Do you know what you’ve got within you? If it's deadly asbestos, you'd better have what it takes to fight for what's right. 

Where the Dust Settles is the history of asbestos exploitation in Australia.

Historical fiction with plenty of courtroom drama, it includes Dr Duncan Graham’s experience in asbestos litigation and is based in part on actual well-known events, the participants involved in them, publications, researchers, places, legal cases and matters of public record. All names, characters, conversations and the places and events in which the story unfolds are, however, products of Graham’s imagination. 

Where the Dust Settles tells the fictional story of James and Jenny Henderson, who came to Australia from the UK in the 1950s looking for a new life after the horrors of war. On the long sea journey they were drawn together, and fell in love. Eventually Jenny and James settled in Sydney, had a family, and worked hard for a brighter future. 

Little did they know as a young married couple that in forty years’ time, they’d be fighting for their lives and for justice in a court case against two of Australia’s biggest companies. 

James watched as the men in the asbestos gang grabbed the bags of raw asbestos and by brute force lifted and emptied them into bins. The hessian sacks leaked their contents over the heads and shoulders of the men as they went about their tasks. After the fibre was emptied into the bins, it was shoved down chutes into what Jack Taylor said was the hammer mill, which pulverised the fibre into fine, feathery particles, which were then blown through ducts into storage hoppers. 

When asbestos cases started flooding in in the 1980s, big end lawyer Bruce Fraser thinks he can springboard into partnership and fame with a win for his client, Henry King Industries Limited, a large asbestos cement manufacturer. 

When James Henderson comes to plaintiff’s lawyer Viviana Glosioli, she hopes she can overcome her self-doubt, her boss’s advances and the sausage-factory mentality of her firm to secure a win for him as yet another worker and his family so unfairly taken advantage of. 

What unfolds is the ugly truth of asbestos and the legal industry it spawned. With so much at stake – money, careers, reputations, lives, James’ legal battle may change the law forever. 

Based on real events in modern history, Where the Dust Settles is a gripping read and a story that’s extremely relevant today.

Where will the dust settle after all is said and done?

Sydney barrister and medical doctor Dr Duncan Graham SC is likely to know more about the asbestos industry and asbestos medicine than any other person in Australia. From his many years of work in asbestos litigation, Duncan has acquired an exhaustive knowledge of the scientific literature about asbestos-related diseases. He has cross-examined, examined and interviewed many leading international experts on the subject.