아래 내용은 Perthnow의 2018년 8월 20일자 기사입니다.
서호주의 위트눔(Wittenoom)은 청석면 채굴로 아주 유명하다. 청석면 열을 흡수하는 곳에 사용되었고, 방독면 등 각종 무기에 쓰여졌다. 2차 세계대전이 끝나고 청석면 수요가 줄어들자 광산은 1966년에 문을 닫았다.
당시 13,000여명이 위트눔에서 살았고 그 중 7,000명이 아이들로 추정하고 있다. 그리고, 이천명가량이 석면질환으로 사망한 것으로 추산한다.
1950년대까지 청석면이 건강과 주변 환경에 악영향을 끼칠 수 있다고 그 누구도 알려주지 않았다.
어린 아이 2명이 청석면 위에서 소꿉놀이를 하며 놀고 있는, 상징적인 사진이 있다. 두 아이는 30대에 악성중피종으로 사망했다.
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AN iconic image lingers in the consciousness of a generation of West Australians.
Two little boys, covered in muck, caught out by the camera. The one on the left has a naughty grin that only a three-year-old can muster, the other an unexpected glare of a tough nut that belies his tender age.
All these years later, Carol Farber, now 80, vividly remembers that photograph. She should. She took it.
It was at the bottom of her driveway at Wittenoom. The cheeky one was her nephew, Philip Noble, with another Wittenoom kid, Ross Munro, who was a year or so younger.
Back then, in the early 1950s, Carol Farber was Carol Smith, and had just arrived in the remote mine town to begin what she remembered as “the happiest days of my life”.
She had just been given a Box Brownie for her 13th birthday and she was snap-happy. She took pictures of everything that moved and remote Wittenoom, nestled at the foot of the stunning Hamersley Ranges, had plenty on offer.
She and her mother, Kathleen, and brother, Terry, had escaped a violent father and husband and ended up in the busy mining town with their eldest sibling Fay, whose husband Ray Noble worked for CSR’s subsidiary Australian Blue Asbestos.
It was a “magical place” full of happy families, newly arrived migrants hoping to get ahead and lots of fun and adventure for kids like Carol.
“I remember climbing up one of the gorges with my brother, and finding an Aboriginal cave filled with these wonderful drawings on the wall,” she recalled.
“It was so eerie, it scared the life out of us, but I took a photo anyway and then we ran out of there as fast as we could. Mum never let us see the photo, but I still remember how scared we were.”
However, no one was scared of blue asbestos.
It was everywhere. Tailings covered every square inch of ground. The shard-like blue asbestos helped beat the extreme heat of the Pilbara.
“They (the workers) used to spread out all the tailings over the town because they reckoned it took the heat out of the red dirt of the Pilbara,” Carol said.
“The blue asbestos fibres were used to absorb the heat, because it was pretty hot up there most of the time.
“Someone had dumped a big pile of the blue stuff at the bottom of our driveway,” she said.
“The two boys were just jumping around in the stuff when I took that picture.
“I remember once when the governor, Sir Charles Gairdner, was coming to our school.
“The men spent hours raking the blue asbestos right across the schoolyard to make sure that we didn’t burn our feet when we were performing for all the dignitaries who had flown into town.”
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When dust ends in death: How asbestos devastated Wittenoom
