Asbestos in the Latrobe Valley: The Danger That Followed Workers Home
- Editor
- Jul 17
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 22
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 is the human version of that history: the dust that filled a room, the work clothes carried through the front door, the warnings that were never given and the illnesses that appeared decades later.
The Latrobe Valley powered Victoria, but many of the people who made that possible carried a cost that was not visible when their working lives ended. Their stories remind us that institutional memory is not enough. If we want to understand what work has asked of people, lived experience must be treated as evidence, heard early and preserved alongside the official record.
The valley that powered Victoria
Large-scale electricity production began in the Latrobe Valley during the early 1920s. The State Electricity Commission of Victoria was established to develop the region’s enormous brown coal deposits, with Sir John Monash becoming its first chairman in 1921. Electricity generated at Yallourn began reaching Melbourne in 1924. Monash University’s archival history describes the project as one that transformed both the state and the Valley.
The SECV progressively developed the open-cut mine and the Yallourn power station complex. It also built a town for its workers and their families.
Yallourn was no makeshift settlement. Influenced by the garden-city movement, it had landscaped streets, parks, schools, shops, a cinema and housing that compared favourably with many other regional communities. The town reflected a larger social idea: the people undertaking essential work should be given the foundations of a good life.
Yet beneath that promise sat another history.
Asbestos was widely used across Australian industry because it was strong, durable and resistant to fire and heat. In power stations, where boilers, turbines and steam pipes operated at extreme temperatures, it was used extensively as insulation.
At the time, its presence was treated as an ordinary part of industrial life.
Dust inside the power stations
Former power industry worker Ray Harris worked across the Yallourn A, B, C, D and E stations between 1956 and 1962, and later at Hazelwood Power Station until 1989. In a statement recorded by Slater & Gordon and published in a history written by Zoe Taylor-Lynch, he described bags of dry asbestos being emptied into large bins and mixed with water to create a paste used for lagging pipes, boilers and other equipment.
The mixing process produced significant dust. Workers were covered in it.
Exposure did not end once construction was complete. When steam pipes leaked, old lagging had to be removed and replaced, disturbing the material again. Harris recalled that during his 33 years in power-station operations, warnings were not provided and protective equipment was not issued.
These accounts matter because a technical description such as asbestos lagging tells us what a material was used for, but it does not tell us what it was like to stand beside it, mix it, breathe it or return home with it embedded in work clothes.
ABC reporting of the Victorian Government’s later apology also recorded that family members were exposed through contaminated clothing brought home from the power stations. The workplace danger did not always remain at work. It entered laundries, kitchens and family homes. ABC News
When the consequences take decades to appear
Asbestos-related diseases often develop many years after exposure. Mesothelioma, asbestosis and asbestos-related cancers may not become evident until decades after the work that caused the exposure has ended. The Australian Government’s asbestos safety agency warns that there is no known safe level of exposure and that the long latency of these diseases can separate the original workplace danger from its eventual consequences. Asbestos and Silica Safety and Eradication Agency
That delay creates a particular kind of injustice. By the time a person becomes ill, the workplace may have closed, ownership may have changed, records may be difficult to find and the people responsible for earlier decisions may be long gone.
The physical injury arrives late, but so too can recognition.
The Gippsland Asbestos Related Diseases Support organisation, known as GARDS, reports that documents obtained through Freedom of Information indicated that approximately 140,000 Latrobe Valley power-station workers may have been exposed to asbestos between the 1920s and the 1980s. It also cites a 2003 study that found former power-industry workers were developing mesothelioma at seven times the Victorian rate.
These figures should be read with their stated source and historical context, but they convey the scale of the legacy described by workers and families across the Valley. GARDS history of asbestos in the Latrobe Valley
Australia prohibited the use, manufacture, import and export of asbestos-containing products at the end of 2003. A ban, however, cannot undo exposure that has already occurred, nor can it remove asbestos from every older building and industrial site. Most importantly, it cannot return the years taken from people who became ill.
An apology after years of suffering
On 15 October 2008, during a regional sitting of the Victorian Parliament at Monash University’s Gippsland campus, Premier John Brumby apologised to former SECV workers and their families.
The apology followed years of work by GARDS and acknowledged that people had suffered through exposure while undertaking their everyday work. The Premier told them:
“The government sincerely apologises to these workers and their families for the injuries caused by the exposure at the SECV.”
The apology mattered because it placed responsibility into the public record. It acknowledged that the illnesses experienced by workers and families were not simply private medical misfortunes. They were connected to work performed for a state-owned institution and to an industry that helped build modern Victoria. Contemporary ABC report
Recognition cannot reverse disease, but its absence can deepen suffering. An apology tells people that what happened to them is seen, that their account belongs within the official history and that the contribution they made will not be remembered separately from the price some were required to pay.
A permanent place for remembrance
An apology entered the harm into the official record, but the Latrobe Valley still has no dedicated public memorial to the people who died from asbestos-related diseases connected with its power industry. ACV/GARDS says it has sought such a place for more than 25 years and is now fundraising for a memorial sculpture and mural proposed for the Moe Botanical Gardens.
The sculpture depicts a power worker with his young daughter, deliberately shifting the story beyond the worker alone. It recognises that asbestos-related disease reached into marriages, childhoods and family life, including through dust carried home on clothing. The figures are intended to stand slightly larger than life, but with a familiar and unassuming posture that invites connection rather than distance.
A complementary mural would show workers leaving the Valley’s power stations, set against Loy Yang A and B, Morwell, Yallourn and Hazelwood. Many of their stories remain largely untold. Together, the sculpture, mural and interpretive panel would preserve something an industrial chronology cannot: the people behind the infrastructure and the families who continued carrying the consequences long after a shift ended.
The proposed memorial therefore belongs within this story not simply as a fundraising project, but as an example of lived experience becoming public memory. It would create an accessible place where families could gather, names and experiences could be honoured, and the community’s contribution to Victoria could be remembered in full.
Support or learn more about the proposed memorial: ACV/GARDS Memorial Fundraiser
From Latrobe Valley to Wallerawang
The story has echoes in Wallerawang, near Lithgow in New South Wales, where generations of workers helped power another state.
Wallerawang Power Station began generating electricity in 1957 and closed in 2014. Its chimneys and boiler house were demolished in 2021, but the asbestos legacy did not disappear with the structures. Planning documents for the station’s closure estimated that approximately 7,000 cubic metres of asbestos waste would require disposal. NSW Planning Portal
The histories of Wallerawang and the Latrobe Valley are not identical, and we should not assume that the experiences or disease patterns of one community precisely mirror those of another. Yet they raise the same important questions.
What did workers know? What were they told? What protections were available? What happened when illness appeared years later? Who supported the families, and whose account became part of the permanent record?
The official history of Wallerawang can tell us when the station opened, how much electricity it produced and when its chimneys fell. Only workers and families can tell us what it was like to live alongside it, what was carried home and what remained after the gates closed.
That is why Shattered has begun documenting Wallerawang: The Danger We Couldn’t See, alongside the story of asbestos in the Latrobe Valley.
Lived experience is more than data
Institutions often speak about preserving institutional memory, but institutional memory usually preserves what the institution recorded about itself. It may contain policies, reports, decisions, minutes and statistics, while leaving out the things that were never formally documented.
Lived experience reaches into those gaps. It tells us whether a warning was understood, whether protective equipment was actually available, whether workers felt safe enough to raise concerns and what happened to a family after someone became ill. These stories should not be gathered only at the end of an inquiry or after damage has become impossible to deny. Nor should they be reduced to de-identified data once their emotional and social meaning has been removed.
They should be heard early enough to change what happens next.
The asbestos story also shows why medicine alone cannot carry the full responsibility for recovery. A doctor may diagnose mesothelioma or asbestosis, but cannot by themselves provide recognition, accountability, financial security, family support or the assurance that the person’s experience will help protect someone else.
Care must extend beyond the consultation room.
Why this story belongs in Doctor Doctor
In Episode Two of Shattered, Doctor Doctor — When Care Matters Most, we visit the Latrobe Valley because the story of workplace health does not begin when a person enters a medical practice, and it does not end when a diagnosis is made.
It begins with what happened at work. It continues through the long period when harm may remain unseen. It reaches into families and communities, and it is shaped by whether institutions listen, acknowledge responsibility and respond to people as human beings rather than as cases moving through a process.
The people of the Latrobe Valley did more than supply labour to a power industry. They helped power Victoria. The same is true of the workers at Wallerawang who helped power New South Wales.
Remembering their contribution without remembering its human cost would leave the history incomplete.
A reflection
When an institution records its own history, whose voice is missing?
If workers and families had been listened to earlier, what might have been prevented—and how might their experiences help us recognise the workplace dangers that are emerging today?
Source acknowledgment: This article draws on the asbestos history researched and written by Zoe Taylor-Lynch for the Australian Asbestos Network and GARDS, supplemented by government, archival and contemporary reporting.
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