The Western Australian government wants to close down the town linked to deadly mesothelioma risk, but a few still cling to their ‘beautiful’ place

'Where is better than here?' Last six residents of Wittenoom resist efforts to close asbestos mining town

'Where is better than here?' Last six residents of Wittenoom resist efforts to close asbestos mining town

Western Australia is threatening to pass legislation to evict the last six residents refusing to leave the mining town of Wittenoom, infamous for a deadly asbestos mine that has been connected to a toll of more than 2,000 cancer deaths.

The town, about 300km south-east of Karratha, was founded to house the workforce for two blue asbestos or crocidolite mines, which were shut down in 1966, four years after Australia’s first case of mesothelioma was diagnosed in one of the mine workers. The state government began to “phase down” the town in 1978 and has made repeated attempts to encourage the final few residents to move on, most recently in 2013.

This month, the lands minister and leader of the National party of WA, Terry Redman, announced he would introduce legislation in 2016, the 50th anniversary of the mine’s closure, to forcibly acquire the remaining 21 privately-held properties and shut the town down for good.

“The remaining residents have chosen to decline previous offers for their properties by the state,” Redman told Guardian Australia. “As a result the creation of specific legislation to enable the compulsory acquisition of the remaining 21 freehold lots in Wittenoom will be drafted ensuring this issue is resolved.”

Redman said the legislation would be specific to Wittenoom – it would not confer broader property-seizing powers on the state.

The more the government does, the more they take away, it just makes the place better Wittenoom resident Peter Heyward

Sighing down the landline from his Wittenoom home, Mario Hartmann, one of three remaining permanent residents, says he has heard this threat before.

“We get this shit all the time,” Hartmann said. “They said before, that they will close it down. Whatever they come up with, they come up with. But if they can do it here, they can do it anywhere.”

Hartmann moved to Wittenoom in 1992, after the state had already demolished 70 houses and shortly before it closed the police station, motel, service station, pub and airport. The electricity was shut off in 2006 – Hartmann and other residents put in private generators – and the post stopped in 2007. The town was degazetted that year and condemned in 2008 as part of a 46,840 square kilometre contaminated area declared “not suitable for any form of human occupation or land use”.

The contaminated area is too big to be wholly blocked off, but Redman said government was considering other options to block access to the Wittenoom and Colonial mine sites and the Wittenoom Gorge.

But Hartmann and his few neighbours told Guardian Australia they had no intention of leaving.

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“Because it is a beautiful place, that’s why,” Hartmann said. “It’s very nice here. We have got water holes, we are next to a national park.”

Peter Heyward also moved to Wittenoom for its beauty, in 1993. The appeal has only got stronger, he said, with every attempt to shut it down.

“It’s very much a ghost town, there are more kangaroos than people,” he said. “The more the government does, the more they take away, it just makes the place better. I will have to thank them for that one day.”

Situated near the mouth of the Wittenoom Gorge, against the backdrop of the Hamersley Ranges on the fringe of the Karijini national park, Wittenoom is a fair prospect. The waterhole-dotted gorge is particularly attractive, especially to those who either don’t know, or don’t care, about the asbestos tailings dump that stretches for several kilometres.

The government buried the mine infrastructure and 400,000 cubic metres of heavily contaminated material in the gorge in 2004, but according to Redman plans to remediate the rest of the site are hampered by the presence of the last few residents. Any work on the asbestos dumps would disturb the airborne fibres that cause the particularly aggressive cancer mesothelioma.

Wittenoom Gorge is a popular campsite for people from the large mining towns of Karratha and Port Hedland. Heyward said most who come are locals who know the history of the area.

“Easter time is very busy, people come from all over the place,” he said. “We go up the gorge and all the water holes are full.”

Redman has cited concern for tourists as one of the key reasons to close the town, but Heyward said bulldozing the buildings would make no difference – people just drive on through.

Two children - David and Bronwyn Jones – after playing in asbestos tailings near their Wittenoom home in about 1962. David died from mesothelioma in 2006, aged 48. Photograph: Jones Family

“Wittenoom has been here for decades; a lot of people have lived here, so they come back every year and go up the gorge, some people spend a month there,” he said.

“Closing the town would not make a single bit of difference. I would probably be camped up the gorge myself if the house was gone.”

The original townsite was just 1.5km from the mine, but was moved 12km away to allow it to expand. Tailings – the waste product from the mine – were used to pave roads and playgrounds, and in people’s backyards.

Lorraine Thomas is the second-biggest landowner in the town, behind the state government. She owns nine properties, including the former shop and cafe, and notes “the value of all of them is probably zero” thanks to the town’s condemned status. The 73-year-old suffers from severe arthritis from an injury as a teenager and moved to the town in 1980 for the heat.

“I invested all of my savings in this place,” Thomas said. “I have got nowhere to go. Where is better than here?”

Thomas runs a generator and solar panels to power a bank of batteries and has foregone an electric kettle, toaster, and other unnecessary gadgetry in the name of saving power. She is a councillor on the shire of Ashburton and disputes that the town is unsafe, saying that the asbestos contamination is no worse there than anywhere in the Pilbara.

Wittenoom is a death trap Robert Vojakovic, president of the Asbestos Disease Society of WA

“There’s a risk wherever you live, your life is at risk,” Thomas said. “I might go outside and get run over today – there’s not much traffic here, but it’s a risk.”

Successive government and independent reports have said residents at Wittenoom are at an increased risk of developing mesothelioma or other asbestos-caused cancers.

“Wittenoom is a death trap, and the sooner that people get out of it, the sooner we can clean it up,” Robert Vojakovic, president of the Asbestos Disease Society of WA, told Guardian Australia.

Vojakovic went to work in the Wittenoom asbestos mine as a newly-arrived Croatian immigrant in the 1950s. He left the mine in 1961 and moved to the Northern Territory. When he returned to WA in the 1970s, he said, he found his former workmates “dropping like flies”.

He has not been diagnosed with mesothelioma, but says “that could happen tomorrow”. The disease often has a long incubation period and can begin from a very small period of exposure.

In 2012, the University of WA published a study showing that adults who had lived in Wittenoom as children when the mine was active were between 20% and 83% more likely to die from cancer than the rest of the population. Most were first exposed when they were three and had left the town by the age of 16.

Vojakovic said he regularly met people who had contracted asbestos-related diseases from just a brief time spent in Wittenoom.

“One lady, from Karratha, just camped one day in the gorge and she got mesothelioma,” he said. “It is a beautiful spot, a lot of people go there to see it. But there’s a death sentence on going there, it’s a Russian roulette – one person might be fine, another person will get cancer.”