Article Surviving blue asbestos: mining and occupational disease in South Africa and Australia Jock McCulloch
[email protected] Abstract Australia and South Africa are the only countries to have mined crocidolite or blue asbestos. Crocidolite was mined in the Northern Cape for one hundred years and at Wittenoom in Western Australia from 1944 until 1966. Mining has left a pandemic of asbestos disease in the Northern Cape and although production levels were modest Wittenoom has become the site of Australia’s worst occupational health disaster. The labour regimes in South Africa and Australia were very different, yet the rates of asbestos disease among miners and their families were probably similar. The hazards facing miners arose from the nature of the labour process, the technologies of production, the rapacity of employers, and the limitations of state regulation. Introduction The global asbestos industry was born on the mines of northern Italy in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By 1920 mines in Canada, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia, were supplying fibre for the manufacture of a range of products in Western Europe and North America. In what was an early twentieth century example of vertical integration the larger companies such as Turner & Newall (UK), Gefco (UK and South Africa), Eternit (Switzerland) and Johns-Manville (USA) operated mines, usually in the developing world, and factories in the metropoles. Manufacturers promoted asbestos as a wonder mineral which enhanced the quality, longevity and safety of any product into which it was incorporated. The industry was so successful that by 1950 asbestos had become an essential ingredient in the commodities around which post-war prosperity was built.