservation and tourism, particularly on the threats posed to tourists by the freedom of dingoes around Ayers Rock:
This case dearly exercises that a choice has to be made between dingoes and deadly snakes on one hand, and tourism on the other. The two ought not to be expected to co-exist, creating hidden traps for decent people, ... Dingoes have not, and never have been, an endangered species. Despite constant efforts by man, they have held their position as the most dangerous carnivore of the canine species on the Australian continent.
Tourists in national parks should be able to observe native fauna in its natural state, but I maintain, only from a safe distance ... Lessons ought to be learnt from this inquest and applied.
‘The death of this baby/ he said, ‘in an area where previous attacks causing bodily injury had occurred, was too high a price, and a totally unnecessary price, to pay in the cause of conservation’ (Shears, 1982:99).
Although this was not to be the end of the case, this summary constitutes an interesting attempt to balance the popular with the legal. The argument suggests that because the legal evidence had been so speculative, a verdict could only be reached based on known probabilities, namely, the inherent dangers of the outback. In this context, the coroner dwelt on geological wonders, on dangerous animals and especially on the unfettered dingo roaming an area which had been appropriated for tourism and conservation. The unknwon of the case - the fate of the baby - was subjugated to the unknown of the site of the disappearance, the
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wilderness. Thus, the coroner concluded that a dingo stole and killed the baby (appropriated the baby into that unknown) but his account works to re-incorporate this horror back into the known through the claim that there was human intervention in the burial of the body: by this strategy, the fear and threat of the unknown could be ‘tidied up' by an account which incorporated the events back into the social. This process of balancing the known and the unknown, and the human and animal, has been incorporated into an ideology of culture and nature, a dichotomy which has been in terms of a tension between tourism and conservation. By the painstaking summary which is marked rhetorically by an excessive amount of repetition, the coroner attempted to provide, by insistence, a resolution - an end - to the case by a plea to balance natural forces with social responsibility (cf. Sanders:63-64).
Ambiguity and Forensic Science
The role of forensic evidence became the lynchpin of the second inquest. Technically, it indicated the presence of infant blood in the family car, an unlikely venue for a dingo, and that the damage to the clothing suggested decapitation by a metal blade, a view which was reinforced by the presence of a bloody handprint consistent with a small female adult on the jumpsuit. Further, it seemed that the neck of the clothing had been cut with a pair of scissors, while soil and plant deposits indicated that the clothing (and perhaps the body) had been buried some distance from the Rock area and later dug up and buried elsewhere.
Evidence about blood in the car was presented by a woman forensic biologist, Joy Kuhl. Little was publicly known about the nature of the specialized activity of forensic science and there was considerable media and public surprise that its chief exponent was a woman. Furthermore, her evidence constituted the first concrete indications in the case. Attention centred on tests which indicated the presence of foetal haemoglobin, a substance present in young babies, but rarely in older people, and not present in either of the Chamberlains. This evidence has been crucial to the outcome of, and fallout from, the case.
Evidence about the clothing was largely supplied by Professor James Cameron (of the Department of Forensic Evidence at London Hospital Medical College), a world expert in the field of forensic science. His evidence involved simulations as to whether a dingo could have caused the damage to the clothing; ultra-violent fluorescent photography which distinguished blood marks; and tests to simulate the flow patterns of blood on the clothes. Cameron concluded that one person had held the jumpsuit:
(whilst) the body was in that item of clothing and whilst the blood was either flowing or whilst certainly when the person holding the child (had hands that) were damp with blood. The distribution of the blood on the jumpsuit and on the singlet would suggest that the blood flowed onto the collar from above, all around the neck at one time, and not from two separate areas as one would have anticipated were an animal involved (Shears: 164).
In summary, he said that it was reasonable to assume that Azaria met her death by unnatural causes, and that the mode of death had been caused by a cutting instrument, possibly encircling the neck or certainly cutting the vital blood vessels and structures of the neck' (Shears: 165).
The weight of forensic evidence contributed significantly to the committal and verdict The trial saw the rehearsal of inquest material where the strength of the forensic evidence was questioned: Kuhl’s plates had been destroyed after the inquest in accordance with departmental procedures and were therefore not available for re-examination; doubts were case on the specificity of the reagent used to test for foetal haemoglobin; and Cameron’s credentials were shaken by the revelation that a conviction largely based on his forensic results in England had subsequently been reversed after those results were disputed.
Nevertheless, much of the substance of the prosecution rested on the forensic work and the circumstantial evidence that it suggested, especially given the absence of a body, and the fact that no motive was established by either prosecution or defence. The Chamberlains continued to vehemently deny allegations about their involvement in Azaria’s death, despite intensive grilling by the prosecution. Such was the centrality of the forensic evidence, that the judge himself remarked on the problems of reaching a verdict on the basis of circumstantial and highly technical evidence in his directions to the jury before they retired, warning that, ‘We are not in the realm of speculation; we are not in the realm of science; we are in the realm of proof’ (Shears:226).
Shears summarized the directives of the judge in these terms:
‘You are not here to solve mysteries’ - when they went to the jury room they were not going to consider what possibly happened, what might have happened, or whether they thought that Mrs. Chamberlain had probably done it. They were there to determine whether they were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Alice Lynne Chamberlain had murdered the baby and whether her husband was an accessory after the fact of murder. If they were satisfied, their duty was to convict; if they were not satisfied, they had to acquit (Shears:228).
The verdict was a surprise to everyone concerned in and with the case, despite widespread opinions of guilt or innocence, because of the nature of the alleged crime (infanticide), the legal processes of the Northern Territory, and the reliance on circumstantial evidence. It seemed to be generally felt that Lindy would and should be acquitted. The trial had had a great impact in terms of public debate about forensic evidence, and the role of ‘science’ and scientific results in imputing actions and intenLions. This had contadictory consequences: on the one hand, forensic science received great publicity and a vastly increased status in police and
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scientific work, as reflected in the recent high priority which has been given to forensic laboratories in terms of funding. Yet, on the other hand, the role of ‘science’ and the automatic acceptance of its results as ‘truth’ sufficient to produce an irreversible legal outcome has been simultenoeously questioned, a concern that has been inflamed by a more recent case where a man convicted of murder was released after the circumstantial forensic evidence that convicted him was discredited (the Splatt case in South Australia; and cf. the Thomas case in New Zealand).
The centrality of the forensic evidence lay behind Justice Murphy’s dissension from the High Court majority ruling, which rejected the Chamberlain’s appeal. Murphy attacked aspects of the Crown case:
He was particularly severe on the scientific evidence, saying the failure to preserve blood samples had deprived the defence of the chance of cross-checking.
He also noted that a vital Crown witness, Professor James Cameron, had recently given evidence in an English court which was later found to be wrong {Daily Sun (Brisbane), February 23, 1984).
Murphy concluded that it was;
‘Dangerous to convict on “expert” evidence which is inconsistent with otherwise credible evidence ... absence of a motive in conjunction with other elements is disquieting’ (Daily Sun (Brisbane).
These remarks sparked off a long-running debate about the nature of the forensic evidence and its consequences. For example, in a Letter to the Editor, a reader commented:
It is conceivable that the jurymen peers of Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain may have been overwhelmed by scientific opinion - taken as gospel by the unknowing and questioned in hindsight by High Court judges (Glynn: 1984).
Unusually, scientific ‘experts’ have joined the public debate in evaluating the forensic tests used in the Chamberlain case, for example, when 31 scientists joined Professor Boettcher in questioning the specificity of the chemical reagent used to test for foetal haemoglobin (Brown, 1984a). A distinction was made betwen the
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purposes for which such a test, might be used, namely, for publication in a scientific journal as opposed to in a trial which could result in life imprisonment- Comments have even been offered on the form of the legal process, as in the comments of Dr. M. Whitten (Chief of the Division of Entymology, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization):
I was just appalled at the approach taken in the court to see where the truth lay. The adversary approach is not suitable for dealing with complex scientific information to determine whether it is foetal or non foetal blood. If the court had in fact concluded it was denatured adult blood then perhaps there would have been a different verdict (Brown, 1984a:2).
The response of the forensic scientists involved in the case has been to deny that the disputed test alone was the key basis of the results, but as Dr. S. Bax has stated, ‘the most solid confirmation of the presence of foetal haemoglobin in the Chamberlains’ car had in fact been made using an unrelated technique’ (Brown, 1984a). They have also defended their particular expertize against academic scientists ‘who are probably inexperienced in our techniques and are not aware of all the facts that were available to the jury’ (Brown, 1984c). They have stressed that the procedures had accorded with scientific objectivity:
There is unanimous support for Joy Kuhl ... no matter who did it, in the final analysis the same answer would have been reached (Brown, 1984c).
Additionally, more general extracts on the role of circumstantial and scientific evidence were generated as reflected in ‘Letters to the Editor' likening the case to the Splatt release:
Where a Crown case rests on complex questions of scientific evidence, entirely circumstantial in nature, is unable to suggest any plausible motive and a guilty verdict cannot rightly be warranted, it highlights the necessity of empowering the trial judge to withdraw the case from the jury, or that the jury be given a special warning not to convict (Poulier, 1984).
The furore about the forensic evidence finally led to one of the juror’s publicly defending the jury’s decision, arguing that forensic evidence had not been central to the verdict. He said:
‘I think I can say that a lot of the technical evidence (on blood stains in the car) was not'fundamental to the finding of the
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jury ... it really came down to the fact of whether you believed it was a dingo or not and therefore a matter of whether you believed Mrs. Chamberlain’s story or whether you didn’t.’
The juror said evidence regarding dirt stains on Azaria’s jumpsuit, cut marks on the garment and the state in which the child’s clothes were found all influenced his decision. 'Those sorts of things did not support the theory that a dingo took the baby, but let me stress that each of those pieces of information did not individually get a conviction. It was a whole lot of those things being reasoned out’ (The Courier-Mail, April 12, 1984).
The question of forensic work has remained a central issue and the finding of the matinee jacket and questioning of the blood test techniques has ensured that the ‘scientificity’ of forensic evidence continues to be doubted.
’Legal Fallout’
The fallout from the case has not been confined to the realm of the scientific: equally questions of legal process have been raised. The feelings expressed by Glynn (1984) in his letter to The Australian reflected much of the popular feeling:
There is no protection for the innocent if a jury of his/her peers gives a verdict based on ‘gut feeling.’ But as reasonable men/women consider circumstantial evidence based on scientific opinion, theory and conjecture as opposed to basic facts, and conclusive evidence, a verdict as suggested ‘case not proven’ could honourably be given. Justice will have been done and seen to be done (Glynn).
There has, then, been a shift away from specific evidence to a questioning of the role of the jury in the legal process. Thus Justice Brennan in assenting to the majority High Court ruling noted:
‘The question for the Court of Criminal Appeal is whether it was open to the jury to be satisfied of the appellant’s guilt, not whether the court is satisfied’ (The Daily Sun (Brisbane), February 23, 1984).
The Chamberlains’ appeal to the High Court could only be raised on the grounds of whether due legal process had been followed and not on the grounds of re-examining the evidence. It
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was rejected after a long debate in a split 3-2 decision on February 22, 1984 which concluded that there was not ‘reasonable doubt’ about the verdict on the weight of the evidence. The Daily Sun summarized the findings as follows:
The cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence was the crucial force behind yesterday’s High Court decision to let the convictions of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain stand.
Another key factor was the normal reluctance of an appellate court to interfere with a jury verdict unless there was something so patently wrong that the administration of justice was in doubt.
These elements emerged in a 53-page judgement written by Chief Justice Sir Harry Gibbs and Justice Mason.
They referred to a number of factors which presented obstacles to acceptance of the Crown case.
‘They were such that they must have raised doubt in the mind of a reasonable jury,’ the judgement continued.
‘However, in our opinion the other evidence in the case was sufficient to remove those doubts’ (Daily Sun, February 23, Brisbane).
The Sun's editorial took up the question of whether a jury should be used in such cases where so much expert evidence was involved. This has been debated widely since, for example by the Chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission, Justice Michael Kirby, who questioned whether ‘it might have been more appropriate if [the judge] had analyzed the scientific evidence for the posing of certain questions to the jury’:
‘I think it was a very, very unusual jury to convict the woman on that evidence. They might equally have discarded it altogether.’ Questions could be raised about the verdict when the trial judge himself had expressed in his summing up some bewilderment over the forensic evidence, he said.
‘I would say in cases like the Chamberlain case the evidence is so conflicting it would be hard for the jury to make up its mind completely.’ But the jury did not have to give its reasons, which was one of the weaknesses of the jury system (Brown, 1984b).
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