eBookSecond edition (Second edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Founded in 1888, James Hardie Industries is one of Australia’s oldest, richest and proudest corporations. And its fortunes were based on what proved to be one of the worst industrial poisons of the twentieth century: asbestos.
Asbestos House, the name of the grand headquarters that Hardie built itself in 1929, tells two remarkable tales. It relates the frantic financial engineering in 2001 during which Hardie cut adrift its liabilities to sufferers of asbestos-related disease, the public and political odium that followed, and the extraordinary deal that resulted. It is also the story that the company, knowingly and unknowingly, forgot: how, even as fibro built a nation, the asbestos fibre from which it was made condemned thousands to death.
Reconstructed from hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of documentation, Asbestos House is a multi-award-winning saga of high finance, industrial history, legal intrigue, medical breakthrough and human frailty.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925113457 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribe Publications Pty Ltd |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 635 KB |
About the Author
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for forty years, contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines, and published fifty books, including thirty-one about cricket. He is half of the podcast Cricket Et Cetera/Et Al (with Peter Lalor).
Read an Excerpt
Asbestos House
The Secret History of James Hardie Industries
By Gideon Haigh
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2007 Gideon HaighAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925113-45-7
CHAPTER 1
'Let's give them to Hardie's'
'When one comes to inquire into the qualities of this truly wonderful mineral — one of nature's marvels — and its multitudinous uses of today, how surprising it appears that thousands of years have been allowed by civilisation to elapse between the present time and the period when the ancients first made use of it, before finally giving serious attention to its immense possibilities.'
— Leonard Summers, Asbestos and the Asbestos Industry, 1920
through most of his life, Bernie Banton was an inexhaustibly active man for whom there were never enough hours in a day. When he worked for the insulation manufacturer Hardie-BI at Camellia between 1968 and 1974, he preferred night shifts, so he could ply his trade as a painter and decorator by day. But, since being tethered to a respirator by the asbestosis with which he was diagnosed in 1999, he has had to compress his ebullience into his story-telling, which is by turns furious, mischievous, harrowing and hilarious. Sitting in his living room in West Pennant Hills recounting his first meeting with Hardie representatives in October 2004, it is the fury that flashes.
When Hardie's chairman Meredith Hellicar began proceedings, Banton says, he sized her up. He heard her say she was 'truly, truly sorry' for the suffering of those with asbestos-related diseases. But what did she really know, or even care? 'Well, Meredith, actions will speak louder than any of these words,' Banton recalls saying. 'Let's see you come up with the money.' But it was Hardie's lead negotiator, Peter Hunt of the blue-chip advisory firm Caliburn Partnership, who chiefly aroused Banton's ire:
Greg [ACTU secretary Greg Combet] spoke, I spoke, then this guy Hunt. And — would you believe it? — he starts telling us what a great company Hardie's was. Two minutes into it, I said: 'Let's just cut the crap. I'm not going to sit here and listen to this. This is absolutely unadulterated crap. The only reason Hardie's is a successful company is the thousands of lives they put at risk when they knew it was a dangerous product. They knew what was going on and did nothing about it. So don't you tell me what a great company Hardie's is. You're a lot of grubs. I don't know how you can look at yourselves in the mirror. How dare you! This is a despicable company with no morals whatsoever.'
As he spits the story out, Banton's voice rises an octave. He almost runs out of puff. But he'll harangue Hardie's, he assures you, for as long as there's breath in his body.
Sitting across a long conference table at Export House, Meredith Hellicar cuts an altogether cooler figure, immaculate in a powder-pink power suit. She, too, has always worked hard, and ever upward, through public service then private sector executive ranks; today she turns in the standard seventy-hour week of the fully employed public company director. But as she enlarges on her own understanding of Hardie's history, you can hear the keen edge of frustration through her usual serenity:
No, I didn't feel a great sense of shame that we'd made asbestos. I felt a great sadness about the people suffering as a result. But it had been the great wonder material. There are all these discussions about when we knew. But if you talk to John Reid [Hardie's former chairman], he'll tell you that we tried our absolute hardest, as soon as we got the information, to treat it as a health risk. And we asked the workers to wear masks, and they didn't like that because the masks stopped them from smoking. John Reid will tell you that the workers hated him for forcing them to wear masks. They'd say: 'How dare you try to stop us smoking!'
Then we realised it wasn't just a health and safety issue. And I've just had a letter from a 93-year-old woman whose two husbands worked for James Hardie, and she said: 'My husband loved asbestos so much that he lined our driveway with it.' And of course governments specified that you used it. My sense was: 'My God, this product turned out to be deadly.' It would be like sitting on the board of Nokia in fifty years' time when they discover that some early medical reports now were right and that mobile phones turned out to be deadly.
While Hardie has been criticised, with some force, for its dedication to corporate 'spin', Hellicar does not sound like somebody reading from an autocue. The frustration is authentic. She sighs and assumes a 'what-can-you-do?' expression.
Decades of medical research have been devoted to the effects of prolonged exposure to asbestos; the effects of prolonged exposure to the James Hardie story would probably also repay study. In most public controversies, there is at least some common ground, some agreed set of facts or principles. Where Hardie is concerned, virtually nothing is shared. People cleave instinctively to extremes. Hardie's detractors will swear that the toxicity of asbestos was common knowledge as far back as the 1920s; Hardie's defenders will point out that asbestos was in widespread use all over the world throughout the period of the company's involvement, and in many countries still is. Hardie will be described to you as a charnel house that murdered its workers with malice aforethought, and as a victim of misplaced emotion, tabloid sensationalism and a compensation system gone mad. Those I approached to discuss the Hardie story routinely prefaced their response with the question, 'What's your angle?'; it was as though a vested interest was a prerequisite of involvement. When they spoke, it was often with extreme vehemence. The word 'asbestos' is derived from the Greek for 'inextinguishable': this could easily refer to the animosities it engenders.
Some of this pent-up fury arises from the rudeness of the awakening: for most of the last century, asbestos was a substance identified with safety, disarmingly familiar and ubiquitous. Some of it is a function of the insidious aetiology of the diseases that asbestos causes: with mesothelioma, the most carnivorous of cancers, as long as forty-five years can elapse between exposure and emergence. The result is that misfortune falls with cruelly disproportionate weight on people just about to enjoy the fruits of a lifetime's labour, dashing their dreams as it wrings out their lungs. Yet by the time they have been diagnosed, not merely is remission a faint hope, but responsibility is a hazy concept. James Hardie dominated the Australian market for asbestos products: its conspicuousness as a defendant of compensation claims in New South Wales' Dust Diseases Tribunal is a perverse tribute to the acumen of previous management. But a corporation has no face to smite or soul to damn. And — let an obvious point be made at the earliest possible opportunity — none of the directors of James Hardie who deliberated on the constitution of the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation in February 2001 had the remotest connection with the company's asbestos past.
At least some of the anger, too, springs from popular ambivalence about modern industrial capitalism, reputedly red in tooth and claw, and the forces of globalisation, apparently inescapable and ineluctable. A story widely told of Enron's Jeffrey Skilling, a most notorious recent archetype of the chief executive, concerns a class at Harvard Business School where he was asked what he would do if he learned that a product his company was making had harmful side effects. 'I'd keep making and selling the product,' Skilling answered. 'My job as a businessman is to be a profit centre and maximise return to shareholders.' Hardie seems the ultimate profit-before-people story. The profits here entailed the forfeiture of the peoples' lives. In fact, this view can be at least partly dismissed immediately. The decisions for which this generation of victims are paying were taken not five years ago, but rather decades ago — at a time when, we are commonly led to believe, a kinder, gentler form of capitalism operated, the forces of globalisation were faint and far-off, and Australia was at its most 'relaxed and comfortable'. And the origins of the industry of which Hardie was a pathfinder lie long before any of the dramatis personae in recent events were born.
a couple of days before Christmas in 1968, James Hardie & Coy's chief engineer Frank Page sent a wry note to the boss of the company's Camellia works quoting Rudyard Kipling's 'Tomlinson' — 'a scurrilous satire in verse on the academic way of thinking'. He had been reading a number of recent medical papers and press reports about asbestos whose authors had airily cited the Greek geographer Strabo and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, both of whom had mentioned in passing a sickness of the lungs in slaves whose occupation was to weave asbestos into cloth. They had reminded him, he said, of the lines where Tomlinson gives an account of his life, which proves to have been lived exclusively through his library: 'This, I have felt, this, I have guessed, and this, was noised abroad/This, I read in a Belgian book on the word of a dead French lord.' Page was still griping about it the following April in a letter to his friend Geoffrey Sutcliffe of the British asbestos giant Turner & Newall: 'Like the rest of the asbestos-using industry, I am heartily sick of articles in the popular press and learned papers — so called — which allege that Pliny and Strabo noted the occupational hazards of working in asbestos and then proceed to quote the housewife whose claim to fame was that she lived in a "pre-fab" for six months and had an "asbestos body" in a specimen of her lung tissue on death.'
[* This is an elision of three couplets from 'Tomlinson', comprising remarks the speaker makes to both St Peter and the Devil.]
If he made it rather brutally, Page had a point. Strabo and Pliny did note that asbestos weavers were prone to sickness of the lungs, and favoured protective masks from animal bladders, but their observations are mostly of unabashed wonder. Asbestos is a freak of nature. In its varying states it could be mineral, animal or even vegetable in origin: the earliest written references were in the fourth century BC by the 'Father of Botany', Theophrastus, part of Aristotle's circle. As late as the 1960s, it is reported, a major shareholder in an English asbestos firm visiting its raw-material supplier in South Africa asked where the plantations were.
Asbestos is, in fact, a fibrous silicate. Microscopic study reveals that each fibre consists of thousands of strands, stronger than steel per unit cross-section, subdividing into diameters that artificial fibres cannot. A single strand weighing less than 50 grams can be strung out for more than 300 metres; and a square metre of woven cloth will weigh about 220 grams. Not all asbestos, as we shall see, is equal: of the three varieties used commercially, curly fibred chrysotile (white) is known as a serpentine; straighter crocidolite (blue) and amosite (brown) are called amphiboles. But all have been prized for their tensile strength and their imperviousness to electricity, vibration, abrasion, vermin, acids and bases, salt, dust, frost and, of course, fire.
Asbestos has been mined since prehistoric times — it has been detected in Finnish pots dating from as early at 2500BC — and its original uses in perpetual wicks in sacred lamps and funeral raiments for dead kings evoke its almost supernatural reputation. Despite its properties, however, asbestos has been a novelty for much of human history. Charlemagne amazed guests by casting his asbestos table cloth into the fire for cleaning; Marco Polo described encountering asbestos textile on his traverse of Siberia; Benjamin Franklin affected an asbestos purse when he first visited England. But it seldom threatened to support an industry. The first factory, established in Russia in 1720 during the reign of Peter the Great after the discovery of substantial deposits of the mineral in the Ural Mountains, closed because of a lack of demand for its handbags, socks, gloves and textiles. It was also difficult to mine, especially in remote areas: in Italy, where it was found in the Susa Valley, it had to be delivered from the alpine heights by toboggan, and work was occasionally disrupted by avalanches.
Asbestos was not truly rediscovered until the industrial revolution, when the advent of the power of steam in pipes, turbines, ovens and kilns placed a premium on substances that were heat resistant. The origins of the global asbestos industry lie in the second half of the nineteenth century, when virtually all the major players were established. American Henry Ward Johns first experimented with asbestos in 1858, inspired by an entry in an encyclopedia, and founded the H. W. Johns Manufacturing Co in West Stockbridge, Massachussetts, taking out patents to manufacture roofing materials from asbestos, pitch, jute and burlap; in 1879, the company diversified into asbestos paints. That same year, Turner Brothers, a textile firm in Yorkshire, first wove asbestos on its looms.
H. W. Johns Manufacturing would merge with Milwaukee's Manville Covering Company to form Johns-Manville; Turner Brothers would come together with Washington Chemicals, J. W. Roberts, Newall Insulation and the brake manufacturer Ferodo (an anagram of its founder's name, Herbert Frood) to form Turner & Newall. A third giant company, British Belting and Asbestos, originally W. Willson Cobbett Ltd and later BBA Group, emerged from a similar process of mergers. The emergence of manufacturers stimulated demand for raw material. Two huge chrysotile mines in Quebec, the Kingsville and the Jeffrey, begat their own towns, Thetford Mines and Asbestos respectively. In December 1893, merchant venturers also founded Cape Asbestos, listed on London's stock exchange, to exploit a huge crocidolite deposit at Prieska, 800km north of Cape Town.
Paints and textiles were the material's original industrial applications. The former were used at the British Museum, Crystal Palace, the National Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and Hampton Court Palace; Edward VII became a public enthusiast. And when appalling theatre fires in Moscow, Vienna, Nice and Kronstadt in 1881 cost 1300 lives, impresarios hastened to entice patrons with asbestos curtains. In Australia, asbestos products first achieved notice when they were exhibited at the Sydney International Exhibition in September 1879, a year after making a considerable impact at the Paris Universal Exposition, and were first popularised by importers, the largest of which was Melbourne's Australasian Asbestos Company, formed to act as agents for H. W. Johns Manufacturing Co. Strangely, some of the best publicity the company enjoyed was when, in July 1884, a huge fire swept through Little Collins Street and burned out its store. The Age reported:
One incident in connection with the fire in Little Collins Street which is worth noting was that the Australasian Asbestos Company, who occupy a portion of the building, were enabled to save their books through having taken the precaution to paint their walls with the fireproof paint, and although the fire ravaged quite close to the wooden partition which divided the company's office from the store, the inside of the office was found to be uninjured, the paint not being so much as blistered.
Mining did not flourish. Asbestos mines operated in Australia at Jones Creek, near Gundagai, from 1880, and at Robertstown, north of the Barossa Valley, from 1894. They achieved little. And where fire had failed to stop Australasian Asbestos Company, finance did. A mine it developed at Anderson's Creek, near the Tasmanian town of Beaconsfield, became instead a money pit: the company steadily 'expended its capital and died a natural death'. It was a breakthrough far away that would, in time, turn Australia into the world's biggest per capita consumer of asbestos.
From Russia in 1896 came the first samples of a tough but lightweight building material under the trade name Uralite, in honour of the mountains from which the mineral had been hewn. Within three years, the process had been considerably improved by an Austrian engineer, Ludwig Hatschek, operating from a factory in Vöcklabruck using a second-hand strawboard-making machine that he had bought out of a newspaper. He called his material Eternit to evoke its durability, and the corporate descendant of his experiments remains one of Europe's top building-products companies. Uralite and Eternit were prototypes of the product that Australians know colloquially as 'fibro': fibre-cement. Technology for its manufacture would change hugely over the next seventy years, but the principles did not alter much: a slurry of asbestos fibre, cement, and water was circulated through an agitator into tubs, dried at high temperature, then deposited in laminations for rolling to the required thickness. The result — more durable than wood, far cheaper than masonry, and as adaptable as either — would be the foundation on which fortunes were built. The biggest was to be James Hardie's.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Asbestos House by Gideon Haigh. Copyright © 2007 Gideon Haigh. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue: 'I really thought he would want to know ...',1 'Let's give them to Hardie's',
2 'The workers who breathe death',
3 'We'll shoot the bastard!',
4 'Pain so dreadful',
5 'A very unpleasant and profitless war',
6 'We don't have to worry about that one any more',
7 'What are we going to do with you?',
8 'A dirty job that had to be done',
9 'Asbestosis House',
10 'Next time you are speaking to the Lord ...',
11 'I think we're fucked',
12 'If you don't achieve it, you are gone',
13 'Plucking figures from the clouds',
14 'Canberra on steroids',
15 'Wow. That's much more than I was expecting',
16 'Possible in future not solvent'17 'Lots of hairs on it',
18 'Beauty contest between warthogs',
19 'There will be no better friend to the foundation than James Hardie',
20 'The thing is not defensible',
21 'I wish now that I'd just belted them',
22 'Five cents in the dollar and tough titties',
23 'I am a rock',
24 'What about the word "dishonest" don't you understand, Mr Macdonald?',
25 'Who's who in the zoo',
26 'There's $1.5 billion on the table - you can point to that',
27 'A nutcutting meeting',
Epilogue: 'A class thing',
Acknowledgements,
A Guide to Sources,