1960, WA physician Dr Bob Elphick remarked to his colleagues that the mining industry was turning men into stone. This evocative image aptly described the end-stage pathophysiological changes that occurred in the lungs of the state's goldminers after exposure to silica dust.

Until 1926 in WA, when X-ray technology became readily available and financially viable, diagnosis of dust disease in miners was fraught, flawed and at best an educated medical guess. Medical men and miners believed that their ill health was caused by a combination of infection from tuberculosis and exposure to dust, but it was tuberculosis rather than silicosis that became the focus of preventative and

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