After Decades-Long Anti-Woman Witchhunt

Court Finally Exonerates Lindy Chamberlain

Australia

We reprint below an article from Australasian Spartacist No. 216 (Winter 2012), newspaper of the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League.

Almost 32 years after the tragic death of nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain in August 1980 and the subsequent vicious witchhunt and wrongful jailing of her mother Lindy for her murder, on 12 June this year a Northern Territory (NT) coroner finally ruled that the Chamberlains’ baby daughter died as a result of being taken from her tent by a dingo [wild dog] or dingoes in a campground near Uluru (then, Ayers Rock) in central Australia. Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, as she is now known, and her former husband, Michael, welcomed the ruling. For over three decades they and their supporters have tenaciously fought to have the truth recognised.

The witchhunt of Lindy Chamberlain and her family was a lightning rod for the mean-minded bigotry and deep misogynist prejudice that permeates Australian capitalist society. From early on, the case captured international headlines. The basic facts of Azaria’s disappearance were quickly submerged in a spiralling police, court and media witchhunt. The police particularly hated Lindy who emerged as an articulate and strong-willed fighter. Picking up on tidbits fed them by the cops, the bourgeois media created a garish circus of rumour and malice, including sensational stories of devils and bizarre black rituals [witchcraft]. An endless stream of gruesome “forensic” reports complemented the medieval hysteria. That the Chamberlains were members of the Seventh Day Adventist church, a small and devout millenarian sect outside mainstream Christianity, made them an easy target. Hand-in-hand with anti-woman bigotry went racism, with crucial evidence of Aboriginal trackers ignored for years following the first inquest. One of the first responses of the Alice Springs cops to Azaria’s disappearance was to raid the Aboriginal settlement near Uluru.

The coroner at the first inquest, which rightly found that the baby was killed by a wild dingo, condemned the months of malicious gossip and sharply criticised the NT police force for non-reporting of crucial information and “lack of complete objectivity.” With its authority challenged (and no doubt concerned for the reputation of Ayers Rock as a money-making tourist attraction), the Country-Liberal Party NT government of the day swung into a new “investigation.” By late 1982, Lindy had been framed up and convicted of murdering her daughter and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Michael was convicted as an accessory after the fact.

In jail Lindy gave birth to another daughter, who was taken from her. After three gruelling years in prison, she was released in 1986. A growing public campaign by witnesses and supporters defending her innocence, including John Bryson’s powerful 1985 book, Evil Angels, exposing the prosecution’s parade of “forensic evidence,” was beginning to embarrass the national and territory governments. The finding of evidence that the prosecution had insisted never existed compelled the NT government to release Lindy and set up a Royal Commission to quell the outcry. The inquiry found there was “insufficient evidence” to convict the Chamberlains—while whitewashing the state prosecution and exonerating the cops. In response, the NT government granted the couple an insulting “pardon”! It was not until 1988 that the convictions were quashed. Azaria’s death certificate wasn’t amended until 1995 and even then the inquest returned an “open finding” on the cause of death.

Lindy Chamberlain was framed up by the courts and cops of territorial, state and federal governments. The role of the sycophantic bourgeois media was to sow suspicion, ignorance and fear, whipping up a broad base of support for the witchhunt within this brutally sexist capitalist society. As we wrote in “Lindy Chamberlain: Victim of Anti-Woman Witchhunt” (Australasian Spartacist No. 121, July/August 1987):

“The rampant sexism in this remote white imperialist enclave made a woman of the calibre of Lindy Chamberlain a perfect target for witchhunting. The bourgeois media focussed on the fact that Lindy is an intelligent, assertive woman, who has displayed enormous reserves of strength....

“It is precisely these qualities, manifested in a woman, which were used by the media to portray Lindy as an aberration in Australian society. It speaks volumes about the oppression of women in Australia that it is held that women should be dumb, passive subjects....

“Lindy Chamberlain was witchhunted in a manner worthy of the Salem witch trials. She was vilified by the media because she would not cry, and because she would not smile. Her stony appearance in the courtroom was portrayed as cold unrepentance.... Little matter that she had nothing to repent; that her ‘emotionless’ exterior was evidence of her resilience and self-respect in the face of the massive campaign against her....

“The witchhunt of Lindy Chamberlain played a part in reinforcing the position of women as the core of the nuclear family—in this role women are to be subservient, not defiant and outspoken. The hypocrisy of the official bourgeois morality, which sanctifies the nuclear family, was sharply exposed in the state witchhunt of Lindy Chamberlain, which sought to destroy her family.”

In this bourgeois society, “justice” serves the ruling class and the courts are primarily vehicles to keep everyone else in line. True justice for the years of state terror inflicted on the Chamberlains, and for all those who suffer at the hands of the state, will come with the sweeping away of this exploitative, racist and sexist capitalist society and its replacement by the state power, collectivised industry and planned economy of the victorious working class, the only road to a decent, egalitarian world.