ABC: Mini-series "Devil’s Dust" - Bernie Banton's story

A new ABC-TV mini-series "Devil's Dust" will introduce the James Hardie asbestos scandal to a whole new audience. It is based on journalist Matt Peacock’s 2009 book Killer Company, and the relationship between Peacock and the late Bernie Banton.

Matt Peacock had spent decades at the ABC doggedly investigating the health risks posed by asbestos and whether the James Hardie company had allowed its workers to be exposed to asbestos fibres knowing they were deadly.

By then Peacock was pessimistic after decades of reporting on James Hardie. The company’s spin machine was simply too clever, too powerful, to ever be defeated.

Bernie Banton was an angry man, already dying from an asbestos-related disease and determined to make sure his final days were put to good use bringing those responsible to justice.

The two met when Peacock was researching a 7.30 Report story and the journalist immediately knew Banton was the man who would take the story to the masses.

“He was critical, really,” says Peacock.

“James Hardie had always won the spin war, but when Bernie entered the scene they started losing it.

“I’m pretty certain that if it weren’t for the propaganda war, if it weren’t for the publicity that Bernie generated, legally Hardies was almost home free… But what brought them unstuck was that sheer weight of public pressure and that was really the result of the campaign and the impact that Bernie had on people’s hearts and minds.”

Those snapshots of Banton, gasping for air and breathing oxygen from a portable machine, but speaking with barely repressed fury, are among the defining images of last decade.

Banton, says Peacock of his late friend, “could talk the talk”.

This was a turning point in the campaign for justice for James Hardie’s victims, a campaign that shredded James Hardie’s reputation, resulted in the company agreeing to fund hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the victims, and in the directors of James Hardie being stripped of their corporate positions.

The story of how Matt Peacock pursued James Hardie over the decades and the crucial role that Bernie Banton played was first chronicled in Peacock’s book Killer Company, published in 2009.

It has now been adapted into a two-part TV mini-series, Devil’s Dust, that screens on the ABC on 11 and 12 November.