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Introduction
Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth.
- Bryce Courtenay
The Azaria Chamberlain case will go down in Australian history as a disaster, in the league of train smashes, corporate collapses and medical failures. When each of these disasters is scrutinised in the aftermath, it is almost inevitably found that there were contributing factors which could have been recognised well in advance: lack of maintenance, miscalculations, cost-cutting, complacency, negligence, arrogance, recklessness. Such failures individually are often tolerated, to wit with a warning, caution or disciplinary action of some sort, but without upheaval, because other safeguards have been in place. But when a series of individual failures come together and there are no more safeguards, the pieces, as it were, lock into place. How many worksite foremen, viewing the aftermath of a fatal industrial accident, have asked: “Why wasn’t this checked?” How many chief executives, pondering a corporate collapse, have asked: “Why didn’t I heed that warning?” How many ministers of state, seeing a policy go belly-up, have asked: “Why he did not see that coming?” How many barristers, seeing a client go to gaol, have asked: “Why didn’t I pin that Crown witness down properly?” At any point in most sequences of events, safeguards have operated. Things have not worked out in places, but the overall operation has nevertheless proceeded, because other checks and balances have worked. Every time a financial analyst sees a risk in a proposed investment, and that is acted on, then a safeguard has worked. Every time a forensic scientist sees an inconsistency in a test result that casts doubt over the Crown scenario and says there is no confirmation, an effective safeguard has not allowed things to continue.
There are usually multiple safeguards, and sometimes the failure of some of them leads to a rescue operation. Sometimes, just the final safeguard holds up. More than a quarter-century ago a NSW Police superintendent, Harry Blackburn, came under suspicion as the perpetrator of a series of assaults and rapes in suburban Sydney. There were a number of safeguards against a wrongful conviction: the accuracy of eyewitness accounts, the competence of investigating police and of reviewing police, the scrutiny of the Director of Public Prosecutions. All these safeguards failed and Harry was charged and paraded in front of the cameras for all the world to see. As a result of the stress both his wife and daughter-in-law suffered miscarriages and Harry’s life was turned upside-down. But the headlong rush to total disaster was stopped in its tracks. A safeguard worked, being the competence of an officer who took over from the original investigators. He was the then Detective Inspector Clive Small. The brief was “full of holes”, Small said, in the face of a stiff opposition from superiors, and the prosecution was dropped.
In the Azaria Chamberlain case, a series of safeguards were in place and any blame, whatever it might have been, properly attributed. The couple lost their baby, seized in the jaws of a wild animal at Ayers Rock on 17th August 1980. An investigation followed. To the point of the initial coroner’s finding, in February 1981, that a dingo had taken the baby, the safeguards held firm. Then it was reinvestigated. There were further safeguards: the competence of the investigating police and scientific experts, the chance to air all the facts, if it came to that, before another coroner, and again if it came to that, the common sense of trial judge and jury, then perhaps of the Federal and High Courts of Appeal. As it turned out, one of these safeguards might have held, being the view of the case taken by the trial judge, James Muirhead, who saw through the nonsense and virtually begged the jury to acquit. But because of the authority of the jury decision, his urgings were overridden. Another safeguard almost held. Two of the five High Court judges hearing the Chamberlains’ appeal, Justice Lionel Murphy and Sir William Dean, found that the appeal should be allowed and the convictions quashed. But they were in the minority on the bench and that safeguard failed. As it turned out, all the safeguards failed. The Chamberlains were convicted, Lindy sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, Michael to a suspended sentence, and their lives were torn apart.
As the event was scrutinised, over and over again during the following three decades, it gradually dawned on officialdom – however long that took – that that had happened. The safeguards, or any one of them, should have held up. But with their total failure, the pieces fitted into place, and there was nothing to stop what followed. Then the question was asked, in a royal commission, why this had happened. Contributing factors became readily identifiable: the remote location, making immediate and expert crime scene examination difficult, the incompetence and arrogance of at least some of the forensic scientists, the ruthlessness and irresponsibility of media, making it near-impossible to have put together an untainted jury, the bigotry of the general public and the rigidity of the legal system.
So often, in these disasters, there are warnings. One such warning, had it been properly researched, was an inadequate performance of the principal scientific witness, Professor James Cameron, in a criminal case in Britain. As far as forensic science in general was concerned, there were warnings from previous cases, especially where prosecutions had been based on scientific rather than primary evidence, where evidence had been wrongly admitted or insufficiently tested, where expertise was assumed in an expert judgement when it should not have been. After Michael and Lindy Chamberlain were convicted over their baby’s death, the final appeal had to be to the Court of Public Opinion, which is at best fickle. In the Chamberlain case, it worked. But by the time that had been done – the coroner’s finding in 2012 reverting to what Denis Barritt had found in 1981 – the lives of everyone in the Chamberlain family had been ruined or severely affected.
Congratulations Australia! A baby is snatched away by a wild animal and the parents are universally vilified, convicted and punished. All those years and years, collectively, of education and training, all that experience of the police offices and scientists and lawyers, all those hundreds of years in which the legal system had been studied, scrutinised and refined, all that money spent on investigation and court proceedings, and yet this happened.
Michael and Lindy Chamberlain had no reason to believe nine-week old baby Azaria was in any danger when Lindy placed her asleep in their tent with their sleeping four year- old son Reagan. From that misplaced confidence, everything went wrong for the Chamberlains.
Having suffered the unimaginable trauma of losing their baby in these horrifying circumstances, they were thrust headlong into a world that was utterly unfamiliar to them, sneered at and pilloried throughout the nation, prosecuted and in Lindy’s case, gaoled for life. John Winneke QC, who represented the Chamberlains at one point, was to say it was like Beelzebub going ahead of them all the time, throwing things down which would come back onto them. Leaving aside satanic influences, it was simply a case of the safeguards progressively failing when they should have worked.
Into this mess was thrust Stuart Tipple, a 29-year-old provincial solicitor in New South Wales, retained because he was well-regarded professionally and a Seventh-day Adventist, like his clients-to-be, and in good standing with the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) hierarchy. With limits to his own experience, he took the brief after the re-investigation was launched and plunged into unknown territory, an unchartered wilderness in which he was to experience frustration, persecution and denunciation. He was often a lone figure, attacked and denigrated over the following years within his own church community, pitching his resources against those of the government of the Northern Territory, which called on experts from the other side of the world. However like other solitary figures, caught in a blitz with nothing going right for them, he stayed calm and planned his moves, set his priorities and battled on. The one thing that went well for him was that both Michael and Lindy Chamberlain recognised his intrinsic value and stayed with him.
I encountered Stuart as a reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. The media did not have a good image in the eyes of the Chamberlains, who had initially been frank and open but soon learned to be very wary. I was tarred with that brush as well. But had had some sort of rapport with them, probably because I was a churchgoer. With Stuart, it was a prickly relationship. Probably the worst moment was when Stuart had private negotiations with Brian Martin QC, then the Solicitor-General for the Northern Territory, about a possible release for Lindy. Stuart told the SDA hierarchy, who distributed the information in a confidential document.