Written By Will Grant
 

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.

 
 
 

  • [00:00:00] Will: The mill is where you take the useful asbestos, but the leftovers of the tailings could be rock, but it could be asbestos. Cool thing about that is I just dumped it everywhere. The streets of the town. I don't know why they didn't like the red dust out there. So they'd use the blue tailings dust to cover all of the streets.

    [00:00:14] Rod: Aesthetically pleasing. Good call.

    [00:00:16] Will: And so this is some kids doing a sack race. It looks nice over there. Of course, those sacks are former used asbestos sacks. They also filled up all of the kids sand pits with asbestos.

    [00:00:26] Rod: Come on. This is like a B grade movie. It's fucking Austin Powers Supervillain. And we'll put it in their food. We'll use it as shampoo. Medicines will squirt it up their noses.

    [00:00:38] Will: Here's this bit. And I couldn't find where to fit this bit in. Because, okay, here's this beautiful photo of kids in the sandpit that is an asbestos sandpit. But sometimes the kids would... Would chew on the asbestos tailings as a substitute for chewing gum.

    [00:00:53] Rod: Of course they did. What didn't they use it for?

    [00:01:02] Will: So this one started for me with a photo. The first thing for me that grabbed is like the inherent Australian ness. The red mountains in the distance and a big pile of red dirt in the front

    [00:01:13] Rod: and dudes in their business clothes with the business shorts.

    [00:01:16] Will: No, that's it. That's the Australian this as well. It's like, you know, there's 10 men in there if you count them up, but they all look like my dad absolutely wore that outfit for every day of everything. It was the short shorts, long socks, business shoe no matter where you are. Some sort of business shoe and short sleeve button up. It's that Australia, where there's no yacka hard enough, no tan deep enough. No hard earned thirst that couldn't be quenched.

    [00:01:45] Rod: No steak well done enough

    [00:01:46] Will: yeah, no food no boring enough.

    [00:01:48] Rod: Oh yeah, no vegetable boiled enough.

    [00:01:50] Will: But when you look past the generic Australian ness, the other thing that about the photo that grabs is what they're doing. See, of the ten men in there in that photo, a few of them are standing around because they're the officials, but I think six or seven of them are in a shoveling competition.

    [00:02:08] Rod: They do look like they're competing. I was going to say, I don't know what in, but they look like they're competing.

    [00:02:12] Will: Yeah. It's it's a shuffling competition. It's a thing that some mine sites I think have done for a long time. You know, on your day off, you've done it.

    [00:02:20] Rod: Fuck. I'm knackered. Let's shovel,

    [00:02:22] Will: but yeah, it's day off, it's race day and you stand around and see who can shovel and fill up a 44 gallon drum as quickly as he can.

    [00:02:30] Rod: Oh, that's hideous. At least they're in the desert.

    [00:02:33] Will: Yeah. There's that blue grey sort of cloud that is coming clearly from the stuff that they're shoveling but it's just sort of curled around them.

    [00:02:43] Rod: Which is fine. At least they're wearing all the safe. No, one of them weis wearingong pants. That's safety gear, right?

    [00:02:51] Will: What do I want to explore today? Where that photo came from? What happened after and why the town of Wittenoom in Western Australia is pretty fairly considered Australia's version of Chernobyl. Welcome to The Wholesome Show.

    [00:03:12] Rod: The podcast that would challenge anyone to a science shoveling contest. Let's do it now. Anyone?

    [00:03:17] Will: Science shoveling? Anyone wants to go?

    [00:03:20] Rod: We'll fill the hole of science first.

    [00:03:22] Will: I'm Will Grant.

    [00:03:23] Rod: I'm the shoveler, Rod Lamberts.

    [00:03:25] Will: So for people joining just here, this is actually a part of a series that I'm doing on asbestos. Last episode, I told you the miracle that is asbestos and yes, it actually was. It's a radical substance That is like nothing else and can do things that nothing else could and I said I was gonna tell you How long we've known it's dangerous and all of that, but before I get to that, I just want to tell one particular story just to get a feel for how much of a monster this thing is.

    [00:03:55] Rod: It's going to be longer than I'm comfortable with that, that much I can smell.

    [00:04:00] Will: When he was just 10 years old, the young Langley Frederick George hancock, Lang Hancock for those in the know was out trapping dingoes on his father's vast country cattle station.

    [00:04:12] Mulga Downs is the name of the station and station is an Australian word in this sense that means small country or even medium sized country owned by one person where you can raise cattle or do stuff.

    [00:04:23] Rod: Well, like what we're in the ACT, Australian Capital Territory. And I think there are stations in the middle of Australia that are bigger than our

    [00:04:29] Will: Oh easily. There are stations that are bigger than certainly US states. And look, this was one of the big ones up there. So this is in far Northwestern, Western Australia, the Pilbara. Up there, top left if you're looking at it on a map. Anyway, 10 years old and he's out trapping dingoes. I don't know if he was on a horse or driving a car

    [00:04:49] Rod: tank.

    [00:04:50] Will: It's possible. Look, I feel like this was back in the 1930s. So, you know, what 10 year olds did back then was a little bit different from what 10 year olds do now.

    [00:04:59] Rod: Penny farthing, but with chunky tires, a slingshot.

    [00:05:02] Will: Anyway, he'd gone about 20 Ks from the station up into a series of little foothills little gorges coming down off the foothills. About 20 Ks away. And he saw, as Australian Women's Weekly described later, an unusual dark blue rock in Wittenoom Gorge. Now he'd heard rumours about the value of this dark blue rock.

    [00:05:23] Rod: It's not an opal is it?

    [00:05:24] Will: It's not an opal. So he took it in his pocket and went back to the station where there happened to be a visiting, geologist, a mining engineer. This English mining engineer interpreted by the 1962 Women's Weekly, that there is premium grade blue asbestos, a vital mineral used in the production of gunpowder, gas masks, and pressure piping.

    [00:05:44] Young Lang's ears pricked up when he heard the price. 70 pounds a ton. Now, I don't know what that converts to in the 30s? I don't know what it converts to. Some people reckon that he staked out a claim right away. Now, I don't know if it's possible for a 10 year old to go into the land surveyors office and say, please, sir, I'd like to stake out a claim

    [00:06:03] Rod: from his dad's shoes and a different hat is like yes, I'm absolutely a grownup, but it's also like, I think that was pre the existence of teenagers. Yeah.

    [00:06:11] Will: Teenagers were definitely invented by baby boomers.

    [00:06:13] Rod: So you're a child or you're a grownup. So he might've been cuspy.

    [00:06:17] Will: Yeah, maybe, you know, he was in his dingo killing phase. So I don't know if that was child work or grownup work at the time. He staked out a claim. Now it took him a little while to start mining. He didn't actually start mining as a 10 year old, but he started mining when he was about 25. So in 1937. And this kicked off what's called a little asbestos mining boom in the local area.

    [00:06:38] So there was another mine nearby that was doing it as well and Lang's got his mine. They began surface mining

    [00:06:44] Rod: Picking up rocks. I'm a miner. No, you're not. You're picking up rocks. You're fossicking.

    [00:06:50] Will: There is different types of surface mining. He was picking up rocks.

    [00:06:54] Rod: Expensive fosking. Good for him.

    [00:06:55] Will: He employed a team of local indigenous Banyama people.

    [00:06:58] Rod: At premium rates. No doubt.

    [00:07:00] Will: Look, it was pretty ad hoc. I think Lang young middle aged yet Lang was making more money from bringing in food and supplies and alcohol and things like that on the donkeys in the in trip than he was from selling asbestos on the out trip, or at least it was balanced.

    [00:07:12] Rod: Traditional mining set up in early days.

    [00:07:15] Will: Totally. Totally. Totally. But something changed world war two. Suddenly the Australian government said, you know what, we've had all of our supply routes cut off by you know, the war. Can't get stuff from Britain and Canada anymore so we've got to be self sufficient in the supply of asbestos. I don't know why they chose asbestos

    [00:07:32] Rod: for reasons. It's waterproof. It, what is it? Shoots pistols. It looks after your children. It did everything it was perfect, the perfect mineral.

    [00:07:39] Will: The ad hoc surface mining that Lang was doing came to the attention of the sugar refining company. CSR, Colonial Sugar Refining.

    [00:07:47] Rod: Is that what that stands for? Oh my.

    [00:07:49] Will: So CSR is an existing Australian company. You can buy sugar from them. You can also buy building parts from them.

    [00:07:55] Rod: I've only used their products for many years and I never knew the C was colonial.

    [00:07:59] Will: They had a big sugar refining business. At some point they got into building parts as well. And they were like, yep, building parts, that's the future. Once you know sugar, then building parts. And the problem was they were worried about their supply of asbestos so they said, all right, we need to get in and buy ourselves a mine.

    [00:08:13] Rod: We need a plucky young entrepreneur. Yeah.

    [00:08:15] Will: They'd never done any mining before.

    [00:08:17] Rod: Well, it still isn't mining. It's picking up rocks.

    [00:08:21] Will: Lang sold out, or at least he sold 51%. And at that point he remains the mine manager for a little while until CSR really take over and then Lang steps out of the story to eventually discover the biggest iron ore Reserve in the world.

    [00:08:35] CSR They'd never run a mine before. So it took things a little while at the beginning to ramp up. They kept going with Lang sort of pick up the rocks off the ground sort of thing. But like, we're a modern company. We've got to ramp things up. For a few years it was like, how do you do it though? It's hard country. And they're a long way from everywhere. Hot as fuck. Dry as fuck. A long way far as fuck. For a while they thought maybe we just pull out, maybe it's too hard. But the Commonwealth government and the Western Australian government stepped in and said, no, we can support you.

    [00:09:02] Rod: Don't you know there's a war?

    [00:09:03] Will: We can make this all happen. So they kicked in support. Basically what they needed to do is build a proper mine, not just pick up the rocks, but go underground. As well as that, instead of having a few people doing it let's ramp up the scale. Let's get to a few hundred people doing the mining.

    [00:09:17] So in the late 1940s, the Western Australian government kicked in and said, okay, cool. We'll build you a little town. I do like a government stepping in. Do you want a town?

    [00:09:28] Rod: Do I have to use an existing one? No. We'll make you a fresh one.

    [00:09:30] Will: Fresh town. So eventually the town would get to like, nearly a thousand people, 880 people or something like that. It was the largest urban center in Western Australia, north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Yeah, look, it's just saying how empty Western Australia is, like a town of 880, the largest urban centre.

    [00:09:49] Rod: Six people sat in the house together and we have the largest urban centre.

    [00:09:53] Will: But more importantly, 20, 000 people would live or work there over the few years that it was around.

    [00:10:01] Rod: All at once?

    [00:10:02] Will: No, not all at once. That's the point. Up to 880 is the maximum. It was pretty horrible there and it was hard to get people to stay. For a number of reasons. It had a number of things that it was horrible.

    [00:10:11] Rod: The internet's shit. I can't plug in my Tesla.

    [00:10:17] Will: The government said, all right, we'll step in. We'll build you a few hundred houses. We could build you a post office, a hospital, a police station, a state school.

    [00:10:23] Rod: It's an Australian town. How many pubs?

    [00:10:25] Will: I think there was multiple pubs, the company said, all right, well, you built that bit. We'll build the nice stuff. We'll build a hotel, general store, butcher, Baker library, cafe, employees, amenities building, cinema, tennis courts, haberdasher. They made a whole town there because they wanted people to come and they hung a banner over the entrance to the mine site.

    [00:10:45] Rod: This is actually a town. You'll love it here.

    [00:10:50] Will: Let us strive to make it a happier place to work.

    [00:10:52] Rod: Please help us. Don't whinge. It's bad already.

    [00:10:57] Will: Okay. So how did the mining work? So previously you're just picking rocks up off the ground, but no, this time they went, okay, let's go underground. There were these veins of asbestos running into the gorge.

    [00:11:07] Rod: It's just impossible to hear that normally. Picking up asbestos off the ground, veins of asbestos in the gorge.

    [00:11:11] Will: this was the blue asbestos. For those playing at home, it's crocodolite or the worst of the asbestos types. And so what they do, they'd crawl into these little tunnels and for some reason they made the tunnels no standing height. Like it was crawling height only.

    [00:11:25] Rod: I'm not a real minor if you don't have claustrophobia.

    [00:11:26] Will: Exactly. And and apparently their knees would just get ripped up. There was this great photo of I want to say guy, but he looked about 12. He had cricket pads on to do the mining. Cause you're crawling along on the ground. So using the cricket knee pads, but the miners themselves the thing that annoyed them the most is that it was so low and of course the ceiling is rough as guts, like it's just rock. And so no they're standing up and they're getting their back ripped over and over again, just standing, push back by a drill or something like that. And it's sharp rocks all over the place. And it'd just be horrible. They're not wearing shirts or any safety anD they're all getting cut up all the time and just getting recut, recut across their back.

    [00:12:07] Rod: It'd be nice and cool.

    [00:12:08] Will: No, it's like 55 outside. So big drills drilling holes in the wall, fill them full of dynamite. And then when you've done all of that, end of your shift. So everyone clears out, you explode the dynamite. Next shift comes in and clears out all of the asbestos you got out of there and then drill some more holes.

    [00:12:25] Rod: It's not like on my list of backup careers.

    [00:12:30] Will: There's a lot of dust around really inside the mine shaft. You know, you're exploding stuff. Because there's so much dust, you could only, you can only see the wall in front of you. You couldn't like, like a meter.

    [00:12:40] Rod: I don't know how you stay sane doing it.

    [00:12:42] Will: Okay. But if the mine was bad, the next stage was worse. Cause you take all the asbestos out and it goes down the hill a little bit to the mill.

    [00:12:49] Rod: Smash it.

    [00:12:49] Will: that's what they're doing. So this is basically a factory where you're smashing it and getting the asbestos fire.

    [00:12:55] Rod: So the trick is what we want to do is make this shit as breathable as possible. We need a machine. Have you got a machine that will make these like, like, it's like, you won't even have to breathe in and it still gets into you, but it's okay. You know why it's okay? Because they had safety equipment.

    [00:13:13] Will: Let me just check. No. So they're big machines crushing up all the all the rock to get the asbestos out. And then the last bit you can't do with machines. So you have to do with your hands. So they're just scooping the raw asbestos fibers and putting them in Hessian sacks.

    [00:13:27] Rod: I actually suggest it's better if you do it with your mouth because you get a better seal.

    [00:13:31] Will: I will get to that. Oh my God. But anyway the bagging section at the end where they put it in these old sugar Hessian bags was described as one of the worst bits because you just be covered in asbestos fibers, like a polar bear of asbestos fibres

    [00:13:45] Rod: fire proof, beautiful blue bear though

    [00:13:47] Will: just top to bottom. Oh, but the whole mill. Was just basically a cloud of dust the whole time. They tried to fix it with some rotoclone dust collecting units. They're fans and they must have filters or something like that. But they lasted for 64 operating hours. Like they're made of tough steel, like manganese steel, as tough as you can get and they break down after, what is it? Half a week.

    [00:14:09] Rod: So metal is what dies

    [00:14:11] Will: the metal is just getting corroded like these big fans and they just break down because the dust in the air is so corrosive.

    [00:14:18] Rod: So breathing sandpaper. And no one thought, hang on,

    [00:14:22] Will: if it's bad for that big metal up there, what do you reckon it's doing to my insides?

    [00:14:26] Rod: No, here's what we're thinking because metal doesn't heal, humans do. So it'll be cool because when we get cut, our wounds heal. It's true. Try it. Cut a piece of metal, it doesn't heal.

    [00:14:39] Will: You're right. Yeah. They did try a few things. They did try this wet method of dust control, but that damaged the fibers and that's no good. They did try to wear masks at some point, but it was too hot and no one forced anyone so, you know, it's too hot and you can't breathe through this mask. Oh, there was a final stage as well. So the mill where, is where you take the useful asbestos, put it in the sacks and take that to the rest of the country.

    [00:15:00] But the leftovers are the tailings. So that's stuff that's either not useful or it could be rock, but it could be asbestos. The cool thing about that is they just dumped it everywhere. The streets of the town. I don't know why they didn't like the red dust out there. So there's this nice photo here. They'd use the blue tailings dust to cover all of the streets.

    [00:15:17] Rod: Aesthetically pleasing. Good call.

    [00:15:19] Will: And so this is some kids doing a sack race. It looks nice over there. Of course, those sacks are former used asbestos. They also filled up all of the kids sand pits with asbestos.

    [00:15:27] Rod: Come on. This is like a B grade movie. It's fucking Austin Powers super villain. And we'll put it in their food. We'll use it as shampoo. Medicines will squirt it up their noses.

    [00:15:41] Will: Here's this bit. And I couldn't find where to fit this bit in because, okay, here's this beautiful photo of kids in the sand pit that is an asbestos sand pit. But sometimes the kids would chew on the asbestos tailings as a substitute for chewing gum.

    [00:15:55] Rod: Of course they did. What didn't they use it for? It corrodes magnesium, tungsten, aluminium, cyanide fans. Better get the kids to chew it.

    [00:16:07] Will: Do you know. How does your brain work where you go? Yeah, it's fine. It's fine.

    [00:16:12] Rod: I don't know if you don't know the problem was they're all asbestofied in the brain holes.

    [00:16:17] Will: So the dust was everywhere. The dust, obviously huge in the mill huge in the mine, but that's at the top of the gorge and the town's at the bottom of the gorge. It's a good idea. And so the wind would blow and the town would just be covered in dust all the time.

    [00:16:32] So the Royal Flying Doctors, they would go, Oh, you can spot it from a hundred K's way cause there's the dust plume. They'd know where the town was because this is blue dust plume just covering and they could just see it flying at a distance and they go, Oh yeah, there's Whitnum. That's what we're heading for. Oh my God. Mine's inspectors came over the years and they would describe it as a menace, terrific, terrific in a bad way in the old school version, a disgrace. A lot of times this is in the town as well as the mill was another, like it was just, but the town itself would still get above the peak of the measurement scales. Like they had whatever scale of dust o meter and it got to a thousand and they're like, Oh, it's a thousand.

    [00:17:11] Rod: What should it be? 10?

    [00:17:13] Will: What should it be? It's asbestos dust.

    [00:17:17] Rod: None?

    [00:17:19] Will: Kind of foreshadowed here, this wasn't good. So there are basically two diseases that asbestos causes.

    [00:17:25] Rod: Bad and worse.

    [00:17:26] Will: Yes. The first is asbestosis. That's the better one.

    [00:17:29] Rod: Are you serious?

    [00:17:30] Will: That's the better one. It's named for asbestos. You can probably guess. Okay. Chronic scarring of the lungs. So basically what you're getting particles of asbestos Irritating inside your lungs so that you're getting like, just scarring, just rehealing and not healing properly.

    [00:17:45] Symptoms include shortness of breath, coughing, wheezing, chest tightness. iF the doctor is listening, it sounds like your chest is crackling. Increased scarring, blood flow becomes restricted and it requires the heart to pump harder, progressive deterioration in lung capacity, even after mild physical exertion, you get the sort of normal things where you can't breathe as well. You get sort of the clubbing of the fingers and the skin turns a bit blue. Eventually, the victim becomes incapacitated, needing oxygen to breathe prone to other infections. So death usually comes from something like heart failure or something like that because you can't really breathe.

    [00:18:16] Rod: Hideous lingering death. Lots of side effects.

    [00:18:18] Will: Hideous lingering can take 10 to 40 years and definitely can be fatal. It's one of those things that can be potentially slightly milder forms. But anyway, in 2015, this is just to get some numbers, there were 157, 000 cases for 3, 600 deaths. So that's your death rate for asbestosis.

    [00:18:37] So that's the sort of rate. So it is detectable as a problem that people manage to live with and not necessarily super incapacitating. Definitely a lot of times it is, definitely can get worse

    [00:18:46] Rod: but by live, you mean survive through,

    [00:18:49] Will: yeah totally. Okay. So disease two. The worst one. Mesothelioma.

    [00:18:54] Rod: Oh, I have heard of that. I didn't realize that was asbestos y. Is it only asbestos related?

    [00:18:58] Will: No. It can be caused by other things. So basically mesothelioma, it's cancer of your mesotheliomes. They're the sort of linings of your organs. All of your organs have little sort of linings critically here because asbestos is getting into you through your lungs.

    [00:19:13] It's the thin layer wrapped around your lung. So here's a case report of one of the first cases of mesothelioma shown to be caused by asbestos. At the time of his death, the case was thought to have been tuberculous pleurisy. He had not responded to chemotherapy. He had developed a pleural effusion and attempts at aspiration were not successful because of the sticky nature of the fluid.

    [00:19:37] Rod: We can't get it out because it won't budge.

    [00:19:39] Will: It was thought that he developed an empyema. It's a collection of pus in the body. Like they thought, okay it's something like that and maybe we can drain it. But that was thought to be the cause of death. But anyway, on opening up the chest, I was amazed to find, this is the doctor writing, a huge gelatinous tumor which filled the right thoracic cavity. So basically it took over everything that the lung was. Yep. On slicing into the mass, a greatly contracted right lung was found. So in there, it's kind of squished the lung into nothing. On taking sections from the underlying lung tissue surprised to find occasional lumps of asbestos bodies in the air spaces of the lung. That was the first case of mesothelioma connected with asbestos.

    [00:20:22] Rod: Hang on a minute. That was in, this is sixties. Yeah, this is great.

    [00:20:25] Will: All the way along. Excruciating pain as you can imagine. Obviously difficulty breathing 'cause your lung capacity is getting shrunk. But also the pain of having your organs squeezed, fluid accumulating all over the place.

    [00:20:36] Usually the victim dies within a year. Just to get the scale compared with asbestosis, in 2015 numbers, there were 60, 000 cases of mesothelioma for 32, 000 deaths. So it is not as common as asbestosis

    [00:20:51] Rod: but it's got a much better strike rate.

    [00:20:53] Will: That's it about a quarter as common, but at least 20, 30 times as deadly. And here's the thing about mesothelioma. While asbestosis, it's certainly, you're more likely to get it with more and more exposure. It is thought you actually need pretty high exposure to get asbestosis. Like a small amount of breathing in the dust may cause some scarring, but may not lead to actual asbestosis. A trivial amount of asbestos can lead to mesothelioma. Like it can literally, there is no safe bottom. It can literally be one particle.

    [00:21:23] Rod: So it's luck of the draw.

    [00:21:27] Will: Let's get back to Whitnum.

    [00:21:28] Rod: I don't want to, I don't like it anymore.

    [00:21:32] Will: The first case of asbestosis was in the town was reported in 1946. That's two years before the town was even named. Two years before they'd finished actually building the mine, but you know, keep going. And then in 1962 I found the first case of mesothelioma in Australia and in Whitman.

    [00:21:52] Rod: But mesothelioma was only recently aware of anyway.

    [00:21:57] Will: The guy who discovered it, Dr. McNulty, he said to the mind managers the relatively short period of exposure to blue asbestos confirms the impression that these tumors may arise after transitory exposure to crocolite. He sent them a paper, he published in the medical journal of Australia. I'll tell you more about how it went later, but I just want to tell the story of Whitman. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, people were telling so many horror stories about more and more cases of asbestosis and mesothelioma began to emerge.

    [00:22:27] In 1960, dr. McNulty did a series of chest x rays of the mine workers. Of 199 of them, a quarter were affected. And this is people that are still working more and more cases emerged over the years. Nothing that anyone did caused it to stop except for the fact that it became not profitable anymore. In 1966, it got to a point that we could import asbestos from other places.

    [00:22:54] Rod: Yeah, we'll let them die. Okay, cool.

    [00:22:57] Will: The mine was closed in 1966 just because it was not profitable anymore. So the reports did emerge over time, connecting more and more what was happening in Wittenoom with deaths. In 1978, the Western Australian government decided we're going to phase out the town.

    [00:23:11] Rod: Even that line, phase out the town

    [00:23:13] Will: well, it took a bloody long time. 1978,

    [00:23:15] Rod: I was fucking born here and I'm staying here.

    [00:23:17] Will: Yes. Closed a few streets in 1980, demolished a few houses. 1980, they banned new connections of services to houses. So if you're, if you move out, a new resident can't move in and get the power connected or the water connected. So, that's a good way to stop it. 1985, they closed the school. 1990, they demolished the service station and the motel and the hospital. 2006, they removed town status.

    [00:23:40] Rod: 2006? Huh. Does removed town status mean they bulldozed the cathedral?

    [00:23:46] Will: No, that's a city. It's in the Gazette, like there must be a, like the government official things go in the government Gazette. And they said no longer a town. They removed it from street signs as well. That's where it said Wittenoom and they've got that covered over.

    [00:23:59] Rod: They've done well. You wouldn't know anything was being there.

    [00:24:01] Will: well, it is actually a problem because the last resident, little old lady Lorraine Thomas was evicted in mid 2022.

    [00:24:08] Rod: Good fucking God, she's there on her own?

    [00:24:10] Will: She was the last, I think the previous last resident, the second last resident, maybe 2019.

    [00:24:15] Rod: So she spent three years there going, nope, and my cold dead hands.

    [00:24:19] Will: And so people came up to evict her wearing full protective gear, face masks and everything like that. And she was not embracing the face mask nature of it all. And they boarded up her house.

    [00:24:29] Rod: How old was Lorraine? Do we know?

    [00:24:30] Will: A little old lady. All the roads to the town have been closed and the signs have been removed, but there's still dickheads that go because it is

    [00:24:40] Rod: disaster tourism, but in a settled sense.

    [00:24:43] Will: And yeah, but the thing is, you know, literally the town is covered still in asbestos particles. All over the town and one of those particles, just one can give you mesothelioma, which is a truly horrible way to die.

    [00:24:56] Rod: That's intriguing. That's that classic. Yeah. Yeah. Smoking. You say it's bad for you, but my grandfather smoked 900 cigars a day.

    [00:25:01] Will: Well, here's the thing. So how many people were killed by the town or by the mine? To date, it seems like 2000 people have been killed by asbestos related diseases, which seems to be about 10 percent of the people that passed through the town at all.

    [00:25:14] There may be a few more, but we're probably getting to the tail end of that. The mine closed after 1966. So it's getting further back in time. There you go. You know, this is literally a cloud of asbestos covering the town and it's not a hundred percent of people. It's wow. It's not a hundred percent.

    [00:25:27] Rod: What's all the fuss.

    [00:25:29] Will: Oh God. But here's one, you know, even, like one of a visitor was the minister of the crown in the Western Australian government, Ernie Bridge. He was there during the town closing phase and he died of mesothelioma, contracted from

    [00:25:42] Rod: He was just there for that.

    [00:25:43] Will: I don't know if it was like a one moment thing, or maybe he's there for a few days or a few weeks.

    [00:25:47] Rod: So, but fuck all.

    [00:25:49] Will: Yeah, fuck all. You know, he came much later and died due to this, you know, there's the people working in the mill, which is literally they are covered in asbestos. So the area is still home to millions of tons of asbestos up in the gorge. It's just filling the gorge basically.

    [00:26:05] It's the largest contaminated site in the Southern hemisphere. The Benjama traditional owners of the site have petitioned the Western Australian government to clean it up properly.

    [00:26:15] Rod: That went well?

    [00:26:16] Will: It hasn't yet. There's still time. The Western Australian government is obviously Australia's famously most progressive and listened to indigenous voices style government.

    [00:26:25] Rod: It's pretty much run by them.

    [00:26:26] Will: Yes. So one would assume. Of the 10 men in the in the photo at the beginning, nine of them died of asbestosis or mesothelioma. Just the winner, arthur Della Maddalena. He didn't he lived to the age of 74. Although he did sue CSR, the company, successfully for psychiatric injury based on his fear of dying of an asbestos related disease, which you can imagine.

    [00:26:50] Rod: And the payout? Lifetime supply of sugar.

    [00:26:54] Will: Asbestos related diseases cause approximately 4, 000 deaths every year in Australia, with one person dying every 12 hours from mesothelioma. I'll tell you more, how long the companies knew, and how much they did to cover it all up.

Will Grant
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