If you’ve heard of Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, it’s likely because of the line “a dingo ate my baby,” often attributed to her. She never said it, just one more measure of how badly the news media treated her.
A new film from the New York Times’ Retro Report series looks at how her family’s heartbreak became a pop culture in-joke. Chamberlain-Creighton’s 9-week-old daughter Azaria disappeared when the family was camping in the Australian outback in 1980. She was convicted of murdering the child in 1982, then freed in 1988 after evidence was discovered that cleared her.
The government botched the case, but the news media’s failure was equally “cosmic,” Clyde Haberman writes in an introduction to the film.
Chamberlain outside a courthouse in Alice Springs, Australia, in 1982. (AP Photo)
Many people in the U.S. know about Azaria’s death through the 1988 film “A Cry in the Dark,” starring Meryl Streep as Chamberlain-Creighton. That movie is very sympathetic to Chamberlain-Creighton. “There’s no sense of mocking,” said Jennifer Forde, who directed and produced the Retro Report film. “It’s such an interesting and bizarre thing that the story became a joke.”
Forde became interested in the story when she lived in Australia and it was the “first thing that came to mind” when she thought about pitching Retro Report, she said. Before Chamberlain-Creighton was fully cleared in 2012, she said, a local newspaper ran the headline “She’s back.” It summed up one of the subtexts of media coverage of Chamberlain-Creighton: That she somehow enjoyed the attention her child’s death brought her.
“You can kind of see why she was tried on her personality,” Forde said. During one televised interview, Chamberlain-Creighton coolly discussed how a dingo might have peeled Azaria’s clothes away like they peel the flesh off of cattle they kill. “It was extraordinary to hear a mother talk in that way and talk so clinically,” Forde said.
But Chamberlain-Creighton also took flak for her defying the public’s expectation of what her grief should look like. Her shoulders were often bare when she appeared in public, and “There was a lot of commentary about how attractive she was,” the writer Briar Wood says in Forde’s film.
Forde worked on the film on and off since spring, and began editing it in September. She spoke with Chamberlain-Creighton, who “probably came across as being quite prickly,” Forde said — “you can completely see that after 35 years her patience was wearing thin with the media.” Chamberlain-Creighton was “very confident,” she said, and anxious not to lose rights to her story, the only true one to get told.
She never cried “The dingo ate my baby,” for instance. “Meryl got it right,” Forde said of Streep’s turn as Chamberlain-Creighton. What she shouted was “The dingo’s got the baby.”
The Australian media hasn’t exactly rushed to make amends to Chamberlain-Creighton, Forde said, though some people have apologized.
“I was really interested in the lessons about trials and celebrity trials,” Forde said, as well as parallels to tabloid-y cases like Amanda Knox’s and Oscar Pistorius’. When a story becomes a media sensation, she said, “People become obsessed with knowing all of the gritty details, and it’s really important not to confuse that obsession with access to the truth.”
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