Pod Insights ABC Rewind 03 | Dusted | The human cost of mining in Australia About this episode Asbestos was once known as the wonder mineral. It's now banned in Australia. But before that happened, companies kept making asbestos products despite growing evidence of its deadly dust and a mounting death toll.
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 This is an ABC Podcast.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hello, you're with ABC Rewind. I'm Van Badham and this is Dusted, a three-part series about the deadly history of Australian mining. On our dusty journey, we've coughed our way through a century of gold and coal mining, but now the modern era brings us to asbestos. Mining companies had known for decades that this product kills people, and they made it their job to hide it.
0:33 Speaker 02 This time last year, there were five out of six specialists that said I wouldn't even see Christmas.
0:39 Speaker 03 Asbestos Disease Campaign at Bernie Banton.
0:42 Speaker 02 I'm now down to 20% lung capacity. At the beginning of the year, I did have 40.
0:49 Speaker 01 Until the mid-1980s, Australia had one of the highest rates of asbestos use per person in the world, and about a third of Australian homes still contain asbestos.
1:06 Speaker 04 Vinyl asbestos with the beauty and texture of a handcrafted swirl chip.
1:13 Speaker 01 Three generations of my own family grew up in a house full of the stuff. The roof contained asbestos, the fuse box, the gutters, carpet, wall tiles. Even Melbourne's blue trains were lined with it.
1:35 Speaker 01 Asbestos is responsible for a lung disease called asbestosis and a cancer called mesothelioma. It was finally banned in Australia in 2003, but not before thousands and thousands of people died from inhaling it.
1:53 Speaker 05 A lot of the stories about the evil that was done by some of these companies still burn a flame in my heart because I get very angry about how they've literally gotten away with murder.
2:08 Speaker 01 That's journalist Matt Peacock. He's been chasing asbestos stories his whole career. In 2012, his book Killer Company became Devil's Dust, a TV drama. In it, his character, a cynical radio journalist from the ABC Science Unit, was played by Ewan Leslie.
2:31 Speaker 06 ABC Science Unit, Matt Peacock speaking. Can you hold?
2:36 Speaker 05 Well, I wasn't actually smoking dope, as you and Lesley was, in that dramatization, not in the studio. That phone call was true, though.
2:46 Speaker 06 Sorry to keep you. How can I help?
2:48 Speaker 01 The phone call was a public relations company, wanting to quote one of Matt's radio programs.
2:56 Speaker 06 And your client is?
2:59 Speaker 06 Right, I don't recall Heidi getting a mention in that story.
3:03 Speaker 01 Marijuana aside, this is how the corporate spin swirling around the asbestos industry in Australia started to unravel.
3:14 Speaker 01 And it's why Devil's Dust is so convincing, because it's true.
3:20 Speaker 01 The story did start here, back in 1977, with Matt receiving a phone call and spooling through tape to spot the lie.
3:30 Speaker 03 Airborne dust is still an issue, but there have been huge improvements. For example, the asbestos industry is no longer a concern.
3:41 Speaker 05 It was a very odd call to get from a corporate PR agency, and it immediately became a suspicion of mine that they were using it to give credibility to something that somebody had said on the program by being able to say it was on the ABC. So I got out the tape and played it back.
4:02 Speaker 02 Good evening. I'm Matt Peacock, and welcome to Broadband. Tonight, we'll be bringing you a special series on work as a health hazard. We'll be examining as a case study in occupational health.
4:11 Speaker 05 And the first time I played it back, a 45-minute program, I didn't hear a word about asbestos. And then I did, and it was an interview with a guy called Gersh Major, who worked for the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Sydney University, which is actually part of the Commonwealth Department of Health. And there was one small line in that interview where he said, "It's not all bad," he was talking about the problem of occupational health, and he said, "Take the asbestos industry, for example. I know that the asbestos industry and James Hardy Asbestos have really cleaned up their act, and that's now a much safer industry." And that really made me think. I knew nothing about asbestos. All I knew at the time was, you know, that it was the sort of stuff that firemen used to wrap themselves
4:56 Speaker 05 in when they went into fires. Didn't really know about the cancer risk or anything. But it just made me get really suspicious. And so I started going to libraries, reading up on it. And of course, you know, the penny dropped.
5:11 Speaker 01 And so began Australian media's long uncovering of the real asbestos story.
5:18 Speaker 03 Asbestos, it used to be the wonder fibre found in a multitude of products. But now it's a dirty word. Asbestos was this year finally banned in Australia, yet the story's far from over. Today was the first day of hearings of the New South Wales Parliamentary Committee looking at the Biugal asbestos mine. The Biugal debate has been raging since the 1970s, when the first signs of asbestos poisoning. James Hardy is a company under siege.
5:47 Speaker 02 We're not going away. We're gonna fight until we get justice.
5:52 Speaker 03 Ten former James Hardy executives face fines for lying about asbestos compensation. But victims and their relatives say it's not enough.
6:02 Speaker 01 One of the worst of all these stories was that of Witnoom, the Blue Asbestos Mine in Western Australia, which closed in 1966. At the time, even the unions didn't fully know the danger of asbestos, although some mine workers were told by their friends that Witnoom was a place best avoided. This left the inexperienced and the vulnerable out of the loop. And Witnoom's workforce was largely made up of migrants and the Indigenous community, many of whom from the local Bundjuma people. Maitland Parker remembers playing in Blue Asbestos as a kid. He and his brothers all did. Here he is back in 2018, on the ABC's earshot with journalist Kirsty Melville.
6:49 Speaker 01 Can you, would you talk about your story and your diagnosis?
6:56 Speaker 03 Oh gee. Um.
7:01 Speaker 03 In about twenty fourteen, fifteen, I then started to feel a bit sick.
7:10 Speaker 03 And then I had various tests up here in Tom Price, Crathair. Then I was sent down to Perth. I had fluid in my right lung. I admitted into Royal Perth Hospital. And then the tests out of that proved that I had mesothelioma then. And then when I was told about it by the doctor, it broke my heart.
7:36 Speaker 03 And just the devastation, I guess, of hearing about it was overwhelming.
7:43 Speaker 03 Why bloody me?
7:48 Speaker 01 In the nineteen eighties, the battle for compensation from the company who ran Whitnum, CSR, was on. It was a dirty fight, but in the end, more than eighteen million dollars was paid out to two hundred claimants. But the asbestos tailings in the Whitnum Gorge itself have yet to be cleaned up.
8:11 Speaker 01 Since his diagnosis, Maitland's been fighting on behalf of the Bundjerma people to have these giant dust mountains dealt with.
8:20 Speaker 03 Because I myself never, never ever thought that I'd ever contracted mesothelioma. But I have, and so that's also now driving me in the fight for the clean-up. I'm a walking, living example of what has happened from the blue asbestos. We want the Whitnum Gorge to be cleaned up. So we don't have a lot more of our people contracting mesothelioma. Fine, it costs millions and millions, so what? People's lives are worth millions too. It's our bloody homeland, it's our country, and we want it fixed up.
9:00 Speaker 06 As you might expect, the Greeks had a name for it. They called it the unquenchable, indestructible stone. They called it asbestos.
9:12 Speaker 06 Unaffected by fire. Unchanged by weather.
9:19 Speaker 06 Untouched by time's dark.
9:21 Speaker 07 captains rust, rot and decay. Asbestos possesses rare qualities for which it stands alone.
9:32 Speaker 07 It's the microscopic invisible fibers that enter the lungs which can do the most damage. Inhaling these asbestos fibers can cause cancer, lung cancer and a fatal cancer of the lining of the lungs or abdomen called mesothelioma.
9:47 Speaker 01 Mesothelioma can kill 20, 30, 40, even 50 years after inhaling one microscopic particle. The disease travels far beyond the people who mine it and into the lungs of families, factory workers and home renovators.
10:05 Speaker 01 It even posed a threat to the journalists who were trying to expose the problem.
10:10 Speaker 05 I do remember once when I went to the Woods Reef Mine run by the Canadians at Barabah in northern New South Wales. And as I was interviewing this shonky Canadian mine manager who was explaining to me how, "Oh, it was only white asbestos and you know, these days you read in the papers, everything gives you cancer and you know, we're looking after our workers here." In the corner of my eye, I could see these workers frantically sweeping up the asbestos off the deck that we were walking along. And it was probably about three or four inches thick. There were clouds of asbestos as they're trying to sort of put it in these bags. And I remember trying to hold my breath, which is very difficult when you're doing an interview.
10:53 Speaker 01 One of Matt's friends, academic Jock McCulloch, wasn't so lucky. He began his research at Bayoogal. This was a small asbestos mine in New South Wales and for over 30 years it was run by the building supplies manufacturer, James Hardy. Most of the workers there were Aboriginal and they worked in clouds of dust.
11:17 Speaker 03 ABC Archives, tape identification. This is "There's No Place Like Bayoogal." Background briefing, 1988. Producer, Sharon Davies.
11:33 Speaker 07 Right around here, there was a cracker middle section here. Then you had the driller section down a bit further. Then you had the bagging and all the ducks and ammo mills down the next section. Then they had all the dust shed there. All the dust used to go.
11:59 Speaker 05 And where's the tailing stump? Where's all that?
12:01 Speaker 07 That's over there.
12:05 Speaker 05 Hand in glove with the mining of the actual ore was a huge PR effort which Jock McCulloch knew a lot about and we discussed quite often to bury the knowledge of its hazards. And it happened with asbestos, it happened with silica, it still is happening with silica. And Jock, of course, ultimately paid the final price.
12:30 Speaker 01 Jock McCulloch's last book about dust hazards in mining and the denial of such hazards by big corporations was only a draft when he died in 2018. When he knew he had mesothelioma, his partner of 30 years, Pavla Miller, a historical sociologist from RMIT University, promised that she would complete the manuscript and she did.
12:54 Speaker 07 Jock did extensive research in Southern Africa in very remote regions and his first-hand experience of what the mining communists looked like transformed the current knowledge of history of mining. But because he was wandering around asbestos fields and tailing stumps, he tragically got mesothelioma himself and died.
13:25 Speaker 06 In 2018 from mesothelioma which he almost certainly contracted while he was doing his research.
13:33 Speaker 01 Before he died, Jock was able to document the extent of the corporate cover-up. It was huge.
13:41 Speaker 06 The industry globally developed all kinds of useful strategies for diminishing evidence of risk, hiding risk itself, making sure that public advocates or journalists didn't find out about studies which were conducted. So it was hiding evidence, it was buying off expert opinion, bullying people, dismissing those who were immediately affected.
14:14 Speaker 01 Shamefully, Australia pioneered some of these inhuman global strategies.
14:29 Speaker 05 James Hardy is a company under siege.
14:32 Speaker 01 We're not going away, we're gonna fight. This is Matt Peacock in 2004, on the scene with a TV crew doing a story for the ABC's 7.30 Report. By this time, he'd been following asbestos dust around for 27 years. We're gonna fight until we get justice for victims and their families.
14:54 Speaker 05 You can't get a worse issue than a disease that's killing Australians.
15:04 Speaker 05 And now judicial inquiry describes the behaviour of the company and its top executives as deceitful, misleading and in breach of the law.
15:16 Speaker 05 I mean, I did have that conversation often with people at the ABC. Oh, not another story about asbestos. No, we've done that story already, Matt. Move on. Haven't you got something else to report? But that was the trick. The only way you ever got to the bottom of it was to keep chipping away. That was something that eventually, I think, the media started to recognise. And that was the undoing of the whole nasty cover-up. I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of Australians lost their lives because of this product. And even if you cut some slack, which I don't really, even if you say, ah, well, they didn't know really how bad it was until the sixties or the seventies. I mean, they kept pumping the stuff out.
15:59 Speaker 05 They increased production during the seventies. We used more asbestos per capita than any other country in the world. And as a result, we had the highest death rates of any other country in the world.
16:12 Speaker 01 In the early 2000s, the company at the centre of the storm was James Hardy. In a long-running court battle, James Hardy admitted it knew of the dangers of asbestos as early as the mid 1950s. And it knew by late 1964 that asbestos could cause mesothelioma. From 1968 to 1974, after James Hardy knew it was dangerous, Bernie Banton was employed by Hardy's in an asbestos factory. He and his mates on the job were called snowmen because every day, they got covered in the white asbestos dust. Unsurprisingly, Bernie got sick.
16:55 Speaker 01 Here he is, speaking about it with Karen Percy on the ABC's PM programme in 2004. What's it like living with asbestos? It's very confronting. I have difficulty breathing.
17:12 Speaker 01 But I've just gained an absolute inner strength through this whole inquiry. The company started out refusing to acknowledge that it had any further responsibility for victims. Now, it says it is prepared to ensure that all existing and future victims are compensated, provided it can afford to do so. Bernie Banton remains unconvinced. These people have shown no remorse for the families, the thousands of people that are affected, because of their greed.
17:45 Speaker 01 By the time of that interview, Bernie Banton had become famous for his fight to win compensation for all Hardy's asbestos victims. And by that time, James Hardy had also become famous for truly disgusting corporate behaviour.
18:01 Speaker 05 Three years ago, James Hardy peeled off its asbestos subsidiaries, placing them under a foundation with assets of $290 million. More than enough, it said, to compensate all its victims. Then it moved its headquarters to the Netherlands, from where it now runs its highly successful US operations. It left behind the shell of its former holding company and a lifeline of $1.9 billion in shares, it told the New South Wales Supreme Court, could pay possible creditors into the future, shares it quietly cancelled last year.
18:43 Speaker 01 This is where the tale of James Hardy and the asbestos industry gets even more horrifying. Lecturer in business law at Monash University, Meredith Edelman believes that James Hardy set a precedent around the world for corporate self-protection, when the company divided itself in half, separated out its asbestos holdings, and created a trust fund for victims, a trust fund that was billions of dollars short. People were very upset, for very good reasons, that they were trying to sue a company that became a shell. And this process, look, it's not a formal process to assign blame. So no one ever said to these asbestos companies, "You really shouldn't be producing asbestos."
19:26 Speaker 07 And it was awful that you did. And you've treated your former employees terribly. But the former employees who were injured did get more in compensation than they might have had the company been forced to liquidate because of the claims of the first people who got sick. So what you're seeing is a really troubling problem, where not everybody's getting really compensated and where there's no real accountability, which I think is quite interesting, because they created a new way of thinking about, how do we deal with mass tort? What do we do when a company does something that hurts hundreds of thousands or millions of people?
20:07 Speaker 07 When it owes more than it could possibly be valued?
20:21 Speaker 01 It took until 2005, but a compensation deal was eventually signed. James Hardy had to pay its victims. Bernie Banton saw it as a victory without being victorious.
20:34 Speaker 07 As of today, you won't hear me bagging Hardies.
20:41 Speaker 07 I won't become their pin-up boy. But what I'm saying is all the bands need to be lifted. Let James Hardy get on with what they do well, and that is make profits. So as future asbestos sufferers get their payment.
21:10 Speaker 01 You can understand Bernie's somber mood when you realise that during all the time he spent fighting, his workmates were dying.
21:20 Speaker 01 Colleagues.
21:24 Speaker 01 The loss of a brother to mesothelioma. The loss of loved ones and friends. Hundreds and hundreds of these people are dead because of the inactivity.
21:38 Speaker 02 Just this week, I lost another colleague from the factory where I worked. He was actually the superintendent of that factory. And those years, all that time ago, him and I were not the best of friends. Because he was the superintendent of the factory and I was the union delegate. So you can imagine things were pretty strained. But when I heard of his condition last year, he came over and visited and we had a good hug and a cry and formed a relationship there. And I was just ever so grateful that I was able to be there the day before he died.
22:18 Speaker 01 After this interview, Bernie's asbestos became mesothelioma and he was hospitalized. He'd managed to defy doctors and lived long enough to see justice done. Without him and the trade unions that backed him and his coworkers in, justice would never have happened. Matt Peacock.
22:38 Speaker 05 That was what dragged them kicking and screaming back to the negotiating table because they knew that if they ran away from it, there'd be such an almighty campaign in the United States where they then were generating most of their profit, that it would hurt their bottom line. That's the only reason why they settled.
23:01 Speaker 01 But the dust itself, it hasn't settled. The disease goes on. You might think we've learnt nothing, but for industry policy professional Pamela Kinnear, it is different this time round.
23:15 Speaker 04 I would say what's really important is to understand that we've got this renewed interest in dust disease because of the silicosis re-emergence, if you like, through kitchen...
23:30 Speaker 04 Benches and manufactured stone.
23:35 Speaker 04 And the point that I would like to make about that is that we controlled dust diseases in the past, particularly silicosis, in an institutional framework. It was a big industry, it was a regulated industry, and state governments, et cetera, got involved in the regulation of an industry.
24:00 Speaker 04 The reemergence of this kind of silicosis is in, effectively, in cottage industries. It's in small business, it's in subcontractors, et cetera. So it's going to be a different fight with different kinds of players, with different kinds of imperatives, at a completely different moment in, sort of, modern democratic history.
24:26 Speaker 05 Asbestos fibres can also cause the lungs to form scar tissue. This scar tissue isn't elastic like the lungs are. Too much asbestos, too much scar tissue, and it gets harder and harder to breathe.
24:43 Speaker 05 The legacy's still going to be felt. I mean, we now have a policy, thank heavens, to eliminate asbestos from the built environment, where it's actually getting taken out and buried and disposed of safely. And that, in that sense, we're leading the world in getting rid of the problem, but it's going to take decades and decades. And there are still people who are dying from exposures we never even thought of. In the United Kingdom, for example, there's teachers by the schools who are dying from asbestos in schools. Well, no teacher who went to work in Britain thought they were going to come home and die of a mesothelioma.
25:28 Speaker 01 Bernie Banton died in 2007.
25:37 Speaker 01 He had a state funeral.
25:46 Speaker 01 The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, attended and spoke.
25:49 Speaker 07 Bernie was an ordinary bloke who decided to become something extraordinary, an extraordinary hero in our age, an age where we feared we would no longer have heroes anymore.
26:07 Speaker 01 Hundreds of mourners spilled out onto the street.
26:12 Speaker 01 And Matt Peacock was one of them.
26:14 Speaker 05 You know, it brought a few tears to my eyes. We grew very close during the campaign. I remember the first time I interviewed him where, with his little oxygen mask and the fact that he had asbestos meant that he could only speak in short soundbites, which made him perfect for the media. And whenever people looked at him, they could see what asbestos had done because they could see this oxygen mask in his little tank, giving him the oxygen to breathe.
26:59 Speaker 03 Rain and strong winds didn't deter hundreds of mourners from a final tribute. Many brandishing union flags as they escorted Bernie Banton's coffin several hundred metres away to the waiting hearse.
27:29 Speaker 05 The total irony of it was, there it was, out at Homebush, and I knew that under the ground that I was treading on, that we were all treading on, Hardy had buried thousands of tonnes of asbestos waste back in the day.
27:52 Speaker 01 This brings us to the end of Dusted with me, Van Badham. I'd like to dedicate this episode to fearless crusader for the truth and the victims of asbestos, Matt Peacock, who sadly passed away last year. Many thanks to producer Lynne Gallagher and sound engineer John Jacobs. This has been an ABC Rewind production and you can catch up on the other two episodes in the series, Gold and Coal, just head to the ABC Listen app. Thanks so much for joining us. See you around.
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