Most of his comrades didn’t survive the war, but my Nonno did. My grandfather fought for the Italian anti fascist resistance, he would have been only nineteen when the war ended.
But it did end, and he did survive. And like the rest of us who find ourselves still alive after the world has ended, he had to keep on living.
He moved away from that place, about as far as he could go. He started a new life for himself and his soon-to-be wife.
He was a mechanic, found work in Perth and regional towns around Western Australia. One of those contracts, for six months in 1954, was at a CSR mine in northern WA. Only six months, in a place so cursed that it no longer exists.
Wittenoom was settled on the lands of the Banjima people to service the nearby blue asbestos mine. Blue asbestos was a rare and lucrative commodity, and there were huge deposits in the area. CSR and the WA government invested heavily in the mine and the town.
Tailings from the mine covered Wittenoom in fine blue dust. Houses, streets, playgrounds. People came home covered in blue. And because everything was covered in free asbestos (a great insulator, useful to people living in the outback) the resourceful townspeople recycled the dust, using it for construction, paint, and other projects.
Asbestos dust, especially from blue asbestos, is a poison. The dust is made of sharp, microscopic fibers. These fibers get deep into the lungs and damage the tissue. This causes chronic shortness of breath, coughing, and chest pain. Symptoms can arise many years after exposure. This condition is called asbestosis.
Asbestosis and its causes were well understood by as early as the 1930’s. By the time my Nonno got to Wittenoom, health experts had been warning for two decades about the risks of asbestos. Doctors had specifically warned the WA government about Wittenoom, predicting a huge number of asbestosis cases if business continued as normal.
But nothing is as precious as a hole in the ground. The company hired lobbyists to downplay the risks and talk up the economic benefits of the mine. No doubt palms were greased and promises made. Neither the company nor the government did anything to protect or even warn the people of Wittenoom until it was too late.
Asbestosis was understood and ignored. But there was another, greater danger hiding in the clouds of blue dust.
We now understand that asbestos dust particles can get stuck in the lungs forever. Decades after exposure, they can cause the lung tissue to mutate. This deadly and incurable cancer is mesothelioma. It is a horrible way to die.
I never met my Nonno, but I’ve heard his story. I try to remember him for the bravery it took to stand up to unmitigated authority, and not for the terror of combat. I try to think of the love he had for his family, how hard he worked to give them a good life, and not the agonising death he earned for that work.
But what is harder to see in a positive light are the decisions made by the people who knew better, who had the power to stop this, but didn’t. To date, they are responsible for over 2,000 deaths, and countless lifetimes of breathless suffering.
Only a monster would think that any amount of money is worth putting the health and safety of thousands of people at risk. But individuals acting as part of a larger organisation, corporation, government seem to be able to make those choices all the time.
The actions of CSR were awful, but they are not surprising. I wish things were different, but companies exist to make money. Employees make choices to maximise profit. Very little else is supposed to matter to them, from a job description perspective. And as long as owners and shareholders will only accept the numbers going up, companies will kill whoever they need to to make a buck.
What’s truly disgusting are the actions of politicians who presumably, hopefully, got into politics to help people, to make the world better. They took their mandate to serve the public and used it to throw thousands of people under the bus because the money-men were offering them a better deal. Truly idiotic, selfish, evil behaviour.
And this kind of thing is not just a relic of the 1950’s. It still goes on today. Western Australia is rich in resources, including fossil fuels. We have known for decades that burning fossil fuels adds to the greenhouse effect, which raises global temperatures and is causing climate change. We have known for decades that if we do not phase out fossil fuels immediately, future generations will suffer heatwaves, drought, bushfires, cyclones, flooding, food and water insecurity, refugee crises, war. We have known for decades that the longer we delay, the worse it will get. We have known for decades that we are running out of time.
But, Woodside’s shareholders need to see that number going up, so more gas has to come out of the ground. The politicians know this is the wrong thing to do, and they know that they have the power to make it stop. But the company can pay the cash-for-access, can donate to the party, can offer sweet jobs to retired premiers that did them favours. So, the company takes what the company wants.
By the time the consequences of this banal evil become obvious, it will be too late. When it does, no amount of compensation will make things right, it never did.
I can’t think about my grandfather without thinking about my own children, and their children. What menace is waiting in the blue cloud for them?
Artificial Integrity 