A fascinating paper was published last year (2022) in the Journal: Animals. Titled Before Azaria: A historical perspective on dingo attacks. The paper was written by Adam Brumm from the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University. The paper investigates the origin of the once-popular belief (and misconception) in Australian society that wild dingoes do not attack humans.

A digital repository of archived newspaper articles and other published texts written between 1788 and 1979 (Trove) was searched for references to dingoes attacking non-Indigenous people. A total of 52 accounts spanning the period between 1804 and 1928 were identified.

Reports from the earliest period of colonial settlement (1788 until the turn of the century) were, perhaps understandably, not well represented – the colony’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, was only established in March 1803. This was Australia’s only newspaper until the mid-1820s, when other Sydney papers (and the first provincial newspapers), were founded.

A comparison of the historical accounts with the details from modern dingo attacks suggests that at least some of the historical accounts are credible. The paper also notes that minor (non-lethal) attacks would, almost certainly, have been under-reported.

The paper examined commonly held attitudes towards dingoes in past Australian society based on historical print media articles and other records.

Early chroniclers of Australian rural life and culture maintained that dingoes occasionally killed and ate humans out of a predatory motivation. However, by the early decades of the 20th century, an opposing view of dingo had emerged: namely, that dingo were timid animals that continued to pose a danger to livestock, but never to people.

This change in the cultural image of dingoes can possibly be linked to more than a century of lethal dingo control efforts greatly reducing the frequency of human–dingo interactions in the most populous parts of the country. This intensive culling may also have expunged the wild genetic pool of dingoes that exhibited bold behaviour around people and/or created a dingo population that was largely wary of humans.

Correspondingly, there were no historical reports of dingo attacks reported during the period between 1929 and 1979 (Azaria Chamberlain died on 17 August 1980).

The 20th-century belief that dingoes do not attack humans without provocation was misguided.

Since the 1990s there have been many documented incidences of dingo attacks on K’gari, including the death of nine-year-old Clinton Gage in 2001. The current picture of the dingo is of an intelligent and powerful hunter, but also a highly versatile scavenger that readily exploits anthropogenic foods when available. The latter behaviour brings some dingoes into close contact with people, and, in very rare cases, for reasons that are not yet fully understood, attacks have occurred.

The paper also acknowledges that during the period of early European settlement, Indigenous peoples in Australia had a complex relationship with dingoes that was based on taking pre-weaned pups from wild dens and hand-rearing them. [This was certainly the case with wat’dha on K’gari]. There were also several references in reports to assistance provided to colonists by Indigenous trackers.

Brumm, A. Before Azaria: A Historical Perspective on Dingo Attacks. Animals 2022, 12, 1592. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12121592