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THE CHAMBERLAINS ARRIVED HOME on Thursday 21 August 1980. It was about 10.00 p.m. when Lindy rang her friend Jenny Ransom. It was understandable that Lindy would have turned to her. They had been members of the same church for many years and had become close friends, sharing earlier camping trips and sometimes looking after each other’s children. It was an emotional reunion with some element of catharsis for Lindy. Here was someone who understood; someone with the empathy of one mother for another; someone who had been part of all that had led up to this tragedy: Lindy’s longing for a little girl, the prayers of faith and, ultimately, the joy of it all. She had visited her in hospital when Lindy was ‘really over the moon’ with her delight in her new little daughter. She had bought clothes for Azaria and had seen the nursery with its abundance of little dresses that obviously reflected Lindy’s pride and joy in having a little girl.

She had heard the terrible news of Azaria’s disappearance. But now, as Lindy spoke, it was as though the incident was being recreated in front of her eyes. She had stood around campsite barbecues with Lindy, and knew well that little tent with the peaked roof. They spoke until almost 2.00 a.m. Parts of the conversation were to indelibly imprint themselves in Jenny’s mind. She recalled that Lindy broke down and wept on four or five occasions, and that there was a tremulous but brave affirmation of faith. ‘If I am true to the Lord, then I know that baby will be placed back in my arms just as beautiful as what she was on that day that she was taken.’ Jenny had been a Christian for many years, but the tragedy was too fresh, her friend’s pain too real. How could her God of compassion, without whose leave not even a sparrow falls to the ground, have permitted such a thing to happen? Even six years later, she was to recall this vividly:

I just said to her that it just seemed — Why — I guess I questioned so much why, and Lindy said, ‘Jenny, nothing can bring my baby back to me’ and ‘but so many of us put so much importance onto the three score years and ten that we have on this earth, and nothing into eternity; and that if through this, if one person could just realise and turn their life to God, that her baby wouldn’t have died have died in vain.’

It was as though the roles were for a time reversed. The consoler was being consoled.

Jenny remembered Lindy’s strong faith ‘which I certainly didn’t have at that time’ and Lindy saying that ‘if people can just see that with faith in God this earth is worth nothing but eternity is forever’.

This made a great impression on her, and when Lindy mentioned that a reporter from Woman’s Day was coming to see her the next day, she had an idea. If Lindy was seeking to find a purpose in Azaria’s death through the eternal salvation of others, why not use the media? Why not demonstrate to the world the strength and reality of this faith that was so palpable?

‘If you feel so strongly about your faith and the way you feel about it, surely you will get to more people by going to something like Today Tonight?’

On Friday morning, Jenny rang to again suggest that Lindy appear on the Today Tonight program and, when she agreed, rang the producers to make the necessary arrangements.

Later in the morning, Jenny and another friend, June Simpson, dropped in to see if there was anything they could do to help. They were doing some washing for her when Lindy came down with a number of items she wanted drycleaned. There was a little cardigan of Reagan’s, Lindy’s tracksuit, and a travelling rug or blanket. Lindy drew her attention to some marks on the tracksuit pants and asked her to show them to the drycleaners so that they could be removed. Jenny thought they might have been blood.

It was later to be suggested that these marks were caused by droplets of blood which had dripped down onto Lindy’s slacks as she sat in the car, held Azaria out in front of her under the dashboard, and brutally cut her throat. But these were early days, and there was no inkling of such grisly conjecture when Jenny duly handed over them to the drycleaners.

The interview with Liz Hickson began shortly before lunch. She had gone to Mount Isa to obtain ‘a bit of a scoop’ for Woman’s Day. She knew that the Chamberlains had spoken to a number of journalists whilst at Uluru, but hoped to be the first person to have a full interview with them since the tragedy. It was an emotional discussion. For a time, Lindy seemed to ‘try to detach herself from the conversation’ by talking about ‘all sorts of irrelevancies’. When she did become involved in discussing the events of the evening, she became visibly distressed. Liz Hickson would later tell the royal commission that ‘there were two occasions when she was clearly holding onto herself very hard indeed; and there was one time when she again was holding over, and I crossed the room, and she broke down, then … I think I put my arm around her shoulder.’ They suspended the interview for two or three minutes while Lindy cried, the tears flowing down her cheeks while Liz held her. When asked about her attitude to the Chamberlains, she said, ‘I started off with a completely detached attitude and I became sort of increasingly sympathetic, as a human being, to Lindy’s very clear state of grief.’

She was also struck by Michael’s rueful comment: ‘I have had to comfort people many times when they have lost children. Now I know that my words were a little empty. You cannot possibly know unless it has happened to you. There are things you can never get rid of.’

Liz Hickson’s article was to appear in Woman’s Day on 1 October 1980. Despite her sympathetic approach, some passages were to add fuel to the growing conflagration of suspicion and hostility towards the Chamberlains. The Crown later seized upon it, and pointed to inconsistencies between quotes attributed to them in the article and statements they had made to the police. Michael and Lindy protested that the article contained inaccuracies, but their protestations fell upon the deaf ears of an increasingly sceptical public.

Hickson had tried to be accurate, as she was later to put it, but it was an article for a magazine, not a police report and, as she was to tell the commission of inquiry, it was ‘written partly from notes, and very incomplete notes, and partly from memory. I don’t regard that as verbatim.’ Its accuracy was further put in question by some ‘updating’ carried out by sub-editors whilst she was on holidays. She explained, ‘I wasn’t aware that all that was going to go in until I actually saw it in print.’ She took strong exception to some of the updating: ‘There are about four paragraphs there that I specifically objected to at the time with my sub-editors — I specifically and quite strongly objected to — which was updating from published material published by people other than myself, based on what I just don’t know.’ She defended the overall approach of the magazine on the basis that the article was intended to be ‘factionalised rather than fictionalised’.

The problem was compounded when the police arrived at her home on a Saturday afternoon in the following February in 1981 to question her about her interview. She later explained that her memory had been affected by the fact that she had just spent two months in hospital ‘having a very serious operation’ and that she had protested to the police that she had ‘a very poor recollection’ of the matters in the article. She had also been without her notes. The police nonetheless produced her article and took her through it. She agreed that it was correct, and they typed a statement for her to sign.

She was later to tell the royal commission: ‘I am very uncomfortable about the whole of the police statement, frankly, because it was an attempt to get rid of the police, quite frankly. I did not want to be involved with the police. I was reading quite blatantly from my story and saying, “she said this and she said that”.’ She explained that whilst she had read it through ‘rather cursorily,’ she had missed a few points that she should have picked up. The final paragraph, she said, was ‘totally inaccurate’ and added, ‘I don’t know how I signed it certainly.’ She also complained that some qualifications had been omitted and that ‘they picked out certain things that I had said and left out others’.

One portion of the article which was to assume sinister connotations in the minds of many people was a reference to a ‘thousand word thesis on dingoes’ which Lindy was said to have written. When this document was finally produced, it turned out to have been a project on dogs written when Lindy was eleven years old. One paragraph was devoted to dingoes.