Death Sentence

Stewart Harrity PHOTO Rosey Boehm

Mateship counts for Adelaide waterside worker dying from asbestos exposure

Stewart Harrity, 58, is the longest serving waterside worker on the Adelaide wharves, clocking up four decades on the job. He never smoked a day in his life, kept fit, played golf and looked like a man in his prime.

But that all changed overnight.

A few weeks back in July, Stewart was forced to hand in his resignation. Now he's got a year, maybe more, to catch up with his golf, before he dies:

"It all started in April. I had aches and pains in my right side. Sleeping was hard, the pain was that bad. At first I thought I'd pulled a muscle. I play a bit of golf. But the pain persisted. I was really sore, so I decided to see a doctor. I thought it could be some sort of virus.

"'You've got more than a virus,' the GP told me. 'You've got a real problem. You'd better go straight to hospital.'

"My wife drove me in that night. They drained the fluid out of my lungs and gave me antibiotics to clear up the infection. The doctors told me to wait till things settled down before having a biopsy. But they already had a fair idea. The tumour showed up in the first scan."

When Stewart returned home he found he'd lost 10-11 kilos in the nine days he'd been in hospital. But he felt better and could exercise.

"Five weeks later I was back on the golf course, feeling great. But the day before I was due to go back into hospital it started to play up again.

"When they say 'You'd better come into my room, we've got to have a talk in private', you think the worst.

"The doctor told me it was malignant. We're looking at 12 months, if I'm lucky a few years. Mesothelioma. I couldn't even spell it a couple of months back. Now I know just about everything there is to know. It's like a death sentence. Someone is telling you your life's cut short."

Stewart started on the wharves as a boy of 19. It was 1964. For the next 10 years he'd regularly work unloading hessian bags of asbestos off the ships.

"We probably handled it up to 1975. It wasn't our only job. We might go a month before we got it again. Our gang stayed together at P&O for 10-20 years.

"We loaded the stuff in hessian bags. They'd bust and it would be blowing all over the place, depending on the weather. Lots of cargo would blow around. Most of the work those days was dirty.

"They never told us anything. We had no idea of the danger. Back then we weren't issued with gloves or masks. It was blowing everywhere. You could be working down the hatch on another cargo and you could have breathed it in. The wind would blow it all over the deck, all over the wharf. Everybody was exposed to it. The guys up in the derricks. Everyone."

Most of Stewart's gang were a good 10 or 20 years older and have long retired. But word of the impact of asbestos got around once old mates got sick or died.

"One of my mates retired and has asbestosis. Then I heard another one had died. But I was fit, played a lot of sport and had never smoked in my life. It's something you think happens to other people and is never going to happen to you."

Stewart contacted the union rooms and was put onto union lawyers Slater and Gordon to get his compensation from the Stevedoring Industry Finance Commission (See p15). His doctors advised him to try an operation and chemo after having another biopsy to be 100 per cent sure.

"There's no way I could go back to work. There's a lot of paperwork to get through. The union's helping. My wife's been with me since day one. My three boys live nearby. I'm well looked after. Everyone knows. These things get around pretty quick. I'm healthy at the moment and feeling pretty good. I just try to stay positive. You know just before all this happened I said to my mates I'd give the job away so I could play golf with them every Saturday. So that's what I'll be doing. I love my golf. I'll be happy if I can get a few years in."