Nearly 24 years after her death, news of missing infant Azaria Chamberlain can elicit fervour throughout Australian society, writes Gary Tippet.

Years ago America's most dysfunctional family visited Australia, outraging the nation so severely that the worst offender was condemned to receive a traditional public Booting.

Bart Simpson's response? "Hey, I think I hear a dingo eatin' your baby."

Back in New York, Seinfeld's Elaine insults a stranger in similar terms. On the West Coast, one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's friends - appropriately named Oz, and even more appropriately, a werewolf - moonlights with a rock band called Dingoes Ate My Baby.

A mystery that began nearly a quarter-century ago when nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain vanished from the base of a totemic monolith in this continent's dead heart, continues not only to tantalise Australian imaginations but to permeate popular culture across the world.

And if Bart's referencing was typically crass, the homegrown response has, from the beginning, been no less cruel - in both its official and popular expressions. Once in Alice Springs I saw a souvenir T-shirt. It featured a dingo leaning against a fencepost holding a baby's jumpsuit and saying something like: "Tasty little devil, but a bugger to peel."

What struck me was not so much that some bottom-feeding entrepreneur would design and market such a thing, but that someone would wear it. Happily. As some form of statement.

Azaria disappeared from her family's tent on the night of August 17, 1980. Soon - fuelled by innuendo, assumption and the bizarre circumstances and exotic setting of the tragedy - Australians were dividing into two camps of confident opinion about what happened: 24 years, three coronial inquests, a seven-week trial, two appeals, an 11-month royal commission, a bad Hollywood movie, a series of books and an upcoming tele-movie later, little has changed.

Azaria has become an icon of Australian mythology - or at least urban legend.Azaria has become an icon of Australian mythology - or at least urban legend.

This week, "revelations" about a Pascoe Vale pensioner's secret of what happened that night took a riddle already wrapped in mystery inside enigma and layered on a new coat of Jerry Springer-flavoured salaciousness.

Frank Cole, 78, claims that while camping rough near Uluru with three mates - all now dead - he shot a dingo that had the baby in its jaws. Panicked, the campers covered up the incident, fleeing to Melbourne where one, Mr Cole thinks, may have buried Azaria in his backyard.

On any view, Mr Cole's story is appalling. That four men could sit mute through the fruitless search for Azaria's remains and do nothing while her innocent mother, Lindy, was jailed for life is almost beyond belief. If, for whatever reason, Mr Cole has fabricated the tale, he has only inflicted more cruelty on the Chamberlains.

But his claims reignited the controversy, sparking another media frenzy and responses, considered or otherwise, from every corner. Some revisited the forensics.

Barry Everingham, Northern Territory Chief Minister in 1980, bad-punned that a gunshot that night would have had rangers responding "like a speeding bullet".

Contacted by The Age, one Darwin policeman cynically asked if Mr Cole had found the missing Beaumont children inside the dingo too. Water-cooler experts postulated that his bullet in fact missed the dingo and hit the baby. A common thread was that no one seemed particularly surprised.

"And that is because it's all bizarre," says Graham Willett, lecturer in Australian Studies at Melbourne University. "Everything about the Azaria Chamberlain story is strange."

For a start, he suggests, it begins at Uluru: Australians remain alienated from the interior. "The outback, the bush, has a long history of being a place where the mysterious, the uncanny, the creepy happens... A genuinely strange event is made stranger for many people because it happens in this place where strange things happen: the Outback."

Mr Willett says Australians also had a sense of alienation from Azaria's Seventh Day Adventist parents, particularly Lindy who did not grieve according to their preconceptions.

John Bryson, author of Evil Angels, agrees.

"The writer Morris Lurie put it down, I think quite well, to the fear of the evil mother, which is pretty strong in all of us," he says. "Lindy kept her grief very private. One reason for that is directly attributable to her Adventism, which was the belief that for some mysterious reason, God had chosen this as an event for them and they'd better live up to it."

The Chamberlain's religion, little understood at the time, also sparked wild innuendo: that Azaria meant "sacrifice in the wilderness" and that Lindy had taken her there, dressed in black, for that purpose. The popularity of Exorcist-style movies in the early '80s didn't help, especially in the context of a police investigation "organised specifically to appeal to television...

"We watched it unfold with all the trappings of a horror movie and we judged the people in the same way we have learned to judge screen drama."

The mystery still speaks to other issues, such as police incompetence or corruption and the death penalty.

"This is the archetypal trump card for those opposed to the death penalty," says Mr Willett. "If this country had the death penalty she would be dead now, despite being innocent."

Even those at its heart can get a little lost in the fog of drama and speculation. "I tried to think back on the night when we lost Azaria," said her father, Michael, this week. "Did I hear any shots during the night? "Something in the deep recesses of my mind said 'Yes, you did' ...but then I thought... was it just something that I imagined that I heard that night now, or was it actually real?"

(C) The Age, Melbourne/Victoria, Australia 2004