Asbestos House: the secret history of James Hardie Industries

Accounting History,  May 2007  by Webb, Laurie

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Asbestos House: the secret history of James Hardie Industries Gideon Haigh Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2006

Asbestos House, the Sydney based head office of James Hardie and the title of this book both recognize the pride of place that the company accorded this popular building product "Fibro", which spread across the Australian landscape from the mid1950s until the evidence relating to its toxicity and death-dealing properties became properly understood and accepted. Regrettably, this was a long time coming and Hardie was probably one of the last to concede the dangers of asbestos. As the author alludes to in his epilogue, however, Hardie was not alone in its culpability. It would be decades before a consensus was finally achieved, first as to the toxicity of asbestos and much later in awarding a reasonable level of financial compensation to sufferers who face a miserable death from mesothelioma, which is recognized "As the most carnivorous of cancers, as long as forty-five years can elapse between exposure and emergence" (p.9).

The subtitle of this book "the secret history of James Hardie Industries" recognizes that James Hardie was always (under the old regime) less than candid in dealing with the wealth of publicly available information that revealed asbestos as a dangerous substance. Hardie took a pugnacious stance initially denying liability and then gradually making concessions albeit reluctantly, until finally public opinion and threatened government intervention induced a turnaround and the departure of those senior executives who snared the company into an ethical and moral quagmire.

Within this book's 27 chapters and 442 pages, which weave together the mosaic of the moral decline and fall from grace of one of Australia's most successful manufacturers, the author manages to encapsulate the events in painstaking detail (a script for a planned mini-series perhaps?). The digging out of the "secrets" and the reporting of and reconstruction of the conversations between the various players provides the book with great authenticity and the feel of an insider at work.

A number of chapters in the first part of this book induce in the reader feelings of melancholy as the dreadful sufferings of asbestos victims are described. Those that were affected were not all Hardie blue-collar workers and those purchasing Hardie products, but surprisingly also directors and managers of Hardie whom one would suspect would be privy to "inside" information about the real nature of the dangers of asbestos. Such was the executives' belief in their much revered product that, as the author points out, they (too) paid the "ultimate sacrifice" (p.397).

The author has chosen some cheeky and sometimes quite ominous chapter titles. Chapter 2 for example is entitled "The workers that breathe death" and establishes that asbestos has long been known to be a dangerous substance:

The knowledge that respirable dust in an industrial setting can cause pneumoconiosis - the generic term for dust induced diseases of the lungs - stretches into antiquity. The first pathological description of silicosis dates from 1672, and the guises under which it went before it was christened clinically two hundred years later demonstrate how intimately it has been associated with work, (p.21)

In Chapter 4, "Pain so dreadful", the spotlight is focused on the effects of the disease on individuals and the inevitable painful end that follows:

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, (p.10)

Using the wisdom of hindsight, it is difficult to understand why anyone of those charged with industrial safety, unions and in particular medical researchers did not lead the fight and persist to have asbestos declared unsafe much earlier. However much of the star quality of Hardie's asbestos product arose from its universal acceptance as a versatile and durable building material.

Asbestos protected the burning broomstick in the Wizard of Oz and provided the artificial snow in Citizen Kane. By the end of the second World War, it had long ceased being exotic. In Australia in fact, it was fast coming into its own. After the fibre bottleneck cleared in the early 1950's the market seemed unappeasable. From the mid-1950's to the mid 1960's, fibre imports grew almost three-fold, and as many as six in 10 houses were being clad in fibro. In a hot land, it did not retain heat. In a big land, it was light and easy to transport. In a land where Jack was as good as his master, it was as suitable for handsome California bungalows as it was for workingmen's cottages. More important than its fire resistance was its durability, (p.70)

Hardie's lack of concern for safety issues associated with the handling of asbestos is illustrated in Chapter 8 entitled "A dirty job that had to be done". "Even to a casual observer, there were serious safety hazards. There were vast quantities of asbestos dust throughout the floor of the mill, which were being swept up, shovelled into wheelbarrows and tipped down a chute by men who - with one exception - were not wearing respirators" (p.108).