Film

Yurlu | Country records the devastating cost of the Wittenoom asbestos mine to the Banjima people and their land. By Susan Chenery.

Yurlu | Country tells the story of town erased

The late Maitland Parker in a still from the documentary Yurlu | Country.

Credit: Illuminate Films

It’s an old, old story.

The aerial shots – and there are many – sweep across red earth dusted with gnarled eucalyptus, sculptural escarpment, steep gorges carved into sheer rock, flocks of cockatoos high on the wing. But where once there were campfires beside waterholes, now there is poison. Where once was a thriving company town are the boarded-up remnants of houses. A contaminated ghost town.

Wittenoom was erased from maps in 2007, but the toxic legacy of its purpose, mining blue asbestos, remains. The contaminated site covers a staggering 46,840 hectares. Three million tonnes of waste was dumped over the life of the mine and has remained there for 60 years.

This is also the traditional homeland of the Banjima people, who have been here for tens of thousands of years. “The miners never spoke to the Aboriginal people,” says Elder Maitland Parker, 70, in the Walkley Award-shortlisted documentary film Yurlu | Country, written, directed and produced by Yaara Bou Melhem. “The government and miners gave each other the green light. They just went ahead and built the infrastructure. They ignored us.” But it is the Banjima who pay the ultimate price.

Welcome to the Pilbara.

Maitland Parker was a keeper of memories and stories, a leader and advocate. He and others fought for 15 years to gain native title over Banjima Country. In the film, when he visits a waterhole where he used to camp and fish as a kid, he has to wear a hazmat suit and respirator. As children, Parker and his cousins roamed across this land, picking up and chewing the asbestos tailings like gum in the Wittenoom Gorge. Farther down the track, he looks at tailings cascading down a hill and asks, “What has been left behind? All the rubbish, all the tailings. Country is no good. Black and white getting sick.”

Parker is sick himself. He is dignified, eloquent and dying. Diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2016, he survived almost another decade, fuelled by burning injustice and the campaign to clean up the environment so Banjima people can fulfil their cultural obligation of caring for Country. “We can’t go back and connect and heal,” he says. “We risk our health just by going on Country.” Just breathing the air can kill them. The symptoms can take many years to develop after exposure. This arbitrary death sentence hangs over all of them.

Filmed over the last year of Parker’s life, the pared-back simplicity of telling one man’s story is potentially as powerful as any amount of preaching, activism or protesting. “Aboriginal people don’t normally talk about this kind of stuff,” he says of his illness, sitting by a campfire, “but I’ve made it my business to do so.” He and his family weep together when the oncologist tells him after a scan that the treatment is no longer working, the disease can’t be controlled and he should be prepared to deteriorate. The third act of the traditional documentary structure is now inevitable.

By allowing himself to be filmed in his most vulnerable moments, the message is amplified. Parker’s plight speaks for everyone caught in a travesty that most Australians are not aware of, in this nearly forgotten corner of the country. There have been so many others – more than 2000 asbestos-related deaths around Wittenoom. “Some people,” said the late mining magnate Lang Hancock, in a typical display of callousness, “have to suffer so the majority can benefit from asbestos.”

Hancock, who inherited Mulga Downs station from his father, discovered and mined the blue asbestos in the 1930s. Along with some stunningly racist utterances, he exploited the people he lived among. Parker’s parents and grandparents worked long hours both on the station and in the mine. They were covered in asbestos dust daily and were barely paid. Now, because of contamination, the Traditional Owners are locked out of Mulga Downs, where generations were born, died and are buried, their stories still resonating. A birthing tree there is important to Parker.

Wittenoom was mined by CSR until 1966. Parker never worked in the mines – he was a ranger at the adjacent Karijini National Park for more than 40 years. The tailings are being spread by wind and water to new generations. He worries for the children.

Moving slowly at times, the cinematography by Tom Bannigan that savours this spectacular terrain is all the more devastating because the landscape has been so badly abused and scarred. “There is only so much Country can take,” Parker says. “Same as us people, there is only so much we can take.” The film is accompanied by a soundtrack by Helena Czajka that is jarringly, unnecessarily sinister. We know. We get it. We do not need the spooky music.

In one gorgeous sequence, two men on chestnut horses are silhouetted against an enveloping pearly apricot sunset stretching to a flat horizon. One of them, Parker, is dying because of white man’s greed, carelessness and lack of accountability.

You might think there would be monumental anger. Either Melhem’s judicious editing or sensitivity mean that what might have been some very dark times don’t make the final cut. This is not about anger: it is about grief and the perseverance of a marginalised people. Facing death, Parker does not lose his dignity or sink to self-pity. “You don’t just die and you’re gone,” he says, gazing out across the escarpments. “That is never the case with our people. They are still with us in spirit.”

Maitland Parker died in January 2024. Melham was trusted enough to film the love that surrounded him in those final days.

Yurlu | Country is an elegy to a man and a lament for his Country. It doesn’t shout, editorialise, narrate or dictate: it lets Parker and his people tell their story. We see their worried faces. We see that they are embedded in this landscape, every fibre of it, and we see the fractures they live with. We are invited to experience all of this with them. It reminds us of the ongoing generational effects of racism and colonialism and shines a light on a remote place that has been poisoned by Western greed. It is a film that is quiet and gentle but deadly, designed for impact without aggression.

The Banjima Native Title Board plans to launch a legal campaign against the Western Australian government, which is now responsible for managing the clean-up. It will be a test case under Native Title. The closing credits state that in estimates from 2015, it will cost $150 million to clean up Wittenoom and that in 2023 the government received $13.78 billion from mining royalties.

Yurlu | Country might just move things along. Maitland Parker is most definitely still with us in spirit. His voice is being heard loud and clear.

Yurlu | Country is screening in cinemas nationally.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "Toxic legacy".

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