Chamberlain gives interview

Press, 14 October 1985, Page 18

Chamberlain gives interview

From

CHRIS PETERS,

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney Lindy Chamberlain insists she did not kill her baby, Azaria, at Ayers Rock in 1980, according to an interview published last week. The New Zealand-born Chamberlain, convicted after a sensational trial three years ago and serving a life sentence in Darwin’s Berrimah Jail, gave her first interview since the death of baby Azaria in 1980.

She told a columnist, Ita Buttrose, she has never blamed God for the death of her daughter, Azaria, or the murder conviction and life

sentence she is serving as a result.

Chamberlain, whose husband, Michael, is a Seventhday Adventist Pastor, said, “I don’t believe Azaria’s death has anything to do with God and, because we are in God’s keeping, what has happened has done the minimum amount of damage to me and my family. “There is no way I’m going to let it make me bitter and frustrated. That would only make me crack up and I’m not going to waste time doing that.”

Asked whether she killed Azaria at the Ayers Rock campsite during the Chamberlain family 1980 holiday, she replied, “No.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Lindy Chamberlain said she could have said she had actually seen a dingo with her baby in its jaws, or could have allowed the suggestion that she had killed the baby, claiming post-na-tal depression, but did not do so because she had been brought up not to lie. "Quite honestly I believe that if I’d said, ‘Yes, I did see the dingo with something in its mouth,’ no-one would have believed me,” she said.

Chamberlain, aged 36, said she had never given up hope that she would earn her freedom again and said she was determined she would not shut herself off from life because of Azaria’s death and the events since.

“It would have been very easy for me to have gone to my room after Azaria disappeared and never come out,” she said. “But I

told myself, ‘Hey, you have to get out’. “It is a bit like crawling under a bed or hiding in a closet. You can feel yourself going and if you’re not careful you can go. But if you conscientiously don’t let go and ask God’s help, you’ll survive. But you must help yourself.” Asked if she still believed

in God after what had happened, she replied, “Too right, I’d be in an awful mess now if I didn’t.” She also told the “Sun” she had been accused of being a woman without emotion, but she was not the sort of person to scream, dissolve into buckets of tears, or let herself go-