27

The dingo experts

A NUMBER OF EXPERTS were called to give evidence about the likely behaviour of dingoes, and Porter asked them a set series of questions, obviously with a view to comparing their answers.

In or about August 1980, was it within the bounds of reasonable possibility that a dingo might attack a human baby?

Cawood: ‘Yes.’

Roff: ‘Yes.’

Harris: ‘Yes. Given the increased need for food, possible reduction of food, I would say that it is … an outright acquisition of prey.’

Dr Corbett: ‘Yes, I think it’s possible, but unlikely.’

Dr Newsome: ‘Yes.’

Was it within the bounds of reasonable possibility that a dingo might carry the baby away for consumption as food?

Cawood: ‘Yes.’

Roff: ‘Yes.’

Harris: ‘Well, at the risk of sounding silly, it would not have taken the baby for any other reason whatsoever but food. Given what I said a few minutes ago about the camping area being regarded as a common foraging ground, I would not expect a dingo to stay in that area once it had acquired food or prey which was beyond its capacity to eat on the spot. It would have removed it to a place where it was unlikely to be challenged for possession.’

Dr Corbett: ‘I think it is possible; again, unlikely.’

Dr Newsome: ‘Yes.’

Would the dingo have the ability to carry the weight of a nine-and-a-half pound baby?

Cawood: ‘Yes.’

Roff: ‘Yes.’

Harris: ‘Yes, quite easily.’

Dr Corbett: ‘A dingo could move a nine-and-a-half pound baby from A to B, yes.’

Dr Newsome: ‘That would depend on the distance.’

Assuming a den is four to six kilometres away, would it be able to carry the baby that far?

Cawood: ‘[It] could take the baby to the den near where the clothes were found.’

Roff: ‘Right to the den. The den where the clothes were found was within a reasonable range for a dingo seeking to feed its puppies.’

Harris: ‘I can’t refer to empirical evidence; I can only draw on my general observations of dingoes over more than a decade in the field and in captivity, and my opinion that a distance of four to five kilometres and the weight of about ten pounds would present absolutely no problem to a dingo.’

Dr Corbett: ‘It would get the baby that far, yes.’

Dr Newsome: ‘Judging from what I know of dingoes it would be a possibility. I’d imagine that it wouldn’t be able to carry that kind of weight clear of the ground the entire way, for a number of reasons; not just the weight, but trying to have an even distribution of that weight and there may require some adjustment.’

Is August a month when dingoes usually have puppies at Ayers Rock?

Cawood: ‘Yes.’

Roff: ‘The puppy season is in August.’

Harris: ‘The cubs are born in July, August — there is a slight variation around Australia — and we have found from observing captive litters that as soon as the teeth of cubs erupt they are prepared to tackle solid food — about eighteen days.’

Dr Corbett: ‘Yes, it would be puppies; it is not the normal month.’

Dr Newsome: ‘Yes.’

These answers received some confirmation from Constable Morris, who reported that a lactating bitch had been shot near the site where the clothes had been found.

Does the male dingo, in a dingo pair, normally help feed the puppies?

Roff: ‘Yes.’

Harris: ‘Our observations of captive stocks are, yes. Our observations in the field are not unequivocal in this matter. We have seen males carrying freshly killed prey and going back to where we know there is a female and a litter. But we have not in this field directly seen males arriving at a den and presenting food.’

Dr Corbett: ‘It doesn’t normally help feed them. Not directly. I have not seen the male bring back food for the pups directly.’

Dr Newsome: ‘I have not seen that, but I have not seen as much of feeding or dens as Dr Corbett.’

Does the dingo normally or occasionally bury its prey?

Cawood: ‘Yes, for various reasons [at Ayers Rock], but it is not its normal habit.’

Roff: ‘Yes, dingoes in the vicinity of Ayers Rock do.’

Harris: ‘This seems to vary. We have been unable to attribute controlling factors to the burying of prey. We have seen prey buried in our captive stock and in the field. So the answer to the question is yes, the dingo does bury prey from time to time, but we don’t understand the controlling factors yet.’

Dr Corbett: ‘I have not seen dingoes burying prey.’

Due to an oversight, Dr Newsome was not asked this question.

Does the dingo have a habit, like the fox, of eating its prey head first?

Cawood: ‘I don’t know.’

Roff: ‘Yes, it’s true of most carnivores.’

Harris: ‘Again this depends on the size of the animal. With the larger animals they tend to eat the contents of the abdominal cavity first and then move on to the solid meat, but with smaller animals they usually tend to eat the prey head first.’

Dr Corbett: ‘It eats some prey head first, but it is not typical of dingoes to decapitate the head for a start and eat from the head.’

Dr Newsome: ‘I’ve been surprised at that suggestion. I can’t recall.’

The Crown relied heavily upon the evidence of Drs Corbett and Newsome, each of whom expressed the view that the ‘overall scenario’ was unlikely. In one sense, this was hardly a controversial suggestion. Whatever the explanation for the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, it was obvious that something quite extraordinary had happened. Furthermore, both Corbett and Newsome had drawn primarily upon their experience with dingoes in the wild, but both Roff and Cawood had made the point that a unique situation had existed at Uluru with ‘semi-wild, semi-tame’ dingoes behaving in an uncharacteristic manner. Corbett himself readily conceded that Roff would have been well informed about contacts between the local dingoes and humans at the relevant time, and that he did not ‘really know that much about it’. He also agreed that he had never heard of any other area where so many people had been attacked by dingoes in such a short period of time.

The distinction between wild and semi-wild dingoes was important, if only because so many people were convinced that ‘dingoes don’t do such things’. It had been said, for example, that dingoes would never enter a tent or any other confined area. Yet Roff, Richard Dare, Rohan Dalgleish, and Peter Elston said that dingoes frequently entered tents at the camping areas near Uluru. One camper, Mrs Foster, complained of one burgling the annexe to her caravan, and Mr Dare mentioned one that had actually become accustomed to strolling down the aisle of his bus accepting titbits from his passengers. He also recounted incidents of dingoes entering motels. Roff was emphatic that a local dingo would not have hesitated to enter a tent for food, and Dare said that ‘you couldn’t leave anything unattended around the camping area because a dingo would be ‘in and off with it like a shot’.

Corbett also lent some support to the Crown’s theory that a dingo would have dropped the baby if it had been disturbed as Lindy had claimed. Again, this was probably typical of dingoes in the wild, but Roff and Cawood insisted that it was not true of the local dingoes.

The theory would not have impressed Erica Letsch, who had become understandably voluble when the dingo took the pillow from under her head and then returned for her sleeping bag. But it was left to a tourist, Mr Love, to demonstrate just how ready the local dingoes were to ignore the expectations of experts. He and his family had decided to have a special picnic, a magnificent repast with a five-kilogram leg of pork intended to assume pride of place on the table. He stepped back to record this joyous gathering on his camera and looked through the viewfinder in time to see a dingo, who obviously shared his love of fine food, climbing onto the table. Love let out an outraged shout, but the dingo took off, with the leg of pork held securely in its jaws. He gave chase, uttering the appropriate white man’s imprecations, but the dingo was too fast, and he gave up after running for several hundred metres. That incident had also occurred shortly after sunset, and the animal had taken his prize from an Esky with the lid on.

The Crown persisted in the contention that Lindy could not have seen the dingo shaking its head because it was not characteristic of dingo behaviour to shake prey. This seemed another exercise in clutching at straws. It was not supported even by Corbett, who had seen dingoes kill large rats by shaking them to break their necks. Of course, no one had ever seen how a dingo might treat a human baby, or knew how one might manipulate its prey after it had already collided with a tent pole and was trying to get out between the swinging flaps of a tent. It was all speculative and possibly irrelevant, because Lindy had never claimed that she had seen the baby in the dingo’s jaws; and if there had been two dingoes, and the ‘warning growl’ had come from the one with the baby, as Roff and Newsome suggested, she had probably seen the wrong one.

Despite the evidence that it was the puppy season and that a lactating bitch had been shot nearby, the Crown also maintained that there had been no puppies at the den near the position at which the clothes had been found. Corbett said that a dingo den could normally be identified by the amount of rabbit skins and dung outside, and that he simply could not imagine a den not surrounded by food remains. Yet in 1979, the year before Azaria disappeared, Dr Morrison had been involved in a television documentary, and had filmed a den in which he could see and hear the puppies. The videotape was screened in court. It showed Morrison approaching the den and pointing out various features; but, as he confirmed in his evidence, there had been no noticeable skins outside the den, and the surrounding area had been ‘relatively clean’ except for the puppies’ tracks immediately in front.

One thing which did emerge with clarity was that dingoes were unpredictable. Harris said that he would be very suspicious of anyone who claimed to be definitive about their behavioural patterns. Corbett emphasised that each dingo was an individual, and that one could not make predictions with any certainty based upon general observations. One could suggest normal behavioural patterns, but there would always be exceptions. Roff agreed, stressing that one had to be very careful before making dogmatic statements about what the animals might do.

These notes of caution underlined the fallacy of one of the criticisms of the Chamberlains’ evidence. The Crown seemed to be suggesting, in effect, that if an expert would not have expected a dingo to behave in a particular manner, any suggestion that one had done so must have been false and, if it had come from the Chamberlains, it must have been made in a dishonest attempt to conceal their presumed crimes. There were obvious leaps of logic in any such approach. The opinions were at best educated guesses, based upon dubious extrapolations from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Only the rangers were familiar with the peculiar behaviour of the dingoes at Uluru in 1980, and they stressed their unpredictability. The other experts were reduced to drawing upon their experience of dingoes in the wild and trying to guess how differently other dingoes might behave in the circumstances that the rangers described. And it appeared that the incident was not entirely unprecedented. There had been instances of Aboriginal babies being taken: Perron knew of one such incident, Harris had been told of another, and Nipper Winmatti’s evidence at the first inquest suggested that there might have been more. But none of them had been the subject of any detailed investigation. The experts did their best to be helpful, but their knowledge of wild dingoes attacking small, fleet-footed animals in the wild seemed to offer little basis for speculation about how a semi-tame dingo might have taken a fully dressed baby sleeping in a bassinet at the back corner of a tent.

There was little doubt that a dingo could have removed the baby’s body from her clothing, but there was a further question as to whether the paucity of damage to the fabric was consistent with such an attack. Professor Gustafson of Sweden was apparently the only scientist who had carried out an extensive study of the manner in which fabric was likely to be damaged by animal teeth, and even he had studied neither dingoes nor attacks upon human prey. Raymond revealed that experiments carried out at Healesville using dolls and pieces of meat in jumpsuits had shown that dingoes could pick up the dolls by the clothing without causing visible damage. As Professor Fernhead explained, the jumpsuit material was elastic, and could be held without the teeth penetrating the weave. This suggested that a dingo could have taken the baby, and carried it to the area where the clothes were subsequently found, without causing significant rips or tears.

Dingoes also proved to be surprisingly dexterous creatures. Richard Dare gave evidence of one that had ‘gently unwrapped’ a cake sealed in aluminium foil. There were ‘a few minor tears’, but it had been able to unfold the foil without causing major rips. Roff had seen a dingo open a bar of chocolate ‘which to me was extremely amazing, the way he did it without ripping and tearing’. He said that ‘in stress situations’ they tended to ‘rip and grab and swallow extremely fast’, but when not aware of being observed, ‘it is a very fastidious process, almost, of investigation, of opening … I know that they can be extremely efficient’. Harris, perhaps still ruefully reflecting on what had become a vegetarian barbecue, agreed that dingoes could be ‘thoughtful and methodical at anything they do’, and that they could ‘unwrap things with care and consideration’. When asked how a dingo would be likely to treat prey wrapped in cloth, Roff said that it would depend on the circumstances.

Corbett agreed that a dingo could easily have opened the press studs of a jumpsuit with its nose or teeth, and said that the fact that most of the studs were undone was consistent with a dingo having nuzzled into the jumpsuit in an attempt to remove the body. The animal would have been sufficiently intelligent to be able to extract the limbs from the extremities of the garment, and could have removed the body from the clothing altogether, although he felt that it was unlikely not to have caused some damage to the jumpsuit. Sims, the London odontologist, said that he would have expected more ‘florid’ damage than was evident in the jumpsuit. However, neither he nor Corbett had been shown the results of the experiment conducted at the Adelaide Zoo in which the decapitated body of a goat kid dressed in a jumpsuit had been placed in a dingo pen. A dingo had removed the kid, and the jumpsuit was later found to have only two studs undone. Sims thought it would have required even more skill to remove clothing from a baby, but conceded that he had been surprised that the dingo could have removed the goat kid and caused so little damage. Newsome had also been surprised by the dexterity revealed by this experiment.

The Healesville experiments had shown that the dingoes ‘would go for the head first’ and attempt to remove the jumpsuits by pulling on the extremities. Raymond had been fascinated to find that the jumpsuits came away from the dolls, leaving the booties inside the feet. He had previously been unable to imagine how a dingo could have removed Azaria’s body and yet left the booties to be later discovered by Goodwin and Morris. These experiments provided the answer.

The Crown nonetheless described the experiments as ‘failures’, and claimed that the damage to the jumpsuit ‘looks wrong’. A number of witnesses did say that the damage was not what they would have expected, but Cameron and Ferris were pathologists who hailed from England and Canada respectively — countries not noted for the prevalence of dingoes — and Sims was an odontologist who also came from England, and he had never seen a live dingo when he wrote his first report. I was somewhat bemused by this reliance upon the opinions from overseas experts and briefly wondered whether, if the baby had disappeared in Greenland, a group of Inuit prosecutors would have been equally enthusiastic about importing Australian experts to pontificate about the capacities of polar bears.

Scott was an Australian, but he was a biologist whose opinion was based on a comparison between Azaria’s jumpsuit and a single experiment about which he himself had sounded a note of caution. Corbett and Cawood both knew a lot about dingoes, but neither had made any study of the manner in which they were likely to damage clothing, and neither had seen the results of the Healesville or Adelaide experiments that had so surprised Sims and Newsome. The experiments had demonstrated that dingoes did not always fulfil the expectations of experts.

Sims was not the only odontologist to give evidence. Professor Gustafson had been referred to as ‘the father of forensic odontology’. He had written the first book on the topic in 1966, and was still generally acknowledged as the world’s leading expert in this field. His extensive research concerning the effect of animal dentition on fabrics remained unparalleled. He was now eighty years of age, a white-haired man with twinkling eyes and an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject. His wife, who was the same age, had also been a university professor and, like her eminent husband, was still sharp and perceptive. They were a delightful couple who were both partially deaf and occasionally attracted each other’s attention by whistling. During the course of one conference, she explained that her husband had invented a technique involving the use of ultraviolet light for use in the identification of various kinds of damage to fabric. The inspiration had come whilst he was at the Folies Bergere watching a scantily clad young woman dancing; he had found the effect on her tiny costume fascinating as she wafted in and out of a beam of blue light. His wife waved her finger reprovingly and said with a wry smile, ‘Only my husband could have come up with an invention that kept him going back to the Folies Bergere for research purposes, and then won a prize for it.’

Professor Fernhead had been professor of dentistry at the universities of London and Hong Kong, and now held the chair at a Japanese university which had offered not only a better salary but far better facilities than his countrymen were able to provide. Dr Orams was perhaps Australia’s foremost forensic odontologist, and his opinions also commanded widespread respect. It would have been difficult to imagine a more distinguished group of odontologists giving evidence in the one case, yet they were unanimous that the damage to Azaria’s jumpsuit was consistent with causation by the teeth of a dingo.

They were supported by the experiments conducted by Les Smith and Ken Chapman which had shown that dingoes could cut fabric and produce tufts indistinguishable from those found on the jumpsuit.

Azaria’s clothing had not been found neatly folded, as some reports had claimed, but the items had been located within a relatively small area. Corbett said that he could not imagine the clothing being left in the vicinity of a den without being disturbed and scattered, and others agreed. Roff was not so sure. ‘I find myself having difficulty giving an answer to that’, he said. ‘I mean to say, every animal is possibly going to be different, and I would expect, yes, sure it could be scattered, and sure, it could be exactly like this.’ He later explained that ‘every dingo is a character in his own right. He’s got his own expertise.’

If Corbett was right, it would have suggested the possibility of human involvement; but if Roff was correct and there were puppies in the nearby den, it was quite possible that a dingo had brought the baby to that area and had left the clothes in the manner they were found. Cawood raised a third possibility:

There’s another point that I did think of: that after the clothing was found — it was found in a bundle — that a dingo will take up a bloodstained object and move it, take it back to a lair or take it somewhere but normally chew it. And this was a thought that crossed my mind at the time, that the clothing could have been in fact somewhere in a disarranged fashion and another dog or dingo could have picked it up and by doing so would have rebundled it into a compact sort of an area and take it back and just drop the clothing somewhere after it was first put somewhere else — or first, if the child had been taken from it, but again I would imagine the clothing would have to be torn by the first dingo or the second if that was the case.

Then there was the discovery of the matinee jacket. The searches for Azaria’s body had continued until the Thursday after she disappeared, and the police were sure they would have found the jacket if it had been where it was later found. Lindy and Michael had left for home on Tuesday, and there had been no suggestion that they had ever returned. If the jacket was placed there by human hands, the hands were not those of the Chamberlains.