"YOU" NEVER FORGET..." - Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton

Forty-three years ago, on a cold night at Uluru, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton lost her baby to a dingo, and soon after, she lost her freedom. In an exclusive interview with The Weekly, she speaks about fairness, forgiveness and living with the scars of life.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

There is a sense, meeting Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton for the first time, of stepping into history. She was the central character in a real-life courtroom drama that defined us as a nation – and not in a positive way. There’s something still uncomfortable, disturbing, almost primeval about the way Australia rushed to judge her, to think the worst, to invent a fearful maternal stereotype worthy of Greek myth in the face of a simple, heartbreaking loss. It took almost 32 years for the courts to admit that they were wrong, and that yes, on August 17, 1980, at Uluru, a dingo killed her baby.

Then Lindy appears on a sunny patio with that welcoming smile and she is quite simply a grandmother who will avail herself of any opportunity to share snaps of the grandkids: At Book Week (all three went as Heidi), swimming in the turquoise waters off Exmouth in WA, and making decorations with her last Christmas (a favourite hobby). History dissolves, and she is a quite ordinary woman meeting The Weekly team on a warm Queensland afternoon.

Lindy says life swings back and forth like that for her sometimes too.

“I’ve always been a person who can stand outside myself and look at things from other people’s perspective,” she explains, “but there’s sometimes kind of a sense of unreality about it all … If you’d told me there’d be a Hollywood movie and an opera and a play and several miniseries and a kids’ book all written about my life, I’d be like, ‘yeah right!’ It doesn’t seem like my life because, day to day, I live life as an ordinary person.”