Asbestos House: the secret history of James Hardie Industries
About this ebook
Asbestos House, the name of the grand headquarters that Hardie built itself in 1929, tells two remarkable tales. It relates the frantic financial engineering in 2001 during which Hardie cut adrift its liabilities to sufferers of asbestos-related disease, the public and political odium that followed, and the extraordinary deal that resulted. It is also the story that the company, knowingly and unknowingly, forgot: how, even as fibro built a nation, the asbestos fibre from which it was made condemned thousands to death.
Reconstructed from hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of documentation, Asbestos House is a multi-award-winning saga of high finance, industrial history, legal intrigue, medical breakthrough and human frailty.
About the author
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for forty years, contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines, and published fifty books, including thirty-one about cricket. He is half of the podcast Cricket Et Cetera/Et Al (with Peter Lalor).
