Evidence in the museum: Curating a miscarriage of justice
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617707950 |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Author | Katherine Biber |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617707950
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(4) 505 –522
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617707950
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Evidence in the museum:
Curating a miscarriage of
justice
Katherine Biber
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Abstract
After the conclusion of criminal proceedings, criminal evidence sometimes survives
in what is described here as an afterlife. In its afterlife, criminal evidence is preserved
in various locations; this article explores the museum as a repository for evidentiary
exhibits. It examines the case of Lindy Chamberlain, the victim of Australia’s most
notorious miscarriage of justice, and the evidence that has survived since her
exoneration. Drawing upon interviews with Chamberlain herself, and also the curator
of the Chamberlain collections at the National Museum of Australia, this article
examines the challenges posed by curating a wrongful conviction.
Keywords
Afterlife, Azaria Chamberlain, criminal evidence, Lindy Chamberlain, miscarriages
of justice, museum
This is all we have that remains of Azaria.
(Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton)
Lindy Chamberlain is the victim of Australia’s most notorious miscarriage of justice.
In 1980, her nine-and-a-half-week old baby Azaria was taken by a wild dingo from
the family’s tent during a camping trip at Uluru, but Lindy and Michael Chamberlain
Corresponding author:
Katherine Biber, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, UTS:LAW, PO Box 123, Broadway
NSW 2007, Australia.
Email: Katherine.Biber@uts.edu.au
707950TCR0010.1177/1362480617707950Theoretical CriminologyBiber
research-article2017
Article
506 Theoretical Criminology 22(4)
were tried and convicted of her murder. Following their conviction, Lindy Chamberlain
was imprisoned, where she gave birth to another daughter who was separated from her
several hours after she was born. After Lindy had served almost three years in prison, the
chance discovery of an important piece of evidence prompted a Royal Commission
inquiring into the convictions. The Chamberlains were later pardoned, exonerated and
compensated. Following three coronial inquests, each with different findings, a final coro-
nial inquest in 2012, concluding on the day after Azaria’s 32nd birthday, confirmed that
Azaria was killed by a dingo. Although the fuller analysis is complex, the Chamberlains’
wrongful conviction can be mostly explained by bad forensic science (Bryson, 1985;
Chamberlain, 1990; Staines et al., 2009). However, as other scholars and commentators
have documented, an important context for this saga is the unique character of Australia’s
Northern Territory, a vast and sparsely populated jurisdiction that is at the same time the
nation’s spiritual heart and its lawless frontier (Reynolds, 1989; see also Gans, 2007).
In the decades following her exoneration, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, as she is
now known, came to an arrangement with the National Museum of Australia to care for
the evidentiary artefacts accumulated as a result of the coronial and criminal processes
and the Royal Commission. This article explores the afterlife of this evidence in the
museum, the tangible remains of Azaria’s life and death, as well as the material accu-
mulated through Lindy and Michael’s epic misadventures in the law. It focuses particu-
larly upon Azaria’s clothing, the damage to which was given significant probative value
during the Chamberlains’ wrongful conviction. It examines the challenges that arise
from preserving and curating objects associated with a miscarriage of justice.
The afterlife of evidence
During the criminal trial, there are strict rules governing the access, use and interpreta-
tion of evidence, but after the conclusion of proceedings the rules no longer apply. At the
end of the trial, the judge makes orders about the distribution, preservation or destruction
of evidentiary material, and some exhibits continue to proliferate in cultural contexts,
arousing the interest of artists, writers, scholars, collectors and curators.
The concept of the ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ of cultural objects can largely be attributed
to the cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who wrote that any analysis of the
life and afterlife of a cultural artefact demanded ‘unmetaphorical objectivity’ (2007:
71). Benjamin was attentive to the transformations that an object underwent during its
life and afterlife (2007: 217–251). These concepts were adopted by the art historian,
Aby Warburg (1866–1929), and are sustained by Warburg’s contemporary interlocutor,
Georges Didi-Huberman. For Warburg, survival was not triumphant, but rather some
kind of haunting; a phantom that has survived its own death (Didi-Huberman, 2002).
Didi-Huberman wrote that the surviving object, ‘having lost its original use value and
meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a
moment of “crisis”, a moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity’
(Didi-Huberman, 2005: xxii).
The transfer of surviving objects from the world into the museum requires the curator
to hold in tension the competing demands of a particular thing; its physicality, its fragil-
ity, its history, its symbolic power and its emotional heft. The function of the museum is
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