Thirty-two years ago, 9-week old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from a campsite in the Australian outback, and her mother’s claim that a dingo took the child caused a storm of public outrage and disbelief.

The saga reached far beyond Australia when it inspired “Cry in the Dark,” a 1988 movie starring Meryl Streep. And as popular culture transmuted tragedy into morbid comedy, a misquote from the movie, “A dingo ate my baby!” caught on, popping up in “Seinfeld,” “The Simpsons” and other shows.

The reason the whole story became so well known, of course, was that in reality it has remained unclear whether the dingo did it. And over the ensuing decades, the human drama and the figure of the dingo, Australia’s enigmatic wild dog, have become entangled. Like the wolf in America, the dingo is a symbol that may mean one thing to hunters or sheep ranchers and another to scientists and nature lovers.

Now the Chamberlain case, and dingoes themselves, are back in the spotlight. On Feb. 24, testimony ended in the fourth coroner’s inquest on Azaria’s death, and the office of the Northwest Territories coroner, which held the inquest, said a ruling would be handed down within the next two months. This time, the Chamberlain family hopes that the coroner will conclude, once and for all, that a dingo killed Azaria.

Lindy Chamberlain, Azaria’s mother, has struggled for years to get such a ruling. She was originally convicted of killing her child and sent to prison. She was released after three years and acquitted only after Azaria’s jacket was found near a dingo den.

When Azaria disappeared, dingoes were thought to be shy of people, and with no known attacks on humans, it was hard to believe one had been aggressive enough to come into a campground and take a baby from a tent.

But in the past decade or so, there have been a number of reported attacks, some disputed, and one unarguable fatality.

Adrian Peace, an honorary associate professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, who has studied the change in attitude toward dingoes, said, “The demonization of Mrs. Chamberlain has been replaced by the demonization of the dingo.”

Much of the change, Peace says, comes from public encounters with dingoes on Fraser Island, a nature reserve visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists yearly. Starting in the ‘90s, minor human-dingo incidents started worrying managers of the reserve, and in 2001 two dingoes killed a 9-year-old boy, Clinton Gage, and injured his brother.

“That was really the game-changer,” Peace said.

There were calls for the extermination of dingoes on the island, which did not happen, but rangers kill any dingoes believed to pose a danger.

Dingoes are generally classified as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus dingo, although in the past they have been classified as a subspecies of dog and as a separate species. Physically, they resemble a generic, medium-size dog, about 40 pounds, usually tan-colored, with pricked ears and a bushy tail.

They do not have some of the physical signs of domestication found in many dog breeds, like barking as adults. They breed once a year, like wolves, and when undisturbed they have a stable pack structure topped by one male-female pair, the only ones in the pack that reproduce.

Dingoes came to Australia 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, probably with Asian seafarers and already at least partly domesticated. At the time, people had been on Australia for almost 50,000 years, without dogs. The dingo quickly became an essential part of Aboriginal life and stories.

Europeans, who brought sheep with them, did not share the Aboriginal affection for dingoes. They killed them as pests and built a 3,300-mile fence to keep them out of southeastern Australia. The result is a confusion in even the legal status of dingoes.

Whatever the outcome of the coroner’s inquest, and even as new science shows the ecological importance of dingoes, their populations are under some kind of pressure all over Australia.

Arian Wallach, at James Cook University in Queensland, said research has shown that dingoes, as top predators, are essential to preventing “breakouts of opportunistic species” like rabbits and feral cats and should be left alone as much as possible.

But even protected populations are controlled, she said, by shooting, trapping, poisoning — what Wallach calls “persecution.” Killing adults, she says, destroys pack structure and means the young are more likely to kill livestock or cause other problems. They are, she said, like “hooligans,” whereas in a traditional pack, “they’ll have jobs to do; they won’t be unemployed.”

The problem, Wallach said, is that from sheep country to Fraser Island to national parks, “every single population of dingoes that I know of in Australia is persecuted.”