there had been a dingo at all, and if something else had in fact happened. Now, in September 1981, that safeguard, being the finding of a competent coroner, was failing. The entire case that there had been a dingo attack which had cost baby Azaria her life was unravelling.
Stuart Tipple had a difficult path to negotiate. There were many obstacles in his way, the first being the Northern Territory. The Territory was very much the wild frontier of Australia, where everything was from time to time extreme and the resources for coping were limited. The Territory had an interior so dry that a stranded traveler might die of thirst. It had a “Top End” so wet that a stranded traveler might be drowned, or die of hunger. Even those in more temperate regions were affected by the changes of season. There were only two seasons in the Top End: Wet and Dry. In the change of seasons, when the air was pregnant with heat and moisture, there was a greater incidence of domestic violence. The Top End had had the devastating cyclone in 1974. The Territory was Australia’s front line in world conflict. Darwin had been heavily bombed by the Japanese and the area was still wide open to any invader from the north. And there were the crocodiles, box jellyfish and taipans.
The Aboriginal people were more concentrated in the Top End than anywhere else in Australia. Many were closer to the way they had always lived than Aboriginals elsewhere. There was an ugly history of racial confrontation and the deprivation of land and culture had reduced others to the status of demoralized fringe-dwellers. That was reflected in incarceration rates. Some of the more vulgar whites would joke that the best way to solve the Aboriginal problem was to put a whole lot of them into the back of a truck with a flagon of red wine and a dozen machetes, and leave them to it. On one occasion in Alice Springs, someone placed a bottle of alcohol in the grounds of the John Flynn Memorial Church where Aborigines congregated to drink. The alcohol was laced with arsenic and an Aboriginal woman died.
On 20th July 1980, at Ti Tree, 200 kilometres north of Alice Springs, two police officers forced a car containing eight Aborigines to stop, on suspicion that the driver was highly intoxicated. A scuffle developed. One police officer opened fire, killing one of the occupants and seriously wounding another. Five of the surviving Aborigines were then charged with serious offences and one of the police officers went on trial for murder and serious wounding. Media reporting of the incident so angered local police that an ABC reporter, Terry Price, complained that he was being tailed wherever he went. Price rang the inspector and said that if the tail on him was not removed, there would be a national story that he was being harassed. The inspector got the message. The police officer who fired the shots was acquitted but because of the emotion that had been aroused, the trial of the five Aborigines was transferred from Alice Springs to Darwin.
The Northern Territory had originally been administered from South Australia and the state continued a close association with the Territory. The Commonwealth assumed responsibility in 1910. The Commonwealth amended the legislation in 1947 to allow the Territory to have its first Legislative Council. The council was replaced in 1974 by an elected Legislative Assembly. Paul Everingham had been a solicitor in Alice Springs and had worked closely with Ian Barker, then practising in the Northern Territory, and Brian Martin, also a lawyer. The three knew each other, had mutual respect and were all to become involved in the Chamberlain case. Everingham had served on the Alice Springs Town Council, won a seat in the new assembly and in 1977 became leader of the National Liberal Party. In July 1978, when the Commonwealth granted the Territory self-government, Everingham became the Chief Minister. A passionate advocate for the Territory, Everingham pushed for many things, including a university. If the Territory were to be regarded as a side issue in national politics, it was not going to be for lack of effort on his part. The Territory was not going to be dictated to on how to run its affairs, conduct its police operations or run its judicial system.
The next obstacle Tipple confronted was what might be called anthropocentric arrogance, the feeling that we are masters of everything around us and that animals recognise that. The refusal of so many to accept the dingo story can be written down at least in part to this attitude. Far beyond the rest of the animal world in intellectual capacity, humans have always tended to regard themselves as not only above their fellow species, but in command of them. There is even a biblical injunction, in Genesis 1, verse 28: “And God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’.” They were at his beck and call of Man, or otherwise allowed to follow their own lives, unless those lives and activities brought them into conflict with Man, who would then hunt them away or kill them. The Thylacine came into conflict in Van Diemen’s Land, so it was eliminated. Children were brought up to regard all animals and their interests as subordinate to the interests of Man. Who has not seen a tiny child presume to exert authority over a dog which outweighs it and could, if so inclined, kill the child?
There is sometimes a shock when the seemingly docile animal retaliates. Often it is because of a basic misunderstanding or disregard of the psychology of the animal. A good-hearted person thinks it inappropriate for the dog to eat something it has in its jaws and tries to remove the item, then gets bitten. A mother living in Mt Colah, north of Sydney, was to write to Tipple: “When ordinary domestic dogs, jealous household pets, savage or kill babies, as has happened often enough in Australia – why be so disbelieving when a wild dingo does the same?”
This anthropocentricity has extended to dealing with animals far bigger and more dangerous. We see in the film, Jurassic Park, how actor Wayne Knight’s character got lost on a rainy night, encountered a dinosaur and tried to sweet-talk it: “No food on me!” Of course, from the dinosaur’s point of view, he was food. A tourist in Yellowstone National Park in the United States fed a grizzly bear and, deciding the bear had had enough, withdrew the food and said: “Sorry, feller, that’s enough!” The bear thought otherwise and the man was seriously injured. At an Australian circus, a handler gave an elephant a treat and had more of it in her hand but decided to keep it till later. The elephant reached out with its trunk to get it and the handler moved it away. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the elephant drew its trunk back and with a mighty jerk of the head and trunk knocked over and killed the handler – “removing the obstacle”, an animal psychologist said – and thereby solving the problem. When it came to the case of a dingo allegedly snatching a tiny baby from its crib in the central Australian desert, hearing and smelling a tiny mammal in a vulnerable position, the reaction of so many Australians was: “Oh no, a dingo would not do that!”
This disinclination to accept the dingo story was the background upon which the reinvestigation was mounted. Initially it was led by the evidence of a forensic odontologist, Dr Kenneth Ayelsbury Brown. He told Denis Barritt that he did not think the damage to the baby’s clothing was caused by canine dentition and was more likely caused by deliberate cutting. Brown’s evidence had been rejected by Barritt on the grounds that Brown did not have experience of bite marks through clothing. Brown denied that he felt humiliated by Barritt’s finding and wanted to pursue the investigation because of that. However, he did take the jumpsuit, with the permission of the Northern Territory police, to the eminent British forensic pathologist Professor James Malcolm Cameron, of the London Hospital Medical College. To be fair to Brown, there might have been some disdain at the coroner’s remarks but he was a professional dissatisfied that a problem had not been solved and he resolved to pursue it. Cameron, after an examination of the jumpsuit and examining the patterns of bleeding, ruled out a dingo attack, opting instead to advance a theory of murder. So in through that portal marched a legion of forensic scientists.
Forensic science was the third great obstacle in Tipple’s way, though it should not have been. At least from the days of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, it had become the essential tool of criminal investigation. People could lie and dissemble but traces left behind at the scene of the crime, or carried from that scene, could not be denied. So many crimes had been solved using that science. A tiny spot of blood the killer had not cleaned from the murder scene, a hair follicle that should not have been there, a footprint, a trace of paint, all could point to the offender. The Locard Principle had it that when any two objects collided,
