View from Munibung Hill
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Andrew Belk
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Andrew Belk's biography and other articles by this writer
Come sit upon Munibung Hill with me. When I was a kid we called it Hawkins Hill after the family who owned it. The Hawkins made their fortune carting shit and the tale of how the local shit carters made it big was a suburban legend that stoked our working-class dreams and kept us warm at night.
Below us lies the closest thing I have to a home town – Boolaroo – the "place of many flies". That main road down there is called Main Road. That first street is called First Street. That second street is called Second Street. That third street is called Third Street.
That's Lake Macquarie to the south. It is the biggest saltwater lake in the southern hemisphere. It is great for catching bream and flathead. The dirty-looking creek that flows into the lake down by the bottom of town is called Cockle Creek. Yes, there are cockles in Cockle Creek, but you have to promise me not to eat any.
Newcastle is to the north. It's not far.
Now, that big industrial complex there near First Street – the one with the 84– metre-high chimney stacks – that's Pasminco. It's a lead smelter. Its by-products include mercury and sulphuric acid. That's sulphur you can smell in the air now and that's why everyone around here just calls it the Sulphide. It reminds me of an old drunk the way it sprawls over the town reeking.
There was no one much around to sniff it when it was built – the indigenous Awabakal people overthrown by the end of the 1830's and replaced by a handful of pastoral lease holders. As the first heavy industry in the Hunter Valley the stacks became beacons of jobs and opportunity. It's pumped millions of dollars and tonnes of lead waste into the area ever since.
Come on. Let's walk down together and have a look. On the way I'll tell you a story.
BACK IN 1980 MY MATE BEAKER AND I were up here getting pissed on 99-cent Summer Wine. His big sister had got it for us in return for leaving her alone. We had never been pissed before and had no idea we would get so thirsty. Instead of coming back down the hill this way we got lost and rambled about in the sun for hours getting dehydrated. When we found a little gully thick with lantana and a tiny stream at its base we drank as much water as our stomachs would hold.
When we finally emerged from this oasis we found we were a little way down from some sort of rubbish dump.
The first blister appeared a few days later. The doctor at the local clinic unconvincingly diagnosed chickenpox. A week later I was covered in blisters the shape, size and consistency of under-poached eggs. They filled with clear fluid until they burst the skin and leaked blood. The skin would scab and fall off and a new blister would appear. This continued for three months and if you had seen me you would have freaked out. To relieve the monotony of the isolation ward of Royal Newcastle Hospital I would send paper aeroplanes out the window to the beachfront road below. Anyone who unfolded one of these planes would find a scab and a note informing them they would get the pox and would die within 48 hours.
Beaker escaped with extended diarrhoea and a vomiting session blamed on heatstroke and cheap alcohol. No one ever did work out what I had. We didn't think to tell the doctors about drinking from the stream and they didn't think to ask. The connection between health and pollution wasn't on the agenda. It was the early eighties – the episode of A Country Practice where Molly's pig died after drinking contaminated water hadn't screened yet.
OK, HERE WE ARE. THE SITE COVERS ALMOST 194 HECTARES but the contamination zone goes about 1.5 kilometres in every direction. Greenpeace reckons this is some of the most contaminated land in the country. The Environment Protection Authority says it "does not meet modern health and environment standards" and in 2003 ordered the company to clean it up until it "no longer poses any threat to the community or the environment."
Almost 400 people work here – some of them fifth-generation smelter workers we can trace back to the very first day of operations in 1897. In that time they have made zinc, sulphuric acid, superphosphate, coal gas, cement and roasted zinc concentrates – whatever they are. Since the sixties they have mostly made lead for car batteries. I find it hard to imagine life without my car battery.
Come this way and check out the town. We call the style outer-suburban-working-poor-meets-near-desperation – it's very très in these parts. Here's something – all these homes here in First Street are owned by the company. So are all of the ones in Second Street and some of the ones in Third Street. In the early 1990s the company bought the lot of them – just like that. It was because testing found that the soil here was contaminated with lead – that the air was contaminated with lead – that the kids were contaminated with lead.
When kids are contaminated with lead they can get sick. They can have behavioural problems. They can have mental development problems. They can have disorders of the internal organs. They can have disorders of the nervous system. They get weird little things that local GP's can't identify. The level of blood lead considered safe keeps falling. At the moment it is 10 micrograms per decilitre. In 1991 more than three quarters of the kids in Boolaroo had levels higher than this.
WHEN THIS INFORMATION BECAME PUBLIC Pasminco appeared proactive. It spent millions upgrading the plant. It helped establish an environmental health centre. It volunteered to carry out possibly the boldest pollution-remediation program undertaken in this country. It was world's best practice stuff – tear down the houses closest to the smelter and build a great big dirt wall. Most of the town was into the great-big-dirt-wall concept. They were disappointed when Pasminco changed its mind after the acquisitions. Instead of demolishing all the houses it cleaned most of them up. It laid new topsoil and turf, sucked tonnes of lead dust out of the ceilings and kilos out of carpets, sealed all the air vents and filled various holes and cracks with Selleys No More Gaps. It then put the houses on the rental market.
This is Roland and his girlfriend Sarah. They rent one of the houses in the remediation zone.
"Guys, we are wondering what attracted you to a house inside a contamination zone?"
"The rent's good."
"How good?"
"Let's just say we aren't complaining."
"Are you concerned about the effect lead in the air may have on your health?"
"Mate, I've lived in Boolaroo all my life and there's nothing wrong with me."
"So do you have to work at the Sulphide to get one of these special deals?"
"No, mate – I'm on a disability pension."
"OK. So any special requirements to live here?"
"Yeah, a couple of lease conditions. You have to promise to keep the place real clean and vacuum up and wipe off and hose away all the dust and shit. You've gotta promise not to grow any vegies, you can't have any pets or animals and you can't have any pregnant women or kids under 12."
"It says that on your lease?"
"Of course, mate. The lead – it fucks with the kiddies' heads."
Pasminco leases the houses from First Street through to one side of Third Street, from the main road up to Munibung Hill, to punters like Roland and Sarah under the same conditions. Yes, the politicians know about it. A commission of inquiry reckons it's fine, reckon it's not a problem, reckons it's all right, mate, that a private corporation has established my home town – Boolaroo – place of many flies – as Australia's first child-free zone.
I should let you know that Roland and Sarah aren't really Roland and Sarah. I can't tell you any of my friends' real names because: "We have to live here and you can just go back to Melbourne and drink lattes."
Residents like them have put it on the line before. When the mainstream media got the taste of a story both A Current Affair and Today Tonight buzzed around asking locals to hold their lead-affected babies high for 15 minutes of blame. The people who responded – assuming their fellow Australians would be outraged and pressure the Government to shut the plant – instead became targets.
Despite pleas from Pasminco and ‘No Lead' for conciliation, things on the street got real. The most vocal of the pro-factory camp took it to the loudest of the anti-factory camp – in the streets, in the pubs and outside the school yard. Death threats. Rape threats. Dead horses. This is what happens when you tell a town its jobs and the health of its kids are mutually exclusive.