Australia's apex predator could finally be officially blamed for an infamous child killing. Time to rethink conservation efforts
IN A few days, Elizabeth Morris, the coroner of Australia's Northern Territory, will open the fourth inquest into one of the country's most infamous incidents.
The hearing will seek to identify once and for all the cause of death of 9-week-old Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared from her parents' tent at Uluru (Ayers Rock) in August 1980. Her body has never been found.
Her mother Lindy was convicted of murder in 1982 and jailed. Then in 1986 Azaria's jacket was found in a dingo's lair. Lindy was released and the evidence used against her was found to be spectacularly flawed.
Lindy's plight struck a chord around the world. Even Hollywood came calling. "My God, the dingoes took my baby" is an oft-repeated line from the resulting film A Cry in the Dark.
The Chamberlain family now hope to find some sort of resolution by securing an official finding that a dingo was responsible for Azaria's death.
But for an entire species the future is uncertain. What if it is judged to be a baby killer?
Right from the start everybody had an opinion on whether a dingo could have killed Azaria. Many were not prepared to believe it.
The fact that - with the exception of Aboriginal people - very few Australians had any experience of dingoes did not seem to matter. Even if they had wanted to read the relevant natural history of dingo behaviour it was sparse. The problem was that it was not just an ordinary animal and easily classified. At one level it is Canis lupus dingo, a subspecies of dog that arrived in Australia from Asia 3500 years ago as a domesticated animal that later reverted to living in wild packs.
Old books on dog breeds show other aliases: "Australian native dog", "Australian wild dog" and "warrigal". Names are significant and show that the dingo entered the lexicon of Australian nationhood.
It was considered native, wild, and associated with Aboriginal people as a domestic dog, perhaps as a guard dog or hunting dog. Its "true nature" is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. Anthropologists would rightly say such an animal is dangerously ambiguous. The truth is that the dingo has never been exclusively wild or domesticated, and this is where the danger lies.
In a skilful reading of the way the dingo has entered Aboriginal stories and mythology, Meryll Parker, whose PhD thesis was on the animal, shows how it appears in myths as a fitting metaphor for humans, capable of love, affection, good parenting, loyalty and cooperation. However Parker also points out the existence of "warning myths". Aboriginal people knew about another side to the dingo: that like them it faced adverse conditions and would take food wherever it could.
Repeatedly, Parker found Aboriginal stories and recorded conversations emphasising how the young and the frail should not wander off alone or be allowed to fall behind moving groups, how babies must be carefully looked after in camps, and how the dingo had a reputation for sneaking in behind their wind shelters.
By contrast, most white Australians who expressed an opinion had never been near a dingo. What counted to them was the animal's brutal experience with authorities in their country. Precisely because it had been mercilessly hunted and widely eradicated by the livestock industry, it appeared rather like the heroic figure of the outlaw, or bushranger, resisting authority. Many Australians are distrustful of powerful interest groups and not easily persuaded to exercise muscle over the powerless.
They would know that dingoes probably do steal sheep but since dingoes had gained the status of native animals, they had a just claim to stay. This made Australians reluctant to see the animal persecuted any further.
If the Chamberlain case is decided against the dingo it will be events on Fraser Island in Queensland that clinch it. Here was an island population of dingoes which experts claimed were the least contaminated of their kind by cross-breeding with domestic dogs. As such they became the stars of a major eco-tourist venture, with the island attracting up to 500,000 visitors a year in recent decades. In order to emphasise its unique and pristine nature, the dingo's wildness and nativeness was overemphasised, with its nature carefully crafted in brochures and advertising.
It was never shown in packs, and typically in the distance. And as the anthropologist Adrian Peace wrote, "it appeared isolated and a threat to no one - and so all the more a candidate for conservation".
Yet after a multitude of reports of biting, including one in which a 14-month-old child was dragged into the bush, and another in which a pack attacked an elderly German woman sunbathing, the conservation discourse quickly shifted to consider culling. It is telling that these incidents were blamed on "unnatural" behaviour. Then in April 2001, 9-year-old Clinton Gage was attacked and quickly killed by two dingoes on the island.
If the conservation movement insists on unrealistic conceptions of the dingo, as happened with Fraser Island, then the future of the species in Australia does not look good. Attacks may continue, with culling of problem animals the inevitable result.
However, if it is finally accepted that a dingo killed Azaria, and that dingoes naturally have a complex repertoire of behaviours that include symbiotic and predatory associations with humans, then it can be assigned its place on the landscape as a dangerous animal and conserved as such animals are everywhere, with its separation from people given due weight.
Adrian Franklin is an anthropologist at the University of Tasmania, Australia, specialising in human-animal relations. His books include Nature and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 2001) and Animal Nation: The true story of animals in Australia (UNSW Press, 2006)
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