Lindy Chamberlain’s name has sparked strong emotions among millions of Australians since she claimed a dingo took her baby girl Azaria from an Uluru campsite 37 years ago.
To some she was the hard-faced, cold-blooded killer of an innocent child. Others saw a loving mother who had been wrongly jailed for her nine-week-old daughter’s murder.
Those reactions are widely known, as is the fact a dingo did take Azaria Chamberlain and that Lindy was the victim of one of the worst injustices in Australian criminal history.
Less well known is that more than 20,000 people put their thoughts on paper in letters and cards they sent to Lindy and, extraordinarily, that she kept them all.
Lindy Chamberlain pictured with her nine-week-old daughter Azaria at Uluru, then known as Ayers Rock, before the nine-week-old disappeared from the family’s campsite in August 1980
Merry Christmas: ‘Lindy, you have committed the greatest sin of all, CHILD MURDER. May God commit your soul to Satin (the Devil), for torture in Hell throughout eternity’
A poem written to young mother Lindy Chamberlain while she was wrongfully imprisoned in the Northern Territory for the murder of her daughter Azaria at Uluru in August 1980
Michael and Lindy Chamberlain on the steps of Alice Springs courthouse holding a photograph of Lindy with Azaria after the first inquest into the nine-week-old’s disappearance
Many of those letters, all of which Lindy donated to the National Library of Australia (NLA), have been compiled in a book written by author Alana Valentine.
Most were written by strangers – with messages ranging from offers of support to damning the young mother to hell – but some were penned by friends and family.
One note in the book was written by Lindy’s second-eldest son Reagan, who was six when his mother was jailed for life.
‘Dear Mummy, I love you. On Monday I watched Superman II and I am not feeling very well,’ Reagan wrote.
‘The last few nights I couldn’t go to sleep because I was sick and I am up with auntie powell.
‘On Wednesday I am playing with David and Davina and my eye is getting better each day and I have been getting tadpoles and some have got big eyes and some are just about into a frog.
‘Hugs and kisses. Love Reagan,’
Reagan Chamberlain wrote this note to his mother Lindy when she was serving a life sentence for the murder of her daughter Azaria, who was taken by a dingo at Uluru in August 1980
Reagan Chamberlain with his mother Lindy and sister Kahlia, who was born in Darwin Hospital while Lindy was still imprisoned over her wrongful conviction of murdering baby Azaria
This letter included a lullaby the author had written for Azaria Chamberlain: ‘O sing the child to sleep now, And sanctify the hours; In a contrite coming touch her, And cover her with flowers’
The letters began arriving as Mrs Chamberlain and her then husband Michael were mourning the loss of Azaria late in 1980. They continued through her years in prison and have kept coming to this day.
Having remarried, the now Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton still receives almost a thousand pieces of correspondence every year.
Alana Valentine, the author of Dear Lindy: A Nation Responds to the Loss of Azaria, explains in the book’s introduction how Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton came to donate the letters to the NLA.
‘Lindy remembers that the library first approached her about acquiring the letters in 1986, just a few weeks after she got out of prison,’ Valentine wrote.
Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton recalled for the book: ‘I was in the backyard. Apparently they’d knocked on the front door and I hadn’t heard them so they’d thought, we’ll try the back.’
Lindy and MIchael Chamberlain leaving Alice Springs Court after a coroner ordered her to face trial for the murder of the couple’s baby Azaria near Uluru in August 1980
‘I know I cannot express, in words, the depth of emotion our family is feeling for you and Michael. The shock and disbelief at the jury’s decision has rebounded to everyone…’
Former Sydney Morning Herald reporter Malcolm Brown wrote letters of support to Lindy Chamberlain, whose innocence he had always proclaimed in private and in print
‘And there I was standing next to a big 44-gallon drum burning letters. And they didn’t say hello or anything else; they said, “What are you doing?”
‘And I said, “I’m burning letters. Why?”, and they said, “Well we’re from the National Library and we’d really like to have them.”
‘There were 11 filing cabinets to begin with that had been filed but that didn’t include the four or five tea chests, the letters under the bed, in every drawer of the house, on the veranda. They were everywhere.
‘So I said to the NLA people, “You can have them but I need to sort them. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
‘But then it was not until after I had first published my autobiography in 1990 that I called them and said, “OK, I’m ready to give them to you now”.’
‘Dear Lindy, A short note to let you know we are thinking of you constantly, life seems to have fallen flat since we heard the news. We know that God has his arms of love around you…’
This 1986 letter from Scotland says the author has written to the British judiciary and Parliament including the House of Lords about Lindy Chamberlain’s legal plight
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton arrives at Darwin Magistrate’s Court in February 2012 for the first day of the fourth coronial inquest into the disappearance of her daughter Azaria
Some of the letters are filled with love, others drip with hate.
One family even sent Lindy a bib made from old lace for her daughter Kahlia, who was born while she was still in jail.
‘Also enclosed is a small gift for your baby,’ Geoff and Marg wrote in 1982. ‘When my little baby was born 4 months ago I got carried away making bibs – he hasn’t even dribbled enough yet to use half of them.
‘I have never been too well with words but you must know we care and there are thousands of Australians who feel as we do and we are all with you in Spirit.’
Another letter addressed Lindy as ‘Murderer’ and asked ‘Will you also cut this babe’s throat? You deserve life with hard labour.’
‘Lindy, you have committed the greatest sin of all, CHILD MURDER. May God commit your soul to Satin (the Devil), for torture in Hell throughout eternity.’
Valentine, a playwright and award-winning author, interviewed Graeme Powell, NLA curator at the time the papers were acquired in 1992.
‘The first time we went out there it was this chaotic heap of paper,’ Mr Powell told Valentine.
‘Don’t give up! Someday soon you will be freed from all this trouble and heartache. Remember Lindy Jesus sees your tears and He cries out with you. He feels your heartaches too’
Elizabeth Guy sent this poem: ‘A sensitive, lovely, radiant thing Whose beauty the years can never face – God’s Hands lovingly forming pearls From which the gates of Heaven are made’
Baby Azaria Chamberlain, who was taken by a dingo from her family’s tent near Uluru on August 17, 1980; her mother Lindy was wrongly convicted of the nine-week-old’s murder
‘But when I came back a few months later, it was transformed. Lindy had devised this filing system and she didn’t like the idea of even one bit of loose paper.
‘I spent two or three days there and, if she came across a loose piece of paper, she’d immediately grab a file, do one of those yellow stickers, summarise and find the right place for it.
‘And she drove us all very hard. She had the children all working on it. And her parents at one stage.’
The author was originally granted permission by Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton to view her letters for what would become a stage play and is now a book.
She spent three months looking through what the NLA held from May 2013.
‘From the entry in the NLA catalogue, these letters promised to be a unique insight into the way in which Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance had resonated with and polarised an entire nation and, indeed, provoked responses from across the globe,’ Valentine wrote in the introduction to the book.
Dear Lindy: A Nation Responds to the Loss of Azaria features some of the 20,000 letters written to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton after the disappearance of her daughter in 1980
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton pictured with Alana Valentine, the author of Dear Lindy: A Nation Responds to the Loss of Azaria, published by the National Library of Australia
The librarians took Valentine to 199 boxes of correspondence stretched across ‘endless steel-reinforced shelves’.
‘Inside those boxes was the most extraordinary panoply of human nature,’ Valentine wrote. ‘Poets, supporters and vicious detractors. People sending apologies, advice, theories and frequent admonishments.
‘People who had been touched by God to write, had been moved with fury to write, had had their lives changed or indelibly affected by their encounter with Lindy and her story.
‘Pornographers, eccentrics and hundreds of children. People who spent thousands of hours writing to newspapers and politicians and raising funds.
‘People who donated their savings and their time and every ounce of their energy. Many of these letters, the ones I was particularly attracted to, were sent to her from strangers.’
A letter to Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton from now retired Sydney Morning Herald reporter Malcolm Brown in 1990 declared the journalist’s ongoing support.
Lindy and Michael Chamberlain with eldest son Aidan (right), second son Reagan (left) and youngest daughter Kahlia (front) who was born when her mother was in prison
The tent near Uluru from which Azaria Chamberlain was taken by a dingo on August 17, 1980
Lindy Chamberlain walks through scrub near Uluru during the first coronial inquest into the disappearance of her nine-week-old daughter Azaria at what was then called Ayers Rock
‘Even though I remain a journalist and not a public relations man, and have my first loyalty to my employer, I am still prepared to pledge the services available through me to do whatever I can for the welfare of you, of Michael, and of your three beautiful and long-suffering children,’ Brown wrote.
Valentine was surprised at how many of the letters from strangers started the same way: ‘Dear Lindy’, and ‘May I call you Lindy?’
A letter from Ginny and Barry French written before Kahlia’s birth is signed-off ‘lovingly’.
‘Dear Lindy, I know I cannot express, in words, the depth of emotion our family is feeling for you and Michael,’ the couple wrote. ‘The shock and disbelief at the jury’s decision has rebounded to everyone to whom we have spoken.
‘We pray for you as you approach the birth of your new baby and we hope you will be able to find serenity and peace and that your baby will bring you comfort.
‘We cannot know what you have suffered, but we can admire your strength and your courage; you are a wonderful lady.’
Dear Lindy: A Nation Responds to the Loss of Azaria, by Alana Valentine, NLA Publishing, RRP $39.99.
Lindy Chamberlain holds her daughter Azaria, who disappeared from a campsite near Uluru in August 1980; thousands of letters written to Lindy are the subject of a new book