WITTOOM, Australia – Sitting on a rooftop in a ghost town in the middle of the Australian outback, Mario Hartmann waits for bulldozers to arrive.
He climbs every day because it’s the only spot with internet signal. With the nearest town an hour and a half away, he knew he had to be careful. “I go, you can only drink 15 beers,” he said. “More than 15 beers, you don’t come up here.”
But worse risks haunt this town. In the yard below, Mr. Hartmann’s Australian Shepherd darted around behind a ball, sending up dust clouds that contained an invisible threat: blue asbestos. Just one breath can send fibers into someone’s lungs, causing an incurable cancer. That’s why the government is about to wipe this Wittenoom town off the face of the earth.
Mr. Hartmann, 59, doesn’t mind this. He held out his hand in front of a panoramic view of the sunlit fields and red mountains beyond the town, his vacation home now and forever.
“How beautiful is this, hey?” he say.
Once a symbol of economic prosperity, Wittenoom is now considered one of Australia’s greatest industrial tragedies, made uninhabitable by the actions of insurmountable and abandoned mining interests. the government ignores doing nothing to clean it up.
The town was built long ago by soaring demand for asbestos products such as coatings and insulation, with the promise of economic development overshadowed. health concerns are emerging. Of the 20,000 who lived in the town or worked in the nearby mines, 2,000 people died from asbestos-related diseases.
Wittenoom became a cancer-causing ticking time bomb as mining wastes known as tailings were brought into town, paved into roads and scattered in playgrounds and gardens to keep out dust. Near the mine, waste – more than three million tons – piled up like mountains and let it flow down the gorges.
60 years after the mining ceased, the Western Australian state government says the health risk remains unacceptably high.
For more than a decade, it’s been trying to shut down Wittenoom to prevent thrill-seeking tourists from visiting. It removed the town from the official map and shut down electricity and water. It tries to buy the residents. When that didn’t work out, it passed a bill this year to buy back the remaining properties by force.
In the process, it transformed the few residents who refused to leave into symbols of self-determination, fighting for the right to roll the dice in their own lives.
But by the beginning of September, the remaining two were almost willing to give up the fight. One is Mr. Hartmann, who accepted the acquisition a few years ago but still comes back a few months each year.
An immigrant who combines an Austrian accent with an Australian swearing-in personality, he leaves when the town, empty and vandalized, no longer resembles the place where he first made his home. 30 years ago.
He was not blind to the dangers of the annual return trips to his barracks. But he accepts it easily, seeing it as out of his control. “Some people have it, some people don’t have asbestos-related cancers,” he said. “It depends on your makeup.”
To live in a place like Wittenoom requires you to have faith in an immutable future. Mr. Hartmann views his fate with a certainty that spares him from doubting his own choices, which is why he can say with certainty that living in Wittenoom ultimately leads to his death, “I won’t regret staying here.”
Toxic legacy
Maitland Parker, who grew up on the outskirts of Wittenoom during its heyday, recalls clouds of dust rising from a functioning pump mine. Aboriginal kids like him used to hitchhike trucks transporting asbestos fibers, he said. His brother remembers chewing the tail like gum.
But it took decades for people to realize what they were breathing in. “Actually, we never had a clue,” Parker said.
When he visited Wittenoom one August afternoon, he wore a mask.
Mr. Hartmann told him about it. “What’s with the mask, huh?” he say. Mr. Parker has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure.
This is part of Wittenoom’s random devastation. While many people who work directly with asbestos do not develop cancer, Mr. Parker did even though he had never lived in town or worked at a mine.
Mesothelioma can be treated but cannot be cured, and life expectancy after diagnosis is usually one to two years. But Mr Parker, 69, is still going strong after receiving his diagnosis in 2016.
“I’m still alive. I should die,” he said. With the time remaining, he has made it his mission to clean up the pollution.
After the mine closed, no action was taken to improve the land. The Banjima people, who have lived around Wittenoom for thousands of years, have left its legacy. They still go to the mountains and canyons near the town. They had no choice, they said; it is their cultural and spiritual obligation.
But each time, they make an impossible choice between their lifestyle and their health. Western Australia has one of the highest rates of mesothelioma in the world, and rates in the state’s Aboriginal communities are still taller.
Mr Parker said the responsibility lay with the Western Australian government. “At this point, they don’t care about the suffering,” he added.
Mr. Parker and others with ties to Wittenoom believe the town’s closure will herald a resumption of mining activity in the area. They fear that the warnings about the industrial arrogance the town symbolizes will pave the way for the very industry that destroyed it before.
Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman, whose father is an asbestos miner in Wittenoom, plans to mine iron ore just outside the contaminated area and has also explored it there.
The pain Mr. Parker feels with every breath is a reminder that his time is running out. But “while I’m still kicking and I can still breathe and argue for my country to be cleaned up,” he said, “so, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Last position
A well-maintained house that stands out in the wasteland with its rusty oil drums, toppled signposts and up and down windows is Wittenoom.
At the front door, a polite warning, scrawled on a clapping board in neat handwriting, greets visitors: “Stay away, please. People still live here. Thank you.”
Actually a person. Inside, Lorraine Thomas, the last resident of Wittenoom, is packing 40 years’ worth of belongings into cardboard boxes and crates: antique furniture, boxes of papers and documents, clothes the owners have abandoned. gone long ago.
Mrs. Thomas, 80, said: ‘These are the things I have collected.
It’s a slow process. She missed one deadline to leave in June and another on August 31. At the beginning of this month, she was waiting to see if authorities would remove her by force.
As she counted down the days, her mind turned to the memories she had created in the town, where she moved in with her three young daughters after the death of her first husband. It was at Wittenoom that she met her second husband, Lesley, and built a life with him running a travel and gems store.
She recounted those memories over and over, as if she could still see them playing through her window – gas stations, schools, and motels stacked on top of vacant lots and tall grass. knee.
“I don’t know,” she mused. “Life should be a little different.”
Even after her daughters leave, her husband dies, the town disappears and her home surrounds her, she swears she will never leave, not wanting to part with a place that has become a radio station. memorial for a happier time and a fuller life. To hold on, she must be excellently self-sufficient; when she locked herself out of the house recently, she broke the window to get back in.
But as her health declined, she admitted that she couldn’t stay forever.
On September 8, the inevitable happened: The sheriff arrived without warning and deported Ms. Thomas.
Mr. Hartmann also left on government orders, taking his campers to a nearby canyon to spend the rest of his vacation.
And Mr. Parker will continue to wait and see if Wittenoom’s lessons are learned.
