Or at least it did, until I took a few loose tiles off the bathroom wall, and discovered what appeared to be sheets of Asbestos making up the wall.
Now, Asbestos was once considered the wonder material for building. You could turn it into sheets. It wouldn’t catch fire. You could drill it, saw it. Even make a bathroom cabinet out of it. I know: we had one in the family.
But after a while, people started getting ill. In the UK, it was only used for a few garden sheds, but in Australia most of the post-war dream homes of the Western Suburbs were built of the stuff. And that was when people started keeling over, in alarmingly high numbers.
Instead of being inert – as many builders had thought (as in, wouldn’t ‘ert a fly), it was infact composed of millions of minute fibres, that once sawn, broken, drilled, anything in fact that was the reason why people bought it in the first place, and it would lodge in the lungs, causing a painful death some 20 or 30 years later.
Sydney is now the asbestos death capital of the world, with thousands dead thanks to what they thought was a new life in the country.
And now I’ve found my asbestos sheets, I’m understandably anxious that I don’t follow them. Which is why the whole gammit of environmental waste disposal are swinging into action on Tuesday, sealing the place in plastic, sucking the life out of the air (but, you note, not me) and carting off a ton of asbestos.
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