It's a striking picture: three young men riding high in the breeze, hitching a ride on a red truck in the hot and dusty West Australian Pilbara of the 1960s.

"We used to put our swags up there, lie on the truck, and look far and wide," says Yindjibarndi elder Allery Sandy.

"It was exciting for us. We used to think we were riding on the clouds.

"But little did we know that down the track we might get sick."

Fresh from the mine at Wittenoom Gorge, bags of deadly blue asbestos were transported by trucks like this one, 200 kilometres north to the port.

It was mostly local Aboriginal men who drove these trucks, and loaded and unloaded the bags at either end.

Almost all of them have died from mesothelioma.

So have thousands of people who lived near and worked in the former town, now a declared contaminated site.

Nobody living and working on Australia's only blue asbestos mine at Wittenoom knew the awful truth: that breathing in one microscopic fibre of blue asbestos could kill.

'It was beautiful country'

For a place that's borne so much death and grief, the country surrounding Wittenoom is indescribably beautiful.

Deep, red gorges cleave their way through the landscape. The colour of the country changes with the sun: red, gold, peach and pink.

Wittenoom's landscape changes with the sun. ( ABC RN: Kirsti Melville )

Wittenoom Gorge sits between Karijini National Park and the Hancock family's pastoral station, Mulga Downs. Part of the Hamersley Range, it's rich and bursting with iron ore. And blue asbestos.

"It was beautiful country out there. Water holes, fishing, camping," says Banjima elder Alec Tucker, whose people hold native title over the land.

"Until they blew it up."

The West Australian Mines Department first found blue asbestos in the Hamersley Range in 1915.

But it wasn't until 1938 that Lang Hancock founded Australian Blue Asbestos and started using the local Banjima people to hand-mine it with picks and shovels in the gorges near Mulga Downs.

In 1944, Hancock sold his leases to the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) which mined Wittenoom Gorge for blue asbestos for the next 22 years.

In a time and place with few jobs for Aboriginal people, Wittenoom quickly became the place to work.

They came from all over the Pilbara and, like the thousands of workers cajoled here from Europe by company representatives desperate for workers, they were oblivious to the danger.

"The only way Aboriginal people could get a job was working on a station or a mine site," Mr Tucker says.

Workers at the Wittenoom mine were unaware of the associated health risks. ( Supplied: State Library of Western Australia )

"They loved what they did. It was a beautiful gorge. But they didn't know how much risk they were living with."

Conditions in the mine were appalling and Aboriginal people typically worked some of the most dangerous jobs: bagging asbestos, shoving it into bags by hand and breathing in the deadly dust.

Early warnings ignored

In 1948, Eric Saint from the WA Public Health Department was the first person to explicitly warn both the mine's owners and the WA government about the impending health disaster.

He predicted "the most lethal crop of cases of asbestosis in the world". But his warnings were ignored.

Maitland Parker grew up on the outskirts of Wittenoom. ( ABC RN: Kirsti Melville )

"A lot of people knew it could kill but nothing was done about it," says Banjima elder Maitland Parker.

As a young boy, Maitland and his brother Trevor lived with their family in a humpy on the outskirts of Wittenoom. No Aboriginal workers lived in the company town that had been built to support the mine; they camped on its fringes.

Wittenoom was built with asbestos. It was used in houses, walls and roads; the tailings were used to suppress dust in the school playground, on roads, at the racecourse, the airstrip, in backyards.

In its heyday, Wittenoom had a population of over 20,000 — and a popular racecourse. ( Supplied: State Library of Western Australia )

It blanketed the town and the gorge.

There's nowhere else in the world where an entire town has been so completely contaminated by asbestos.

Everybody was exposed: the workers, their wives, children and visitors.

"We used to roll in it in the gorges," Archie Tucker says.

"We'd climb up on it and roll down it into the water at Gorge Pool. I didn't realise what it was, we just used to love playing in there. It was just all blue."

One brother lucky, another struck down

Trevor Parker says he used to play in, and even chew on, blue asbestos as a child. ( ABC RN: Kirsti Melville )

Trevor Parker used to chew on discarded pieces of asbestos.

"Me and another bloke, he's passed on now from mesothelioma, we used to chew on it," Trevor Parker says.

"It used to get all gummy and we'd chew it to see who could get the biggest gum in their mouth.

"It does freak me out now. A lot of people have passed away from that asbestos.

"We left Wittenoom when I was about 17 and within 10 years people had started passing away. And I'm thinking, 'Gee, I'm bloody lucky I haven't got this disease yet'. I'm in my 70s now and so hopefully nothing.

"But it might catch up on me later. I hope not."

Maitland Parker grew up in Wittenoom and worked in Karijini National Park for decades. ( ABC RN: Kirsti Melville )

His brother Maitland hasn't been as lucky.

"A few years ago I started to feel a bit sick. I had fluid in my right lung and the test proved I had mesothelioma," he says.

"And then they tell you it's not curable. It broke my heart to think I've contracted the bloody thing. Why bloody me?"

This is the great tragedy of mesothelioma: the randomness, the interminably long latency period.

One microscopic blue asbestos fibre, unknowingly inhaled, can lodge itself in the lining of your lung, and then sit there silently for 20, 30, 40 years.

And once mesothelioma strikes, it's brutal — excruciating and rapidly fatal.

From mining town to ghost town

The Wittenoom blue asbestos mine eventually closed in 1966 — but for financial, not safety, reasons.

The population of the township itself — 20,000 at its peak — began to decline; in 2007, the Western Australian government struck Wittenoom off the map.

Though thousands who lived and worked in Wittenoom have died from asbestos-related diseases, the impact on the Pilbara's Aboriginal people has been disproportionate — they have one of the highest mortality rates from mesothelioma of any group, anywhere in the world.

Wittenoom's old landmarks now lie abandoned. ( ABC RN: Kirsti Melville )

And when all the mine workers left, the traditional owners stayed and their exposure to asbestos continued.

Mesothelioma has devastated these small communities.

"There wouldn't be a family that hasn't been affected. Not one," says Paul Sheiner, a lawyer who has worked with the Banjima people for decades and on Wittenoom compensation claims since the 1990s.

"It would be a very different world in the Pilbara if Wittenoom hadn't been there and hadn't had people dying so young from this disease," he says.

It's a sentiment widely felt. It seems everybody up here knows somebody who's died from an asbestos-related cancer.

"It just changed everything," says ecologist Peter Kendrick, who works in the region and has lost friends to mesothelioma.

"So many people who've gone were leaders in their community and it's had a huge impact in the Pilbara.

"It really set things back because it took people when they were young, they died in their 40s, at the peak of their lives. They were people who were active in their community and across communities.

"And it hasn't improved. It's still going on."