Episode description

Australia is a wondrous country with endless sights to see. The Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Opera House, Bondi Beach, the vast sunburnt deserts... and a tiny town in Western Australia where, if you breathe, your chances of dying a horrible death will be vastly increased.

Wittenoom, considered Australia's version of Chernobyl, is a site that no one should visit (and yet some still do). Back in the 1930s, before Wittenoom was even a town, a young man named Lang Hancock kicked off a mining boom after discovering a beautiful blue rock: premium-grade blue asbestos. At first, the asbestos mining was more like fossicking on the surface, but things really kicked off when CSR (a famous Australian sugar refining company!) bought the mine and decided to take things underground. 

After World War II, the demand for asbestos grew due to the lack of imports so the Australian government decided to help CSR and make their mine go gangbusters. They even built them a town with a post office, hospital, police station, state school (and likely many pubs). They wanted everyone to go live in Wittenoom so they could mine the crap out of it. 

The problem is, mining sucks. It’s one of the worst jobs ever. Crawling through small, dark tunnels, miners would be covered in cuts all over their bodies, dust filling up their lungs and eyeballs. The whole mine was one giant dust cloud. CSR tried to fix it with some Rotoclone dust-collecting units, but they lasted for a grand total of 64 operating hours because the asbestos dust corroded them.

The mining part was bad, but the next stage of the process was even worse. Once the rock had been extracted, it was sent to the mill to be smashed into tiny fragments. Then it had to be bagged, where workers would be covered head to toe in asbestos fibres. After the bagging, they had to do something with the leftover stuff, the asbestos tailings. What did they do with that?  Oh, they just dumped it wherever they could, even in the kids’ sandpits. Sometimes the kids would chew on the asbestos tailings as a substitute for chewing gum. Hey, it corrodes metal fans, what harm could it do to kids?

Needless to say, Wittenoom was a shit place to live. The town was covered in dust all the time, so much so that the Royal Flying Doctors knew exactly where the town was from 100km away because of the giant blue plume of smoke. 

Little did the people of Wittenoom know what was to unfold was worse yet. There are basically two diseases that asbestos causes and they go from bad to worse. The first is asbestosis, which is chronic scarring of the lungs. Death usually comes from something like heart failure because it’s so damn hard to breathe. For those who don’t die, their fate is to survive through decades of horrible pain. The other thing that can happen is mesothelioma, which is cancer in the lining of your organs. It is truly a horrible way to die and all it takes is one asbestos particle to do it. 

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, more and more cases of asbestosis and mesothelioma began to emerge. In 1960, Dr. McNulty did a series of chest X-rays of the Wittenoom mine workers and one quarter of them were affected. Asbestos related diseases cause approximately 4,000 deaths every year in Australia, with one person dying every 12 hours from mesothelioma.

But nothing anyone did caused the mining to stop… it just wasn’t profitable anymore.

Eventually in 1966, they closed the mine (only because they could import asbestos for cheaper) and in 1978 the Western Australian government decided to phase out the town. It took decades for this to happen though, gradually closing down businesses, schools and pubs. Now it’s a wasteland but there was one faithful resident who refused to leave until finally she was evicted in 2022 by a team wearing full protective gear and face masks.  

So, unless you want to risk dying a slow and painful death, maybe don’t go visit the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.

PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED:

• From Toothpaste To Cigarettes: The Lesser Known Uses Of Asbestos

SOURCES:

• Asbestos caused psychiatric injury, The Age
• Chilling image shows group of miners competing in an asbestos shovelling contest...and all of them except one died from exposure to the deadly mineral, Daily Mail
• Demolition of asbestos town Wittenoom starts, as government warns visitors to stay away, ABC
• Last homes in asbestos-riddled Wittenoom to be demolished, but some want to stay, ABC
• Memories of Wittenoom, a once-thriving but asbestos-riddled town that led to more than 1,000 deaths, ABC
• More than 2,000 people from Wittenoom died of asbestos-related diseases. A powerful andcompelling requiem brings their story to the stage, The Conversation
• Permanent Memorials, Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia
• Sistemazione and death: the role of the Wittenoom asbestos mine in the lives and deaths of Italian transnational workers, by Angela DI Pasquale
• That’s iron, he said, The Australian Women’s Weekly
• The discovery of the association between blue asbestos and mesotheliomas and the aftermath, JC Wagner, British Journal of Industrial Medicine
• WA Lands Minister John Carey stands by eviction of last Wittenoom resident Lorraine Thomas, ABC

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