DEADLY BLUE DUST

l Who For years, Bronwen Duke and her family were exposed to asbestos fibres. Then she lost almost her entire family to asbestos-related illnesses

Asbestos tragedy

Bronwen Duke’s earliest childhood memories are of happily playing with her brother David in the dirt outside their Wittenoom home, in Western Australia’s remote north. Back in the 1960s her parents, Ron and Val Jones, had no idea the dust the kids played in, tinged blue by asbestos fibres, was deadly. “We never dreamed the tiny asbestos filings were dangerous,” Duke, 59, now living in Canberra, reflects sadly. “They were soft and blue, fun to play in, and they were everywhere.”

Tragically, fibres from asbestos mined in the town would lodge in the lungs of, and kill, both Duke’s parents, her brother David, and 10 other family members.

“My younger brother Shane [who is 57] and I are the only ones left, out of two generations of families who lived in Wittenoom,” Duke says. “I have one photo with 13 members of my family in it and every single person is dead.”

According to the Perth-based Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia – which has been helping victims of asbestos-related illness since 1979 – that’s the largest number of asbestos-related deaths in one Wittenoom family. To date, more than 4000 Australians have died of asbestosrelated diseases, and more than 2000 were former residents of Wittenoom, says, Melita Markey, the society’s chief operating officer.

With its picturesque gorges and employment prospects, Wittenoom was a drawcard for European migrant workers who flocked there to work at the tiny town’s asbestos mill, built by late mining mogul Lang Hancock in 1939. In 1943, CSR Ltd bought the mill and expanded the operation; it ran until 1966, employing 7000 people.

“Mum was a teenager when her dad moved the family there in the ’50s, so he could take a job as foreman at the mill,” Duke says. “So, that’s where my mum met my dad, and her three sisters met their husbands.”

Duke says her father would drive the workers to the mine each day. “He certainly didn’t dream he or anyone else was at risk,” Duke recalls. In 1963, when Bronwen was 5 and David was 6, her father became ill with lung problems and the family moved down to Perth so that he could receive proper medical treatment.

At first, Duke says, the doctors thought he had tuberculosis. “He kept fighting to catch his breath,” she says. “But though he was ill, Dad was determined to keep working and support the family. Then, in the mid-’70s, he learned he had asbestosis. It’s an extremely harrowing disease, in which you feel like you’re choking. He died in 1979.”

In 1989, 10 years after her father had died, Duke’s mother Val was diagnosed with mesothelioma. “It’s extremely difficult to watch someone you love unable to walk three paces because they can’t breathe. She was dead within months.”

Then in 2006 her beloved brother David, just a year her senior, was also diagnosed with mesothelioma. He too, was dead within months of his diagnosis. “He was 48, a married father of two, and certainly wasn’t expecting to get sick,” Duke sighs.

“He’d left Wittenoom when he was just 6 years old. But when you look at old photos of us playing in the dirt, we were literally black, covered in asbestos fibres. Shane was only 2 when we left Wittenoom, and I don’t think he was exposed to asbestos. But unfortunately he, too, has a health battle on his hands, with melanoma cancer.”

Now a divorced mother of two, Duke has no idea why she has been spared from contracting an asbestos-related disease. “I have tests every year, but so far, I’m fine,” she says. But having lost so many family members this way, she admits it is, at times, almost too much to bear.”