There’s a deadly history of Dust in this country.

It’s a history that repeats: from coal in the late-1700s, to gold in the 1860s, to Asbestos, which peaked in use in the 1970s.

We learnt significant lessons from asbestos and from the many thousands of deaths it’s responsible for.

But have those lessons been forgotten?

From cover-ups and lies, to needless deaths and bitter fights for compensation, the influence of the asbestos battle lives on.

And now, the focus is on a different deadly dust.

A ‘disregard’ for safety

Until the mid-1980s, Australia had one of the highest rates of asbestos use per person in the world. It was used in a range of products including flooring, roofing and guttering.

Inhaling microscopic, invisible asbestos fibres can cause, among other diseases, a fatal cancer of the lining of the lungs or abdomen called mesothelioma. Its symptoms can emerge up to 50 years after exposure.

Australia still has one of the highest death rates from mesothelioma and other asbestos-related illnesses.

It’s estimated that last year alone, 761 people died in Australia from mesothelioma.

For decades, construction and mining companies had known that asbestos kills people. Some made it their job to hide that fact.

In 1988, Victorian Supreme Court judges ruled that the building company CSR, which had taken over asbestos mining at WA’s Wittenoom plant, had acted with “continuing, conscious and contumelious” disregard for its workers’ safety.

A 2011 WorkSafe Western Australia report put it even more firmly:

“Asbestos mining at Wittenoom was the greatest occupational health and safety tragedy in Australia — comparable to the Chernobyl and Bhopal catastrophes.”

It wasn’t just Wittenoom.

In the 1970s, “we used more asbestos per capita than any other country in the world”,  journalist and author Matt Peacock, who’s been reporting on asbestos for decades, tells ABC RN’s History Listen.

Asbestos was finally banned in Australia in 2003. But its legacy remains.

“A lot of the stories about the evil that was done by some of these companies still burn a flame in my heart,” Peacock says.

Greed and hidden risks

In the early 2000s, a media storm centred on the company James Hardie.

In a long-running court battle, it admitted it knew of the dangers of asbestos as early as the mid-1950s.

Yet, says Peacock, “they kept pumping this stuff out [and] they increased production [of asbestos] during the ’70s”.

There was “a huge PR effort … to bury the knowledge of its hazards”, he says.

Historian Jock McCulloch, who died in 2018 from the mesothelioma he contracted while researching the impacts of asbestos mining, documented the extent of corporate cover-up globally.

Professor McCulloch’s partner, Pavla Miller, a professor emerita of historical sociology at RMIT University, saw Professor McCulloch’s research through to publication after he died.

“The industry globally developed all kinds of useful strategies for diminishing evidence of risk, hiding risk itself [and] making sure that public advocates or journalists didn’t find out about studies which were conducted,” Professor Miller explains.

There was other questionable behaviour in the industry, too.

In 2004, a judicial inquiry into James Hardie criticised the company and its top executives, saying it had, among other things, underfunded a victims’ compensation fund.

A subsequent report by DF Jackson QC was quoted by then-New South Wales premier Bob Carr, who told parliament at the time:

“Hardie’s senior managers systematically and deliberately misled the actuaries, misled the board, misled the foundation, misled the stock exchange, misled the Supreme Court and misled victims and unions.”

The company had effectively divided itself in half, separated out its asbestos holdings and created a trust fund for victims — a trust fund that was billions of dollars below what was needed to adequately compensate.

“People were very upset for very good reasons. They were trying to sue a company that became a shell,” says Monash University business law lecturer Meredith Adelman.

She believes that James Hardie set a precedent around the world for corporate self-protection.

‘People’s lives are worth millions, too’

Bernie Banton became famous for his fight to win compensation for all Hardie asbestos victims, of which he was one.

In 2004 he told the ABC that the company had “shown no remorse for the families, the thousands of people that are affected because of their greed”.

Despite the company’s tactics, a $4.5 billion compensation deal was signed in 2005. Banton, who died in 2007 and was honoured with a state funeral, lived long enough to see justice done.

But the threat of asbestos hasn’t gone away.

Near the Wittenoom blue asbestos mine, for example, which closed in 1966, tailings, a by-product of mining, are still blowing around.

Maitland Parker, an active elder for the Banjima people who has mesothelioma, is driving the fight for the clean up.

In 2019 he told the ABC, “I’m a walking, living example of what has happened from the blue asbestos”.

“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 to fix it up.”

‘Here we are back again’

In the last few years, deadly dust has returned to the headlines for other reasons.

Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP, also known as black lung disease) was re-detected in Queensland in 2015.

It was the first confirmed case in the state in 30 years.

A scathing 2023 report from the Queensland Parliamentary Inquiry into coal mining safety criticised the “entire coal mining industry in Queensland (and NSW)”. 

The report said the industry assumed that it had been eradicated in Australia, despite continuing high rates of CWP in the US.

If no-one was looking for CWP, it begs the question, was anyone doing anything preventative about it?

And CWP isn’t the only dust concern in Australia right now.

Silicosis, a preventable work-related disease caused by inhaling silica dust, is also damaging health.

A recent study by Monash University found that one in four stonemasons in Victoria who worked with artificial stone benchtops developed silicosis, which can be deadly.

“We’ve got this renewed interest in dust disease because of the silicosis re-emergence through kitchen benches and manufactured stone,” says Pamela Kinnear, public policy expert and outgoing professor of practice at Queensland University of Technology.

“Here we are back again,” she says.

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Dr Kinnear is an expert on the impact of coal miners’ silicosis, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century.

Silicosis is a deadly lung disease caused by breathing in tiny bits of silica, which is found in things like sand, stone, concrete and mortar, and used today to make products like kitchen and bathroom benchtops, bricks and tiles.

Around 1900, people started to say, “OK, we’ve got to do something about dust disease, it’s a proper industrial health concern”, Dr Kinnear says.

“And a lot of the legislation that started about silicosis is what gave rise to all the other kinds of [legislation like] occupational health [and] workers’ compensation.”

Silicosis has returned as a workplace health issue — and Dr Kinnear says that’s “emblematic of social history”.

“When you actually successfully regulate something, so that nobody sees it anymore, your very success is the thing that causes it to emerge again. Because it’s just lost in people’s minds.”

But that’s changing. 

In February, the Australian Council of Trade Unions called on the Australian government to ban engineered stone products. In August, a Safe Work Australia report recommended prohibiting the use of engineered stone.

Authorities have been slow to crack down on it, but there has been recent action taken.

In October the NSW government increased the maximum prison sentence to ten years for employers who fail to deal adequately with deadly silica dust, and increased the maximum fine from $798,000 to $2.2 million.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the move comes before state and territory work health and safety ministers are due to meet to determine whether engineered stone containing up to 95 per cent crystalline silica will be banned in Australia.

And this week ACTU said it would force a de facto ban on engineered stone if the government failed to act to protect workers from the deadly lung disease silicosis.

The ACTU said its members, including the CFMEU, which represents Stonemasons, and the Maritime Union of Australia, would band together to prevent the product from being brought through ports or transported by union members to construction sites across the country next year.

‘A different fight’

In the past, dust diseases, particularly silicosis, were controlled “in an institutional framework”, Dr Kinnear says.

“[Coal] was a big industry, it was a regulated industry, and state governments etc got involved [in regulation].”

She says the lessons we draw from the past need to be applied to today’s different industrial and political context.

“The re-emergence of this kind of silicosis is effectively in cottage industries. It’s in small business, it’s in subcontractors,” she says.

“So it’s going to be a different fight with different kinds of players with different kinds of imperatives and a completely different moment in modern democratic history.”