Wittenoom does not appear on road signs. It is erased. Disappeared from official maps. No one lives there and it is forbidden to visit. It is a ghost town. Before, many years ago, it was a place of prefabricated houses with a grocery store, two schools, a nursery, a hospital, a church, a bar, an open-air cinema, tennis courts, football and cricket fields, and even its own police station. It was built around a blue asbestos mine so that, in the middle of nowhere, workers and their families could live.
It was in western Australia, in a remote desert area of the Pilbara region. Perth, the nearest big city, was about 1,400 kilometers away. More or less the distance between Madrid and Geneva. Life was not easy in that place, but the miners, many of them European immigrants, agreed to isolate themselves from the world for some months, even years, in exchange for a good salary.
It was the forties, fifties, and sixties of the 20th century. Millions of people left the poorest countries of Europe after World War II in search of economic opportunities. Spaniards emigrated mainly to Germany, Switzerland, France, or Belgium. Others crossed the Atlantic heading to America. And a few dared to go around the world to Australia, a country with which Franco’s regime had closed a migration agreement that began in 1958 and brought nearly 8,000 Spaniards there. The first went to work in sugarcane harvesting. Later, in construction, tobacco, logging, or mining. They called it Operation Kangaroo.
One of the companies seeking labor was Australian Blue Asbestos, a subsidiary of CSR (Colonial Sugar Refining Company) that had been operating a blue asbestos mine in Wittenoom since 1943, a mineral very resistant to heat used in countless products during those years: pipes, trains, ships, electrical installations… That deposit had huge amounts of crocidolite, the so-called blue asbestos. The company saw a great business opportunity and never warned the workers that it was dangerous.
But it was.
Since then, more than 2,000 workers and residents of Wittenoom have died, sometimes decades after leaving the town, from diseases linked to asbestos exposure. A silent and treacherous tragedy that many affected call the “Australian Chernobyl” because of the magnitude of what happened and the delayed effects it caused.
This is the story of what happened there. And of Spanish emigration in those years, told through two families who coincided in that lost town. Daniel and María’s. Milagros and Ramón’s. Two of their children were born in the same hospital bed surrounded by lizards, red dust, and asbestos. Lots of asbestos.
Welcome to Wittenoom, land of opportunities.
Chapter 1. Madrid, 1961. A dance that ends in Australia
María Bernal and Daniel Écija met while dancing. She was 20 years old. He had just turned 26. She lived in a porter’s lodge on Fúcar Street, in Madrid’s Letras neighborhood, was a seamstress, and cared for her sick father. He started helping his father with the taxi at nine years old and had already worked in France and Germany when he met María. She had never had a boyfriend and hardly went out partying. Her mother tried to protect her from the young men in the building, eager to hit on the pretty porter’s daughter. But Daniel was different. He was formal and respectful, tall and handsome.
That Saturday, September 16, 1961, María went with a friend to the afternoon dance at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. It was there she met Daniel. They agreed to see each other a few days later. María still remembers the first kiss. Then everything went very fast. He asked her father for her hand —“don’t worry about anything, Vicente, I love your daughter”— and a year later, on September 20, 1962, they got married. Four days later, they emigrated to Australia.
María is now 84 years old. Alzheimer’s has been erasing many memories, but she still has that trip engraved. The fear, the nerves, the excitement, the feeling of adventure. It was the first time she left Madrid, the first time she got on a plane. They only took a small suitcase for both. Neither spoke a word of English. “I stuck close to my husband, like a child,” María says, surrounded by sepia-colored photos from those years. “But I was proud. I had fallen in love with that man and trusted the future…, even though it was so far away. In Spain, neither of us had anything.”
Two of her four children help María reconstruct her story. The eldest, Daniel Écija — like his father — was born in Wittenoom 63 years ago and is today one of the most recognized television producers in Spain, creator of series like Médico de familia or Los Serrano. His sister Arantxa, 58, a director and audiovisual producer, is the one who best preserves the family memory.
When they landed in Australia, someone connected to the Spanish community received them and took them to an immigrant center, where they stayed a few days. María remembers they were in some “barracks.” Then they traveled to Perth, a city experiencing strong industrial growth in the far southwest of the country. There they distributed the newcomers. In that area, most went to construction or factories. Others, to the mines.
Blue asbestos had been extracted in Wittenoom since the 1930s. The Australian Blue Asbestos company, a subsidiary of CSR, a large company that had started in sugar and then expanded to other sectors, took over the mine in 1943. During the forties, fifties, and early sixties, it was in full operation.
A friend of Daniel’s worked there, the one who had convinced him to emigrate to Australia. He earned a good salary, and Daniel thought it was a good way to save money for his family. María was pregnant. Probably since the wedding night.
They arrived in Wittenoom… and it seemed like the set of a western. There were Australian miners, but most were people from all over Europe. Mainly Italians. There were also Greeks, Poles, Irish… and Spaniards. “We met another couple from Madrid there,” María recalls. “Milagros and Ramón. We quickly became close friends.” They also didn’t speak a word of English.
Milagros Barroso was from Navamorcuende, a town in Toledo. She was widowed at 22 with a small child, so to get by she went to work as a servant in a house in Madrid. There she met Ramón de Juan, driver for a high-ranking official of the Franco regime. He was also widowed and had a daughter. They married. He went to work in Germany and there he first heard about the Australian dream. He returned to Madrid and, almost without thinking, they all traveled to the other side of the world. With the children each brought to the marriage, Mercedes de Juan and Víctor Calvo, and the first they had together, José.
Víctor, now 72 years old and living in Madrid, vividly recounts that trip:
—We left Málaga and took more than 20 days by ship to get to Australia. We passed through the Suez Canal… Phew, the heat there. I remember the seasickness. The uncertainty. That feeling of not really knowing where we were going or how we would live. It was fun too, because for a child it was all an adventure. My sister Merce turned 11 on the ship. We arrived and were taken to some barracks with interpreters, but then we were left not understanding anything. Spanish emigration in those years was like that: you grabbed onto anything to get by, like those who come to Spain now.
And he keeps intact, six decades later, the memory of his arrival in Wittenoom:
—The plane was small, propeller-driven, and shook a lot. We landed on a runway in the middle of very, very red land. There was dust everywhere. I had never seen so much dust. They took us to the houses, made of sheet metal, wood, and asbestos cement. That place was extremely isolated, it was the desert of deserts. That first image I have never forgotten. There were all kinds of animals: snakes, tarantulas, huge lizards. Everything was so different from Spain it seemed unreal, like a dream.
The family arrived in town loaded with trunks of warm clothes and shoes they would never use. Ramón started working in the mine while Milagros and the children spent the day in that prefabricated, scorching, dusty settlement with a landscape they had never seen before.
Chapter 2. Wittenoom, 1962-1964. Life in the mine
Daniel Écija worked eight-hour shifts. Ramón de Juan doubled shifts when he could and often worked 16 hours. They became inseparable friends. Them and their families.
“On our father’s first day of work there was an explosion and several people died,” Daniel son recounts. “I think when he saw all that he thought he had to get out of there as soon as possible, but my mother was pregnant and they had no money, so they stayed a few months.”
His sister Arantxa remembers another story their father often told. A piece of asbestos fell on his foot and, strangely, it was a wound that never closed. In one of the family portraits from that time, Daniel appears with his foot bandaged. They have returned to that photo many times since.
“There were hardly any safety measures,” Víctor explains. “There were many accidents and ambulances appeared all the time. That’s why there was a hospital in the settlement.”
The men who had arrived alone, without family, lived in tents set up for singles. María and Milagros did not feel very safe and usually did not leave the house while their husbands were in the mine. “There were prostitutes to serve the workers,” María recalls. “I was pregnant and tried not to go out much until Daniel returned. I waited for him to come back to go shopping. I was very young, very much a child, and I was afraid.”
“My father told us about Wittenoom as a lawless place,” his son explains. “A town with a rather primitive life where everything was organized by nationality. There was even kangaroo poaching. They went at night with jeeps, shone lights on them, and killed them, according to what he told us. He went one day and never went back. There were also people who stole livestock. He said he even saw the policeman, whom he called the sheriff, selling stolen meat one day.”
There were two schools. One public and one religious. “My brother and I made our first communion there, in shorts and a good haircut,” Víctor says. “In the morning we went to school and then played among ourselves, near home. We didn’t interact much with the other children.” His sister Mercedes does have good memories of two friends, one Italian and one Australian, and also of the nuns: “We were children and children adapt to everything very quickly. I was fine in Wittenoom, calm.”
They bought everything in the only supermarket in town. Every 15 days a truck arrived with goods. “My mother ordered by signs because she never learned English,” Víctor says. She cooked lentils, chickpeas, lots of macaroni, meatballs. Sometimes they managed to get an Italian friend to send some cold cuts from Perth. “For fun, we went swimming in some nearby pools. There were no televisions in the houses. Every day was the same: my stepfather went to the mine and my mother took care of us. She went shopping, cooked, washed clothes by hand… Without ever complaining. I never saw her angry.”
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Milagros, who had not yet turned 30 when she arrived in Wittenoom, is now 95 years old and lives in Madrid. She remembers the parties some families organized in their homes and how it seemed many managed to have fun despite the isolation. They didn’t go, but they really liked the open-air cinema, which was set up with white sheets on which the movie was projected.
María and Milagros experienced two pregnancies in that mining town. Their children were born in the same bed in the same hospital.
Milagros gave birth in March 1963 to John Patrick. They named him after some Irish friends they had made in town. Shortly after, in June, it was María’s turn, who had a complicated delivery. The baby was very large. Forceps had to be used and she was weak because she had just overcome a severe kidney infection. The baby would be named Daniel, like his father. The woman remembers huge lizards entering the room. Later they explained that they were almost allies: they ate the snakes that came to the hospital attracted by the smell of breast milk.
Neither family was ever aware of being in a dangerous place beyond the obvious risks of a mine. At that time, the company and authorities already knew that blue asbestos was toxic and posed a serious health risk, but no one told them. And it was everywhere.
“It was a highly regarded and highly valued material used for a lot of things: roads, houses, roofs, plugs,” Víctor recalls. “In Wittenoom, a town built from nothing, it had been used a lot. We played with it and unraveled it. We put it in our mouths. When we touched it, a little dust came out that impregnated everything. We were surrounded by blue asbestos, but we weren’t afraid. No one warned us about anything.”
There is no census by nationality that determines how many Spaniards passed through Wittenoom. These two families remember a couple more, but they only stayed a few months of the several decades the mine was in full operation. In total, about 6,500 men and 500 women worked there between 1943 and 1966, according to a 1992 article in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine that analyzes what happened. And many of them were accompanied by their families.
The Écija-Bernal family left Wittenoom when Daniel was just over a month old. They left after his baptism, which was officiated by a Polish priest. They still keep the photograph that Daniel and María sent to her parents and on the back wrote: “See, grandpa? I am being baptized and I haven’t cried at all. I really want to meet you, I love you very much.” The date: July 7, 1963. They stayed in town about 10 months.
The De Juan-Barroso family stayed a little longer: about two and a half years between 1962 and 1964. Ramón had gone with a three-year contract closed from Spain, but left earlier.
Both families moved to Perth after their time in Wittenoom. They worked hard, saved money, bought a television, a car, a washing machine, and moved on with their lives. The Écija-Bernal family returned to Madrid in 1966. The De Juan-Barroso family did so in 1971, although the eldest daughter, Mercedes, had fallen in love and married an Italian, Giuseppe, and stayed in Australia, where she still lives near her four children, eleven grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
No one imagined then that Wittenoom would cross their path again.
Chapter 3. Madrid, 1991. Mesothelioma
Life in Spain went very well for Daniel Écija, a self-made man, steady, tireless worker, modern, thoughtful, and charismatic whom his family revered. He raised his four children with his driver’s salary. The couple loved each other very much. It can be said they were a more than reasonably happy family.
Until in 1991 they received an unexpected blow.
—Your father has mesothelioma.
—What is that?
—A very rare and extremely aggressive type of cancer. In most cases, it is usually related to asbestos exposure. It is almost impossible to treat successfully.
Nine months after that diagnosis, Daniel Écija died. He was 55 years old.
The word asbestos echoed in the mind of his wife, María, and in that of their children. They began to ask questions. What relationship had their father had with asbestos? When? Where? What was the origin of that mysterious and deadly tumor? Google did not exist then, and it was not easy to get information or find answers. But soon they came to the family albums, to Wittenoom, Australia. To the 10 months between 1962 and 1963 that their father spent in a remote mine. But too much time had passed. Or had it?
Little by little they learned about the extreme risk all who had worked or lived there had run, that the mine had closed in 1966, that more than 2,000 people had died from conditions linked to asbestos exposure in Wittenoom: mesothelioma, or lung cancer, or complications from diseases like asbestosis. They also learned that deaths could occur decades after inhaling asbestos fibers.
The figure accepted by authorities is more than 2,000 deaths related to contamination in Wittenoom. But Melita Markey, CEO of the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia, nuances this figure: “The Government stopped counting at 2,000, but now it is estimated that the number may be over 4,000. And it keeps increasing. There are children of officials who worked in the town, like police or teachers, who are now getting sick. All these families live with a terrible legacy, thinking that this may have meant a death sentence for their children.”
The miners were unaware of the dangers of the place, but the company and authorities were not. The article in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine explains in detail how the whole process went. How in 1944 there were first warnings about asbestos dust in Wittenoom; how in 1946 a case of asbestosis had already been diagnosed and an inspector from the Western Australia Government’s Department of Mines described the working conditions as “terrifying”; how in 1948 a public health doctor in the area, Eric Saint, warned in writing that dust levels were extremely dangerous; and how the alerts accumulated over the following years.
In 1958 another inspector described the situation in the mine as a disaster. This happened three years before the Écija and De Juan families arrived there without anyone warning them of the danger. By then, numerous cases of serious lung diseases had been detected among workers. One of the first mesothelioma diagnoses related to Wittenoom was described in the early sixties.
Cases continued to increase. The mine closed in 1966, but it was too late for thousands of people. At that time, 1,468 men and 421 women lived there, according to the census cited by the medical journal.
After the closure, lawsuits followed. During the first years, without success. The affected formed the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia in 1979 and began winning lawsuits and bringing to light documents proving that the company had known about the mine’s risks for years without taking measures. A judge ruled in 1988 that the mining company had acted with “continuous, conscious, and stubborn” disregard for the safety and health of its workers.
In 1989 the CSR company reached an agreement with 200 affected and paid 18.3 million Australian dollars (10.9 million euros) in compensation. And it was only the beginning, because litigation continued. In total, according to ABC, the Australian public television, they have paid tens of millions of dollars to former mine workers and their families.
Authorities began pushing for Wittenoom’s closure in 1978, but it was very gradual. In 2006 they cut electricity and services. A year later, it lost its town status and its name was removed from official maps to discourage the curious and tourists from disasters. The last resident held out until 2022.
Sixty years after the mine’s closure, those lands remain toxic due to tiny fibers of blue asbestos scattered across the landscape. And the area classified as contaminated is huge, about 46,840 hectares. That is the fight now: cleaning the area. An organization has filed this year on behalf of the Banjima, the indigenous people native to those lands, a claim for 1.5 billion Australian dollars (900 million euros) against the government for contamination of the land and waters.
The Western Australian Government responds to EL PAÍS by email that it is aware of the “serious public health and safety problem” around Wittenoom and that they continue working on different long-term options for the area and surrounding regions.
Chapter 4. Madrid-Perth, 2026. The tests
Mercedes de Juan stayed to live in Australia with her husband, Giuseppe. She is now 75 years old and tells by video call from Perth how she gradually learned, through the press, about Wittenoom’s closure, mesothelioma cases, the political debate and what had been allowed, and the more than 2,000 deaths.
These days she has to undergo “tests.” She and her brother John, who also returned to live in Australia decades ago with his Spanish wife, Eva. Every year, like all former Wittenoom residents who want to — and who are fewer and fewer — they undergo medical exams paid for by the government to ensure their lungs are fine. The two siblings always go together. “They do a scan and a lung function test,” Mercedes explains. Although, in the case of mesothelioma, if they find something, there is little to be done. It still has a poor prognosis. “There have been cases of deceased who never even lived there, who only went on a school trip,” John explains. “But we have never gone with fear. In our family, we have been lucky and so far no one has gotten sick from asbestos. My father died in Madrid at 87 after advanced Alzheimer’s.”
In John’s passport, as in Daniel Écija’s, the place of birth is that small lost settlement now off the maps. “That place changed our lives forever,” Daniel says now, alongside his mother and sister Arantxa. “We were left without a father, and my mother without a husband, because of a company that had no qualms about risking the lives of its workers to make money, and because of authorities who did not stop it. My father, like so many others, was just an emigrant looking for a better life on the other side of the world.”
The first time Daniel returned to Australia as an adult, a policeman stopped him at the airport checkpoint. It was 1985. His father was still alive and had encouraged him to make that trip. The officer looked at him, lowered his head to his document, looked up again, and said: “So, from Wittenoom, huh? A terrible place.”