nursem– I read up a little on Peter Garrett. Seems he matured a little since his days with Midnight Oil. Lotta times I don’t pay much attention to the lyrics of a song I like, but I found out what “Blue Sky Mine” was about.

I worked with asbestos in the 70′s. It’s a great insulating and fireproofing material, and safe as long as it’s non-friable… I worked making asbestos millboard on a wet machine built in the 1920′s. There was a shack for dumping asbestos packs into a hopper. The interior looked like a snowstorm.

Some of the factory workers looked down on the few of us “school boys” who wore masks while cutting open the brown paper bags to dump the stuff into the hopper, calling us chickens#1+ pu$$ys. Those masks were nothing more than glorified coffee filters.

They didn’t get much radio play here until the late 80′s when I was mostly listening to reggae and blues.