Katie McGrath: Deadly earth that destroyed a family

Katie McGrath was orphaned at age four, when her parents died of rare cancers, nine months apart. Overcoming this to become a woman of considerable achievement, she wants justice.

Katie has written a book about her parents, who died after being exposed to radiation in Sydney. Picture: Nikki Short

Her mother in the garden, planting white, winter cabbages. Her mother posing for the camera, in cat-eye glasses. Her mother in the hospital, with wigs on the bedposts. These are the memories that come to mind when Seven West Media executive Katie McGrath is asked to recall her parents.

“I was so little when my mother died, and my father died nine months later,” she says. “I have some memories, but otherwise I have to sort of imagine them because I was only four when we were orphaned. And then I get angry because they didn’t have to go to an early grave. It is a scandal. And I would like the story told.”

McGrath’s new book, Deadly Earth, is about the premature death of her parents, both still in their 30s when they died painful deaths from rare cancers soon after purchasing an impressive family home overlooking the water, on a street now known to be contaminated with radiation.

Piecing the story together has not been easy. McGrath is a woman of considerable achievement. She joined Seven West Media as group executive, human resources after a scandal involving the former boss, Tim Worner, and his mistress Amber Harrison engulfed the company; she previously has held senior positions at the Australian Securities Exchange-listed Enero Group, Bain & Company, the Commonwealth Bank and Singtel Optus.

John and Iris McGrath with three of their children: Greg and Shannon and baby Katie.

She is not, therefore, without personal resources, yet she found the going tough as she battled through decades-long government secrecy about Sydney’s old uranium smelter.

McGrath says her mother, Iris Cardwell, was an exceptionally bright girl who attended the selective Sydney Girls High School and won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Sydney in 1950. Her father, Fabian McGrath, known as John, was “six-foot-four, and charismatic, an Irish Catholic, a builder, who liked a beer”.

She can’t be sure how they met but likes to imagine her mum giggling with friends at a dance, “pretending not to notice the tall, handsome stranger”.

Iris and John fell in love in the early 1960s, and Iris soon became pregnant. The Protestant-Catholic union was frowned on by both sets of parents, so the couple fled to Alice Springs to have the baby.

“Why Alice Springs?” says McGrath. “I have no one to ask.”

Over time they returned to Sydney, still unwed, and now with children in tow. John started a building company, which soon became very successful. He bought a waterfront home on Nelson Parade, Hunters Hill, to accommodate his growing family, completely unaware that the street had been the site of a radioactive uranium smelter between 1911 and 1915.

Besides building unit blocks, McGrath says her father also opened the famous Black Bull Bistro, a Spanish-themed restaurant, where he’d flame steaks in front of the guests, and dress up as El Toro. His wife, her mum, made the cheesecakes. After more than a decade and three children together, they finally decided to get married, and a fourth child — Katie — was born in 1971.

McGrath remembers an idyllic childhood of running through gardens; of weekend parties, with a large table set with flowers; of wine being served at an open house, for neighbours and friends. She also remembers her parents having a sensual love for each other: even with four kids in the back of the car, John would often reach over to squeeze his wife’s hand and give her a bit of a wink.

“He loved me, too. I remember him coming home from work and throwing me into the air, saying: ‘Look at Katie go!’ ” she tells Inquirer. She’d be terrified, flying so close to the ceiling, but she knew he’d never let her fall.

The McGrath children - Dan, Greg, Shannon and baby Katie - outside the house in Hunters Hill, shortly before the death of their parents.

And then, out of the blue, her mother got sick. McGrath says her mother tried to hide the illness with “Christian Dior and wigs”, and it took some time for the children to realise the seriousness of the situation. She remembers little about their last few holidays together: in one photograph, the kids are holding watermelon crescents in front of their faces, like big grins. On their return, her mum “suddenly needed to steady herself against the kitchen counter” and her father had to catch her, just before she collapsed. She went to hospital for long periods to be treated for leukaemia.

And then, in what seemed like a shocking stroke of bad luck, John also was diagnosed with cancer, in his case in the stomach. Iris died first, in 1975. She was 35. John succumbed nine months later, at the age of 39. “They must have known they were both going to die because they had started calling around to see who could take four children,” says McGrath.

Only one grandparent was alive, “my mother’s mother, Cherry, who was an invalid, paralysed, a beautiful, kind, soft woman. I remember visiting her, the way she always had boiled lollies for children, and Mum’s skeleton from medical school in Mum’s bedroom”. She couldn’t take so many kids, all of them under 13. A second cousin of John, a man called Ted, was chosen, and he tentatively agreed, although McGrath is sure that he agreed only because there was money attached. She says he ran a “speak when you’re spoken to” kind of house, with Ted explaining on the first night that they’d get the strap for breaking the rules.

McGrath remembers wetting her pants the first time she saw the belt. She wasn’t yet five. “His brutality knew no bounds and required little provocation,” she writes.

There was abuse in the house, and cruelty. The children suffered terribly, with one brother soon dead in a motorbike accident, and McGrath’s own innocence shattered in that house.

“It has been a hard thing to write about publicly,” she says, of the suicide attempt that followed.

McGrath was unaware of any controversy surrounding the death of her parents as she grew up. She was a diligent student who got good marks for her Higher School Certificate and found a place at the University of NSW, where she studied commerce. She moved to a rental in Bondi, met a man and got married, and they had two children.

In 2008, as she was climbing the corporate ladder, she came upon a story in the local paper: the NSW government was considering what to do about contaminated land on Nelson Parade in Hunters Hill. Wait, she thought: Nelson Parade? “I was just in shock,” she says. “The story said there had been a uranium smelter on the street, and the ground was contaminated, and people had been dying of cancer.”

She thought back to her childhood — of her mother humming as she stuck her hands deep into the rich earth of her vegetable plots, and of her father digging a retaining wall — and, she says, “I knew I needed to find out more.”

She discovered the smelter operated on a site roughly equivalent to nos 9 to 11 Nelson Parade between 1911 and 1915. Uranium from the Radium Hill Company site at Radium Hill in South Australia, was processed there.

In 1964 the site was cleared for residential use by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. McGrath says her parents had no idea what they were buying when they settled on the street soon after. “Our house, at Lot 17 (roughly equivalent to No 21) was never even tested for radiation,” she says. “Others were told the land was safe.”

By the 1970s, with the risks of exposure to radiation becoming clearer, the NSW government decided the land was not safe after all and purchased several houses on Nelson Parade and demolished them. McGrath says she doesn’t know if her home was among them, but her parents did move around this time to a new home in Drummoyne. She says the old house has since been demolished, with a new one in place. But, she argues, the whole street should have been tested.

“The truth is, Nelson Parade might be the most dangerous street in Sydney,” says McGrath. “At least eight people who lived in that street have died of cancer. And they died young. And it has always been well known to the NSW government.”

Australia’s first female High Court judge, Mary Gaudron, moved her children from the street after discovering the cancer cluster. An internal memo of the NSW Health Commission, dated February 9, 1977, told staff to “please stall and be noncommittal” when responding to queries about the safety of the land.

McGrath began agitating for the right to address a NSW upper house inquiry into the history of the smelter.

“It’s been frustrating because there has never been an apology or an acknowledgment that this was wrong,” she says. “It’s passed from one government to the next, over decades. You go up there now, the site is all still cordoned off. There’s a 20-foot-high black steel wall around it, right on the waterfront, completely bizarre in the middle of Sydney. They know that it’s contaminated. I have seen old documents from the EPA that suggest very strongly that they have always known that it is not safe.

“And telling my family’s story — what happened to my parents, and what happened to us after we went into care — has been hard, but I wish I’d done it earlier.”

She hopes the book will draw attention to the matter, and perhaps generate a proper clean-up, and an apology from the Health Commission.

As part of her research, she went looking for old neighbours, and came upon Penny Richardson, now a widow, who was so pleased to hear from “little Katie” — the girl whose parents had died so suddenly in the 1970s. They agreed to meet in a restaurant, where Richardson reached into her handbag to take out a small red shoe in a ziplock bag.

Katie McGrath's red baby shoe.

“It was mine,” says McGrath. “I suddenly had the clearest memory of myself, sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, swinging my feet, in those shoes. My mother had given them to her after I’d grown out of them, thinking they might fit one of her little girls. It’s the only thing I have of her.”

“So,” said Richardson, gently. “What else would you like to know?” And McGrath had so many questions, but she started with just one: “What was my mother like?”

Deadly Earth by Katie McGrath (Hardie Grant) will be published on October 7.