What does the Latrobe Valley’s asbestos history teach us about delayed workplace harm, institutional memory and the importance of listening to lived experience? There is a familiar way of recording Australia’s industrial history. We document when a power station opened, how much electricity it generated, how many people it employed and when it finally closed. We remember the engineers, the infrastructure and the contribution made to the state. What is less likely to survive i

One of the unexpected lessons from making Shattered has been learning how difficult it is to connect history. Much of our research has involved travelling to communities, reading inquiry reports, speaking with people whose lives have been shaped by work and injury and, on more than one occasion, working through archive boxes with the assistance of parliamentary staff because many of the historical records we were seeking had not yet been fully digitised. Research like this te

From Lithgow to Mount Kembla, Melbourne, Canberra and Cobar, every place we visited became part of the story because understanding work, injury and recovery begins with understanding the communities in which they unfold. One of the questions we are asked most often is why Shattered was filmed across Australia. After all, much of the research could have been undertaken from a desk. Reports are publicly available, experts can be interviewed online and archives have never been m

Women leaving the Lithgow Small Arms Factory during the Second World War. As Australia's workforce changed, so too did the nation's understanding of responsibility, workplace safety and recovery. For more than a century, Australia has continually redefined what responsibility, safety and recovery should mean when work changes a life. They are smiling. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary shift ending. Women stream out of the Lithgow Small Arms Factory after another day'

Judge Ralph Joseph Perdriau (1880–1975), inaugural Chairman of the NSW Workers' Compensation Commission. Contemporary newspaper reports described him as a judge who insisted on visiting workplaces and standing beside workers to better understand the jobs they performed before deciding workers' compensation cases. Digitally enhanced from a photograph published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 June 1950. On 1 July 1926, the newly created Workers' Compensation Commission began i