Poppy Lopatniuk
‘We all live in Wentworth Park … Yet, the key message for all of us with this book is that we ignore our Elders and Elder knowledge at our collective peril.’
Reviews on Tomorrow’s Children
by
Poppy Lopatniuk
By Bronwyn Williams
I met Poppy a few weeks ago – the happy recipient of a luncheon invitation, graciously extended to a friend of a friend. I was welcomed into her calmly ordered home, and fed an excellent carrot soup, and blueberry muffins.
Poppy’s book, ‘Tomorrow’s Children’ was devoured in a few hours. It is as engaging and compelling as its author, and tells a story that is both joyful, and deeply disturbing.
Poppy’s childhood in country north-west Tasmania was a happy, carefree time, and her recollection is clear. The reader slips into the narrative of these years like tired shoulders into a warm, cossetting cardi. They are enveloped in something comforting and undemanding, and an irrepressible smile takes hold of their expression.
Poppy’s account of her young adult years in New Norfolk, and her adventures on the high seas between Sydney and Marseilles reveal a fearless, free-spirited young woman, with a keen sense of the world, and a faultless capacity to observe and recall. Following her journeys through Europe and the United Kingdom, I was in awe of her recollection, and her unassuming storytelling, and a little envious of her ability to take life’s adventures in her stride. To travel far from the safe haven of a loving home, and find out for herself just how big the world really is.
On her return, Poppy met and married her husband, Stefan Lopatniuk. Stefan was a Ukrainian migrant to Tasmania – a man whose childhood was as sad as Poppy’s had been happy. Poppy and Stefan began their life together in North Hobart, and then, in 1965, with three small girls, they moved to the beachside suburb of Howrah, on Hobart’s eastern shore.
Poppy had strength and resilience in spades, but the move to Howrah would eventually test every scrap of those attributes.
The family’s new home in Correa Street, Howrah was adjacent to a still-functioning landfill site. The establishment of the tip in a residential area had been strongly opposed by local homeowners, and Poppy refers to a builder who recalled ‘the excavation of car tyres, plastic items, bottles and household appliances, and the presence of a black gooey substance’ (p.45), as new homes were built near the site. The site was later to become, and remains, Wentworth Park.
At the age of nine, Poppy’s baby, her nine-year old son, Peter, was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia – a blood cancer rarely seen in children. After four years of intensive treatment, Peter was declared to be in remission ‘with as much chance of the illness re-occurrring as any other healthy person would have’ (p.44). Nineteen years later the leukaemia returned, and Peter did not survive the second assault. Poppy’s despair at his death is palpable. ‘Such heartbreak’, she says, ‘It took all my powers to keep on an even keel’ (P.62).
In the years after Peter’s first diagnosis, Poppy saw several of her neighbours – young, healthy adults with families – succumb to an array of cancers. She documented at least forty cancer diagnoses, 13 of which were blood cancers, in the two small streets either side of the landfill area at Wentworth Park. Her daughters suffer from rare auto-immune conditions, and her grandson was diagnosed at age five with a million-to-one craniopharyngioma brain cancer in 1998. Within a few short years, Poppy endured the deaths of her husband and son, and witnessed the life-changing diagnosis of cancer in her grandson.
It was more than enough sadness to fell the spirit of most women, but Poppy is not ‘most women’. The heavy burden on her soul is apparent, as she copes with the decline of her beloved husband with dementia, and the failing health of her son, and the challenges facing her daughters and her grandson. She is sorely tested, but her quest to find answers to the distressing cluster of major health issues afflicting residents of the Wentworth Park area continues undeterred.
When her son was first ill, Poppy considered a link between possible toxic waste dumped at the landfill site and her child’s rare condition. The public health authorities showed no interest in her ideas. As more and more unusual cancers, and other rare conditions began appearing in neighbouring families, the connection became more plausible.
For over thirty years, Poppy has struggled with government at all levels in an untiring effort to find the truth. For many of those years she suspected that contaminated and highly toxic used oils were illegally dumped at Howrah tip. An investigation of the Wentworth Park cancer deaths was aired on Judy Tierney’s ABC Lateline program in 2003 and revealed that, unknown to residents, the tip had been used as a repository for used oils, and it was legal to dump them. Anything, it seemed, could be left at the tip, with no apparent concern for the welfare of nearby residents.
Poppy details her encounters, over many years, with the Department of Health and its staff, with Clarence City Council, and with politicians of varying colours. As expected, her recall is meticulous – the narrative is clean and factual, and absent of any rancour. It is unnecessary. The responses of those in power speak volumes, epitomizing an inhuman absence of empathy, and a pathetically inadequate ‘ignore it and it might go away’ attitude.
Unsurprisingly, ‘official’ statistics recorded in the state Cancer Registry were paraded smugly before all those of diminished faith in the Tasmanian health system. The Howrah postcode area showed no significant increase in the incidence of cancers related to the landfill site, they said, and an anxious populace was assured there was no need for concern.
The best teacher I ever had, in many years of study, was a crazy Russian statistician, who began his first lecture by firmly announcing that if we had come to the study of statistics seeking truth, we were in the wrong place. As Poppy’s book correctly describes, the Cancer Registry statistics relate to incidences of cancer by postcode. The bland, hollow assurances of the government cynically fail to acknowledge that their figures take no account of localised clusters of disease, and the fact that many of the affected Wentworth Park residents were diagnosed after they left the area. Poppy’s pursuit of more relevant figures remains a key element of her quest.
Poppy Lopatniuk is a true Tasmanian, born and bred – a woman who delighted in the bucolic wonders of her childhood home, and the idyllic life it offered. A woman who has taken her time on this earth firmly in hand – embraced its joys, and borne its perversity with unfailing grace. She is now 85 years, and the quest chronicled in ‘Tomorrow’s Children’ continues. Her parting comments are perhaps the most telling – ‘These days I have lost that pride and enchantment in being a Tasmanian. Through mistrust and disillusionment I now live in a no man’s land of unassuaged loss and unanswered questions’. (p.101)
I commend her slim, beautifully written work to all who see virtue in the pursuit of truth.
And …
By Professor Rob White
School of Sociology and Social Work
University of Tasmania
This is the story of one woman’s life. Yet, it is also a story of a family, a community, and a state.
In the narrative there is much that is ‘magic’, and much that is ‘tragic’.
The vital question underpinning this book is ‘how do we know what we know?’ For Poppy, this is matter of personal experience extending over many years. It is a matter of Elder Knowledge.
What was and is the situation? There are actual harms in her community, and these were linked to a specific location of a few streets around Wentworth Park.
This Park was used as the old Howrah rubbish tip.
Chemicals and toxic materials of various kinds were systematically dumped into this tip. Today, this would have been considered a criminal ‘hot spot’, a place where illegal activity is regularly carried out. Persistent and serious illegalities that knowingly cause harm are meant to be criminalised.
However, those in power felt that the ‘evidence’ did not support Poppy’s claims and concern:
• The Cancer Registry was used to dismiss the problem rather than to suggest the need for more precise analysis of the clustering of local cancers and other ills
• The URS Investigation was used to dismiss the problem as ongoing rather than to locate the flow of toxicity over time and the actual movement and locations of contaminants
But Elder knowledge cannot be dismissed or discounted quite this easily. Poppy ‘knew’ that something was wrong. This was embedded in her actual life experiences, her relationships with real live, flesh and blood family members and neighbours, and her time spent living in the area.
Indeed, the test of time has demonstrated that people have died, that people have been ill, that something was indeed wrong about this idyllic place that everyone wanted to simply call home.
The lack of empathy and the inadequacy of official responses to Poppy’s claims are telling reminders that the story of toxic towns and contaminated communities is ultimately a story of power and vested interests.
Yet, the key message for all of us with this book is that we ignore our Elders and Elder knowledge at our collective peril. The lack of transparency, the ambiguities of knowledge, the failures to act, the efforts to cut costs and avoid liability – all of these point to one inescapable conclusion:
WE ALL LIVE IN WENTWORTH PARK
Tomorrow’s children are our children. And their futures depend on what we do now to address the issues that Poppy has so eloquently presented in her book. We owe it to her, and to ourselves, to ‘see, judge, act’ for the sake of all.
• Further cancer investigations rejected
Posted August 03, 2012 20:25:00
The State Government has ruled out any further investigations into claims of a cancer cluster on Hobart’s eastern shore.
Linda Hunt
Source: 7.30 Tasmania | Duration: 4min 25sec
