View from Munibung Hill - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Andrew Belk
THE KIDS HERE HAVE BEEN GETTING THEIR BLOOD checked for lead for more than 10 years now.
This is Ryan. He is eight and a half.
"Ryan, why do you have to get a needle?"
"To see if there is lead in my blood."
"Why do we want to see if there is lead in your blood?"
"Because it's bad."
"Do you know where the lead comes from?"
"From the air."
"Do you know what they make at the Sulphide?"
"Is it sulphide?"
This brown-eyed monster is Ellie. She is six.
"Ellie, why do you have to get a needle?'
"For my blood."
"Do you know what lead is?"
"Yes. It can get on your hands and then you have to wash them."
"Do you wash your hands?"
"Yes. But the boys only pretend. There is a box with a special light you can put your hand in and see the dirt."
"Do you know what they make at the Sulphide?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Peli!"
Yes, Peli. The groover Pelican who teaches kids around here how to live with lead. His beak is all over the literature of local health and educational organisations. Not too long ago there was a special presentation for a series of Peli books the kids had put together. Jo, one of the mums, will tell you.
"I was watching the kids up on stage and they were doing the lead rap and singing about Peli and about how to keep lead safe. I was really proud of them and all the work they had done being lead safe. Then the Sulphide let out one of those loud bangs ... you know those loud bangs it makes ... I looked across at the officials from the Education Department and the Health Department and Pasminco then up at these tiny little faces on stage and I could see the smoke, see the smoke coming out of the smelter behind them and it just hit me. I just started to cry."
Millions have been spent trying to clean this town up. They spent a fortune remediating my little old school, stripping, sealing, painting, planting trees. They dug up the entire grounds and took it away in trucks. They brought a new one in the same way. It all happened quickly – one day the kids and the teachers arrived to be told they had a week to pack up. They were being moved to demountables at another school for the term. Have I mentioned that an independent report commissioned by the local council concluded that remediation was pretty much pointless while the smelter continues to operate. I knew you were wondering about that.
"Wash, wipe, scrape. She'll be right, mate," says Peli the Pelican.
COME ON. WALK DOWN COCKLE CREEK WITH ME and on the way I'll tell you another story.
Beaker and I came down here early one winter morning to find some bait. Most of the town was still asleep. Straightaway we could tell something was wrong because fat walls of steam were climbing from the creek into the air. We walked in a little way and found the water was nice and warm. We thought this was the most tops thing we had seen for ages and soon we were in our jocks and out in the middle of the creek.
All of a sudden Beaker started screaming about something attacking him. Then I felt it. Slimy things nudging at my legs and back. It was mullet: hundreds and hundreds of dead mullet floating down the middle of Cockle Creek.
OK. Here we are. Notice the black gritty sand along the foreshore. That's slag. Slag is a by-product of the smelting process and there are tens of thousands of tonnes of it around here. It was used as fill for roadworks and parks and sporting ovals and building sites for decades. There are more than 2500 identified slag sites in the area. They're the ones they know about. In the old days you could flag down a slag truck and for a "tenner", or sometimes just a cuppa and cake, you could have a load taken to your house – it's great for lawns and vegie patches and it saved the men a trip. No one knows where it all went.
The local council reckons the slag is fine if it is covered with grass or concrete. They say all the slag in public areas around here is covered with grass or concrete or geomesh.
Now, see those boys over there on the BMX bikes. See how they have piled up the dirt to make jumps. That dirt is slag. Slag is 2.5 per cent lead. Lead rhymes with dead.
Let's ring the remediation centre.
"Hi. We're worried about the danger to children from slag."
"All the slag has been covered with turf."
"There is some exposed slag down on the foreshore at Cockle Creek."
"How do you know it's slag?"
"Are you kidding? Anyway, the site is on a map in that report the council commissioned, the one that concluded that existing exposed smelter slag most probably constitutes a significant risk of harm under section 60 of the NSW Contaminated Land Management Act. Shouldn't there be some signs or something?"
"I can't comment, I haven't seen it."
"The slag?"
"No, the report."
"Is slag dangerous?"
"I can't comment."
"Why not?"
"I haven't seen the report."
Look, the little one is barefoot. What do you think will happen to him?
COME ON – LET'S GO READ THE GRAFITTI on the big wooden barrier fence. On the way I'll tell you a story. Shortly after my visit home the Sulphide Factory began to wind down its operations to prepare to close the plant.
By September 16 only ten people were left. On that day I rang to ask a question but no one answered. Knowing the phone was ringing out to an empty desk inside that big old bastard gave me goosebumps. ♦