Helen Fitzroy this week earned official recognition for her work to ensure families that lose loved ones on mine sites are not abandoned to their grief.
Helen Fitzroy this week earned official recognition for her work to ensure families that lose loved ones on mine sites are not abandoned to their grief.
HELEN Fitzroy was doing her usual morning kindergarten drop-off when she learned her husband had been killed in an accident at the mine site he worked at in Norseman.
She says she had pulled up at a friend’s house and to this day still vividly remembers the look on her friend’s face as she came out the door.
“I knew straight away that something terrible had happened,” Ms Fitzroy says.
“All the guys (from the mine) had knocked off and been sent home from work.”
Steve Fitzroy never made it home; killed by a rock fall at a gold mine, leaving behind a 33-year-old wife and three little children, the youngest not yet two years old.
It’s a heart-breaking story that has lost none of its power in the two decades since it occurred and countless retelling on mine sites across the country.
Ms Fitzroy honours the memory of her husband by criss-crossing the country every week to share her story with mine workers and urge them to join not-for-profit Miners’ Promise.
It’s a commitment that forces her to relive the grief and sadness of that day in 1991 every week, but even when it exhausts her Ms Fitzroy knows it’s worth it.
And the knowledge that she could spare just one family the agony of the bureaucratic and legalistic battles she endured is more than enough to keep her going.
Miners’ Promise was set up just 18 months ago to provide financial, practical and emotional support to the families of Western Australian miners killed or permanently disabled.
Ms Fitzroy describes it as a buffer, and says the services the legacy organisation provides are different for every family but could include funeral costs, mortgage repayments, or relocation costs.
She says that, in many circumstances, family finances are frozen until the death certificate is issued, making it impossible for spouses to meet their debt repayments.
The threat of foreclosure or repossession on top of the grief of losing a loved one is enough to push many people very close to the brink, and in some sad cases beyond, Ms Fitzroy told WA Business News.
“Ten years ago I found out, just through the grape vine, of a widow who on her third attempt had committed suicide,” Ms Fitzroy says.
“If we had just been in existence then, if we had just been able to offer some help, I wonder if she would still be alive.”
Ms Fitzroy describes herself as an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary situation, but it wasn’t until 10 years after her husband died that she started lobbying for the creation of a support body for the families.
And one of the key catalysts was her discovery that nothing had changed in the decade since Mr Fitzroy’s death.
By this time, Ms Fitzroy was already visiting mine sites and sharing her story in a bid to give the safety message a human face and encourage workers to organise wills and life insurance.
What started out as a trickle of communications from widows and grieving families turned into a torrent, and it became clear to Ms Fitzroy that she needed to direct her energy into establishing a body that would look after these vulnerable people.
It was a chance meeting with BHP Billiton’s then vice-president of external affairs, Ian Fletcher, in 2009 that fast-tracked Ms Fitzroy’s plans.
The mining giant had suffered a horror run of accidents on its sites in the Pilbara with five deaths in nine months in 2008-2009.
“Ian is very good at convincing people,” Ms Fitzroy says.
“It took a little while to iron out how it would work and who we would need to engage and some of the issues initially were legal and financial … as well as tax issues.
“All those things were hidden things that you didn’t realise until they smacked you in the face.”
With the backing of BHP Billiton, Miners’ Promise was officially launched in July 2010.
It was the culmination of years of lobbying the industry, unions and the state government.
Ms Fitzroy was initially disappointed the not for profit didn’t secure government support, but in hindsight she can see a silver lining.
“Once you involve a government it depends on who is in power as to what priority is put on it,” Ms Fitzroy says.
A number of resources companies already pay the Miners’ Promise membership fee for their workers and Ms Fitzroy would like to see that support swell.
The fee amounts to about $6 a week per worker, and the legacy fund has also attracted a number of corporate donations as well as in-kind support.
Ms Fitzroy would like to see the scheme expanded nationally and even internationally but concedes it will take time to ensure it works with all the different state and territory legislation in Australia.
With billions of dollars in new resource projects slated for WA in the next decade, however, the message about safety and the importance of protecting your family from any mishap has never been more timely.
Ms Fitzroy says boom times are inherently riskier as they perpetuate higher levels of activity, and in some cases increased pressure on workers to perform.
“People are most vulnerable at these times of boom because there is a shortage of skilled labour and there’s an ever-increasing need to get that stuff out of the ground as quickly as you can,” Ms Fitzroy says.
Despite her optimism that safety is improving, Ms Fitzroy says on many sites there remains a disconnect between the safety message and the working reality.
“There are certainly pressures put on people to perform certain things within certain time frames,” she says.
“And a lot of people who have ended up on that list (of fatalities) aren’t up there because of their own actions.
“They are either up there because of someone else’s inaction or someone else’s action, so quite often it isn’t the fault of the person who lost their life.”
Ms Fitzroy’s unerring commitment to ensure no other family endures the battle she experienced after her husband’s death earned her the Local Hero award in the Western Australia’s Australian of the Year awards this week.
