21st November 2022
A forest shelter will be built at the National Arboretum to allow the more than 1000 families whose houses were torn down to remove the threat of the asbestos loose fill insulation. It will serve as a dedicated public place to commemorate the homes and the loved ones lost to the asbestos crises. Sustainable Building Minister Rebecca Vassarotti said the shelter would form part of the healing process for thousands of Canberrans, who owned, lived in, or worked on a Mr Fluffy house — of which there were 1,029 across 56 suburbs.
In 2019, a community and expert reference group recommended a memorial, like that erected in memory of the 2003 Canberra bushfires, made up of plant cuttings that represented not only the homes lost by Mr Fluffy families, but their gardens too. Kathleen Read, who reluctantly sold her property to the ACT Government during the 2014 buyback scheme, said "Losing the garden was… it was hard, it was as bad as losing the house”. In her previous home, she had created her own backyard sanctuary for her family, affectionately called a "secret garden" by a neighbour, due to the deliberate planting around the fence line, all of which was lost when her home was demolished.
For Kathleen, the memorial is too little, too late. Kathleen has said the government's planned place of reflection at the arboretum means "absolutely nothing”. “To me, I think it's their way of accepting that, yes, this happened, but putting up this thing, this shelter … out the way," she said. During the buybacks, the ACT government stored the keys from over 1,000 of the houses, and Kathleen would prefer they be used as part of a display or installation. "Hang them in the Legislative Assembly chamber where it is a constant always reminder to them that people vote for them and they're meant to have some compassion about the way they treat people," she said.
But another former Fluffy owner, Jennifer Cameron, believes the place of reflection is a "nice idea". "I think the people who don't know anything about it of course will be interested, I suppose," she said. "People who are Mr Fluffy residents — who lost their homes — I just think it's somewhere that we can go and remember it, those who want to. I guess there are some who don't want to."
Further to this, the memorial could be a thought-provoking place, for those that are unaware of the severity of asbestos exposure and contamination, and could potentially prevent future exposures, by prompting people to check their homes prior to any renovations that could disturb asbestos containing materials within the home.
The ACT government is now seeking community feedback on the proposed messages and accompanying stories told through the forest shelter. "We do hope this will be seen as a really positive move in terms of really acknowledging the experience of thousands of people in Canberra," Ms Vassarotti said. "Telling people's stories in terms of what it meant to them and what we can learn from these kinds of experiences."
