Cleo Smith search: Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton relates to ‘worry and grief’ of missing girl’s parents

If there’s another mother who knows the agony Ellie Smith is enduring over the disappearance of daughter Cleo, it’s Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton.

After all, each woman has experienced the unique trauma of having their child mysteriously vanish from a tent during a camping trip.

Cleo was snatched from her family’s tent at the Blowholes campsite in Macleod, about 50km north of Carnarvon, in the early hours of Saturday October 16.

More than four decades ago, Lindy’s daughter Azaria disappeared during a camping trip to Uluru.

On the night of August 17, 1980, a dingo took the nine-week-old from her tent.

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A massive search failed to find the infant but her blood-stained jumpsuit was found about 4km from their tent a week later.

At an event in Launceston last night Ms Chamberlain-Creighton said that she relates to the “worry and grief” Cleo’s parents are suffering but that each situation is different.

“Nobody has exactly the same experience,” she said.

“They (media) want me to comment on what it’s like for parents who have a missing child – what they would feel like – but how can I get them to understand that if I don’t know you (the parent)?”

The 73-year-old, who was speaking at the Tamar Valley Peace Festival, told the audience during a question-and-answer segment that it was difficult to describe the particular anguish of having a child go missing.

“People ask the most stupid questions like ‘how do you feel?’,” she said.

“How can I describe how I feel to you, who’ve never been through anything and could never have?”

At the event, Ms Chamberlain-Creighton spoke about Azaria’s disappearance, the subsequent negative media attention and the miscarriage of justice that occurred when she was wrongly imprisoned for Azaria’s death before being exonerated six years later.

From the day Azaria disappeared, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain maintained that a dingo had taken their child.

But NT Police did not believe them and charged Ms Chamberlain with Azaria’s murder while Mr Chamberlain was charged with being an accessory.

The prosecution case against them had been circumstantial and had relied on forensic evidence.

Although that evidence was limited, the couple were both found guilty, and Ms Chamberlain was sentenced to life imprisonment on October 29, 1982.

Her appeals to the Federal Court of Australia and High Court of Australia were dismissed.

In 1986, after the discovery of new evidence, she was released from prison on remission.

Ms Chamberlain was officially pardoned in 1987 and before her conviction was quashed by the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory the following year.

In 2012, a fourth coroner's inquest finally found that Azaria died “as a result of being attacked and taken by a dingo”.

The Chamberlains divorced in 1991 and Ms Chamberlain has since remarried.