The night after their son Mats died aged just 25, Trude and Robert Steen sat on the sofa in their living room in Oslo with their daughter Mia. They couldn’t sleep. “Everything was a blur,” remembers Trude of that day 10 years ago. “Then Robert said, ‘Maybe we should reach out to Mats’ friends in World of Warcraft.’”

Mats was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a progressive condition that causes the muscles to weaken gradually. He was diagnosed aged four and started using a wheelchair at 10. By the end of his life, Mats could only move his fingers, and required a tube to clear his throat every 15 minutes. As he became increasingly disabled, he spent more time gaming: 20,000 hours in his last decade (about the same as if it were a full-time job).

Trude and Robert wondered how they could share the news of his death with his online acquaintances. They didn’t have access to his WoW account, but Robert found the password to Mats’ blog, and they wrote a post. It began: “Our beloved son, brother and best friend left us this night ...” But, they wondered, would anyone read it?

Trude and Robert were stunned by the response. Emails started pouring in from around the world: “Mats’ passing has hit me very hard.” “Mats was AWESOME.” “You should be proud of your son.” “Mats was a real friend to me.” The couple had been anguished that Mats’ existence was lonely, that illness had isolated him, but here were messages, some pages long, from his close friends on WoW. To the uninitiated, WoW looks a bit like Lord of the Rings, set in a fantasy world called Azeroth populated by trolls, elves and medieval glamourpusses waging war with fancy swords.

Nearly a decade earlier, aged 17, Mats had created an alter ego in WoW. Lord Ibelin Redmoore was a private investigator with flowing golden hair, the physique of Thor, and a roguish charm. Mats had been playing as the character for years, but the emails were the first inkling his parents had of how deep his connections were in the gaming community. The story is now told in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, an extraordinary documentary, four years in the making, about to open in cinemas and arriving on Netflix later this month.

I meet Trude and Robert in a London hotel. Recently Robert has been travelling around Norwegian schools with the film. “I think I’ve seen it 150 times,” he says with a smile. They are a warm couple, direct and open. The closeness of their family shines through all of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

The Steens had been approached before to make a film about Mats. “We said no to all of them,” says Robert. “It was too close, too personal, too emotional.” But they felt a connection to Benjamin Rees, a film-maker who, at 35, is the same age as Mats would have been had he lived.

The Steens like to film everything, and the documentary begins by telling the story of Mats’ life through their home movies. At screenings, this part of the film usually ends with half the audience in tears. It features footage of Trude in hospital after giving birth, stroking Mats’ cheek in wonder at this little miracle. We watch Mats taking his first steps at around one-year-old, proud as punch. There was no suggestion that anything was the matter at that point. It was clearer by the time he was three. “Mats was staggering and falling a lot,” remembers Trude. The doctors initially dismissed the couple as anxious first-time parents, before Mats was finally diagnosed with Duchenne MD at four.

One of the most painful moments in the film is Trude opening up about the guilt she feels about Mats’ illness, because she is the carrier of the Duchenne gene. “I still feel that sometimes,” she admits today. “I know it’s wrong. I spoke to Mats about it. He told me, ‘Don’t say that mum. It’s not your fault.’” Her eyes fill with tears. She gave up her job as an adviser to the parliament in Oslo to look after Mats for a decade. “The bond was very strong. We were so close.”

In the documentary, we also hear from Mats – his words, from the blog, are spoken by an actor. He is funny and insightful – and passionate about gaming: “It’s not a screen – it’s a gateway to wherever your heart desires.”

Then the film makes a complete swerve, suddenly switching to animation, plunging the audience into WoW. It’s a move that will baffle some, but feel like a stroke of genius to others. Rees commissioned animators to reconstruct Mats’ virtual life, with every line written by Mats and his role-player friends as they collaborate on the universe inside the game – culled from 42,000 pages of dialogue. “It almost feels as if they’re writing a book in real time,” says Rees.

We see Ibelin’s first kiss with Rumour, the alter ego of a Dutch gamer called Lisette Roovers. Mats wrote about the kiss on his blog: “It was just a virtual kiss, but boy I could almost feel it.” The moment is especially poignant because Mats also wrote about how relationships felt out of his reach: “Love was always a tricky subject for me. It feels like it’s not meant for me.”

Mats made close friends online and touched their lives. But for years he hid his illness in WoW, a place where he wasn’t defined by disability. “Games are my sanctuary,” he wrote. “I am safe here, valued.” But in the summer of 2013 he started the blog, which he did eventually share with some of his gaming friends.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin arrives at a time when parents are agonising over how much screen-time to give their kids. In Norway there is a saying: “Good people climb trees.” But because of his disability, Trude and Robert let Mats spend more time gaming than other children. He was on his Game Boy during breaks at school while other kids played football. Looking back, Robert wishes he’d made more of an effort to understand how important it was to Mats. “He invited us very often to come and sit by him to experience how this gaming world was going on,” he says. “But I thought it was boring.”

Rees was keen to make a balanced portrait of gaming. “In Norway,” he says, “I would say 95% of the media is negative. But this film is a celebration of online communities.” He hopes, too, that it engages with the issue’s complexity. “It was a huge advantage for Mats to be able to play that game. He felt free. It was his sanctuary – but at the same time he could also hide. I think that created a lot of problems for him.”

Rees took an almighty risk making the documentary. He worked on it for three years before approaching Blizzard, the company that owns WoW, for permission: “We wrote them an email, ‘We are a small Norwegian production company. Could we have the rights for free?’ The Blizzard bosses invited him to California to screen Ibelin at their offices. “I had to take extra doses of asthma medicine before the meeting,” Rees says with a grin. But like everyone else, the bosses finished the film in tears.

Trude and Robert invited Mats’ WoW friends – people they had never met – to his funeral. Were they at all concerned? “Should you invite strangers to the funeral?” says Robert. “Should you share the story with a documentary producer? We just asked ourselves, ‘What would Mats want to do?’”

Mats often talked about wanting to be remembered. “That’s natural,” says Robert, “when you know you will die young. Isn’t it? One of the biggest fears is that you won’t be remembered. Nobody will notice.” Trude nods: “He wanted to make a difference to other people. He said that a lot.”

It’s one of Australia’s worst infrastructure failures, a time bomb counting down to catastrophe for a city and farming community unaware of the danger until one man’s alarming discovery.

Since it went up quickly and cheaply, thanks to modern big-build techniques, the troubles with Paradise Dam have been laid out in a stream of headlines that have embarrassed political leaders, infuriated the community and set off a major inquiry and ballooning remediation costs.

But it’s also the story, untold until now, of an unassuming engineer who identified the threat to tens of thousands of people through his ingenuity, a forensic pursuit of answers and an ability to see a worrying future in a smear of concrete dust.

To do that, Brisbane-based global dam specialist Jon Williams and his small team invented a virtual time machine that not only saved an unsuspecting regional population from a potential inland tsunami but changed what engineers across the globe thought they understood about dam construction.

Built for about $200 million, Paradise Dam has already cost Queensland taxpayers more than $165 million in attempts at fixes even before the state government, amid community anger and resistance, decided to knock it down and build a second headwall directly in front of the original. By the time that happens the cost will be at least $1.2 billion more.

How did it come to this? Why was a critical infrastructure project meant to last 100 years defective from the start? Who’s accountable? And is it safe?

After Jon Williams turned up to inspect problems exposed by a giant crater in the spillway, he had questions too. Like why could he pluck stones from the dam’s face with his fingers?

Paradise found and lost

Water has long been a source of prosperity and heartache in the Wide Bay-Burnett region, one of the nation’s most important food bowls, about four hours’ drive north of Brisbane.

Renowned for sugar cane fields and grazing properties, it also produces about 75 per cent of Australia’s sweet potatoes, 50 per cent of our macadamias, almost all Queensland’s mandarins and is the nation’s largest source of avocados, passionfruit and chillies.

Just over 100 kilometres upstream from Bundaberg, Paradise Dam stores 170,000 megalitres on the Burnett River (controversially it was 300,000ML — a megalitre is a million litres — when the dam was completed, but we’ll get to that).

In 1889, prospectors discovered gold on the river’s southern bank about 100kms south-west of Bundaberg. A town sprang up and the new arrivals called it Paradise.

By 1898 the gold was played out, miners had abandoned the town and, for a century, the land was left to livestock. Downstream, Bundaberg quickly developed the industry for which it would become famous: sugar.

But water was unreliable and the region prone to drought. After decades of simmering tension over water availability, producers turned up the volume on irrigation demands at the 1998 state election.

Two days before voters went to the ballot boxes, then-opposition leader Peter Beattie promised a 300,000ML dam on the Burnett River within five years.

Labor swept to victory and the Beattie government got to work. By 2005 the dam, 38 metres high and 600m long, was complete, expedited by a roller-compacted concrete (RCC) construction method and costing just $200 million.

Behind the wall the river swelled and submerged old mining and cattle townships. A push by the Wakka Wakka people to call the dam Degilbo — “big rock in the river” — was rejected. The government named it Paradise.

There was a deep flaw in Paradise that only started to emerge after extreme weather devastated Bundaberg and the farming community and led, eventually, to the dam’s terminal diagnosis.

The storm that ate concrete

Paradise Dam overflowed, a torrent pouring over the spillway and crashing into the river below before surging downstream, covering farmland and inundating much of Bundaberg.

Dam operator Sunwater estimates 1.5 million megalitres of water a day — about the equivalent of three Sydney Harbours at full tide — spilled over the wall at the flood’s peak, churning at the base of the concrete spillway for days.

It was almost two months before the overflow eased enough for inspectors to get close to the wall’s base, where they found a 15-metre cavity carved from rock and concrete.

That was just the first sign of trouble.

Enter global engineering firm GHD’s dam design manager James Willey and principal engineer Jon Williams, whose masterful knowledge of concrete was about to be put to its toughest test.

For more than 30 years, Brisbane-based Williams has been GHD’s go-to guy on its biggest concrete dam projects, helping build them in Malaysia and Oman and designing the concrete mix for Miel 1 Dam in Colombia which, when it was completed in 2002, was the world’s tallest RCC dam at 188m.

He says a brief explanation of concrete helps to understand the issues with Paradise Dam.

“People often call concrete ‘cement’,” he says. “Cement is a component of concrete.”

The rest is a mix of gravel, water, sand and other fine aggregates, and sometimes additives like fly ash to “improve the concrete performance”. In this case, how well a dam holds back water.

Paradise Dam, Williams says, was built with “very fast and cheap” RCC, a construction method developed in the 1970s that has become a popular choice for big dams.

When a dam requires hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of concrete, RCC can mean massive financial savings, Williams says, because it uses less cement, the binding ingredient.

RCC refers not to the mix but to how it’s applied.

“It looks like wet gravel, not like very liquid concrete,” Williams says.

“You move it with a conveyor or a truck, you push it with a ’dozer and you compact it with a road roller, hence roller-compacted concrete.”

Each RCC layer is about 300mm thick and, once placed, rolled and compacted, the next layer goes on top.

After the 2013 flood, as engineers repaired the void at the base of Paradise Dam, they noticed the layers of concrete were not holding together as they should.

Months of testing in 2019 concluded another severe flood could create a risk of the layers shearing and the wall effectively coming apart at the seams.

“The stability was less than required by the dam safety guidelines,” James Willey says.

Unaware there were more problems with the RCC wall than it knew, the Queensland government ordered work to lower the top of the spillway by 5.8m and almost halve the water in the reservoir, reducing pressure on the wall.

That decision had a profound and immediate impact on the region, which in 2019 received just 320mm of rain, its lowest since 1942.

Farmers protested, outraged at a lack of consultation on dropping the dam wall.

Little did they know what they were demanding, that the spillway stay at its original height, could put their community in grave danger.

Farmers fire up for a fight

The region’s producers could barely believe the increased water access they’d lobbied for and celebrated was about to be reduced by almost half.

At the time, Bree Watson, then managing director of Bundaberg Fruit and Vegetable Growers, now an LNP candidate for the seat of Bundaberg at this weekend’s state election, argued the move put the region’s agriculture value of “well over $1 billion” at risk and demanded RCC experts re-assess the dam.

“We find it really difficult when they talk about saving $100 million here or there,” she told ABC’s Landline.

“What would happen if we didn’t have this agriculture industry in the region?”

Strawberry and macadamia nut grower Tina McPherson worried the lost water security would not just squeeze irrigation for farmers but also discourage investment.

“You don’t put those macadamias in without knowing that you’ve got water to buy into the future,” she told the ABC.

As debate raged, the Queensland government in 2019 ordered a commission of inquiry while farmers failed in a legal bid to stop the remediation work.

The inquiry report in May 2020 found the dam had structural and stability concerns due to its design and construction. Namely that:

• The RCC layers lacked sufficient “shear strength” and were at risk of sliding along their joints.
• The apron, or flat bed of concrete at the foot of the dam, was not wide enough “to resist the erosive force of water overtopping the main spillway”.

By early 2021, work to lower the dam wall was complete, reducing storage capacity from 300,000ML to 170,000ML.

But by that time, Jon Williams had picked up worrying signs of an even bigger problem in concrete and rock samples stored for testing in a shed tucked away to the side of the dam.

Core samples of concrete meant to survive the elements for a century were breaking down.

The devil in the dust

“We found the signs of something unusual in the concrete,” Williams says.

“There was dust on samples. You could pick stones out of the outer face of the dam itself.

“There were just anomalies in the performance of the concrete, which were causing some questions among the team.

Experts from the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia were engaged as a technical review panel to assess the next steps.

“Those experts came back and said, ‘Yeah, you actually need to investigate this further,’” Williams recalls.

But there was no way to do that easily on dams because it had not been done before.

“You don’t normally test for degradation of concrete structures, as concrete is normally a very durable material,” Williams says.

“The literature search we did … did not come up with a method of testing degradation for dams.”

Degradation, or the weakening of concrete over time, had only been tested on RCC in US airport runways that endure freezing winters and subsequent thawing — not an issue in Queensland’s subtropics.

Soak, dry, crush, repeat

The GHD team realised it had to replicate the rigours of wet and dry seasons on Paradise Dam by artificially aging the samples.

That meant creating conditions of “accelerated degradation” by, effectively, speeding up time.

“We were trying to extrapolate decades of performance in months of laboratory testing,” Williams says.

It took just over a year to develop methods, gain approval from the international panel and set up a lab.

In mid-2022 the team began a series of tests including repeatedly soaking samples in water from the dam reservoir, in some cases for four months, drying them, soaking them again, then testing their strength by compressing them until they crumbled, asking the panel to challenge their work at each step.

“One of our review panel members commented that the process we’d come up with was worthy of a master’s thesis,” Williams says.

“So that gives you an idea of the rigorous nature of what we were doing.”

By the end of 2023, the tests had revealed the concrete was degrading at an alarming rate.

They found the strength of the samples had degraded by an average of 75 per cent, James Willey says, but “some samples were probably closer to 90 per cent”.

“There was significant uncertainty as to whether we’d be able to rely on that in the long term … to withstand the extreme weather events that we need the structure to be able to pass,” he says.

The problem? RCC dams by design have less cement but Paradise Dam has among the lowest in the world.

It contains 2.5 per cent cementitious material — the average is 8 per cent — putting it in the bottom 1 per cent of 900 RCC dams across the globe.

In the slightly acidic, sub-tropical environment of the Burnett River, the lean mix was prone to carbonisation, a chemical reaction that occurs when calcium in cement comes into contact with air and becomes calcium carbonate, or limestone.

As dam water laps against the wall, it washes out the limestone, leaving cavities that allow more water in.

“With very low cement content … the binder in the concrete can start to degrade — just decompose,” Williams says.

Clay in the concrete mix adds to the problem by constantly expanding, shrinking and cracking.

As the cement turns to limestone and washes out, what remains swells and shrinks through humid wet seasons and baking dry months, causing irreversible “microcracking and degradation”.

While Williams’s team built its case, anger about the decision to lower the wall smouldered, including a class action lawsuit by farmers demanding compensation for lost productivity after the dam’s capacity was reduced.

Then, on December 24, 2021, less than two months after Labor narrowly regained Bundaberg from the LNP on its way to winning the state election, farmers got a Christmas surprise: the state government announced the dam wall would be raised again to its original height with a reinforced structure and concrete buttressing.

The Queensland and federal governments agreed to split the $1.2 billion bill.

But by October 2023, when Williams took his test results to James Willey, whose team had begun work on plans to raise the spillway, the writing was on the wall.

In January, Sunwater and the Queensland government broke the news. There would be no restoration. The dam had to be completely rebuilt.

‘When dams fail people die’

The importance of Jon Williams’s work diagnosing the disease at the heart of Paradise Dam can’t be underestimated, says Dr John Macintosh, an honorary fellow of Engineers Australia, the peak body representing the profession and a former chairman of its national committee on water engineering.

“If this work hadn’t been done, if they [authorities] tried to save some money, you may well have ended up with a replacement or a retrofitted structure that is going to fail,” he says.

And when dams fail “they fail extremely rapidly and that’s when people die”.

“The lessons learned may not be so much for engineers but for the people that engage them,” Dr Macintosh says.

“You don’t try and cut costs by not getting engineering people to ask the questions and to investigate properly.

“Dams, if they’re unsafe they’re hazardous, there’s no two ways about that — not only to life and limb but also for the economy as well.

So who’s responsible?

Like the grinding flood at the bottom of the Paradise Dam spillway in 2013, questions still churn in the community.

Is the dam safe until it’s replaced?

It’s safer since the wall was lowered, says Sunwater, adding it’s now rated to withstand a 1-in-5,000-year flood. The 2013 flood was a 1-in-200-year event.

Nevertheless, by Sunwater’s own estimation, Paradise Dam’s risk level is still well above “acceptable”.

Why hasn’t anyone been held to account for its failure?

In January, Peter Beattie accepted full “political” responsibility, while questioning the time it took to discover the extent of the dam’s problems.

“The buck stops with me and I have never run away from my responsibilities”, he said.

“If the problems were identified years ago why has there been such a delay?”

The dam was built by an alliance of Burnett Water, Hydro Electric Corporation (trading as Hydro Tasmania), SMEC Australia, Macmahon Contractors and Walter Construction Group.

Sunwater took control on completion.

After the decision to build a new wall, Premier Steven Miles was asked if legal action would be taken to recover costs from any of the parties associated with the design and construction.

“We have sought advice on that … and unfortunately the entities that would be responsible are no longer in a legal state that we could seek compensation from them,” he said.

“The advice from engineers to us is that there is no similar example anywhere in the world of a dam being built the way this one has and I would prefer to be able to pursue those responsible for building it in such a terrible way.”

‘Build it the way you designed it’

But while the costs and time lost on the original wall may never be recovered, work on new wall designs has begun.

And despite all the controversy, Dr Macintosh believes RCC will probably be the construction method of choice.

“But definitely built to standards,” he says.

“You gotta build it the way you designed it.”

That design brief now falls to James Willey’s team. And he says Jon Williams’s work on Paradise has been an industry game-changer.

“I know for a fact that it’s already influencing what’s being done on other projects with other clients, at least locally but also internationally,” he says.

For Williams, the Paradise Dam saga is bitter-sweet. But he’s still a fan of roller-compacted concrete.

“RCC done well is a good concrete,” he says. “There will be a public perception that all RCC dams are bad, and that is not the case.

“Even though the outcome is perhaps not what we wished for, the work behind this has been, professionally, probably the most satisfying in my career.”

Credits

• Reporting and photography: Kallee Buchanan
• Drone videos: Johanna Marie
• Editing and digital production: Craig Dixon

Odyssey format by ABC News Story Lab

Australia is in the grip of a housing and cost-of-living crisis, especially for welfare recipients or people who subsist on lower incomes. Despite this, the current Labor government refuses to make any meaningful concessions — such as increasing our miserable and insufficient welfare rate, instigating rental caps, or even ending the pointless cruelty of mutual obligations — to the people most affected by economic inequality. They waste time instead tinkering with regressive changes to taxation legislated by the previous Liberal government, which they still believe they have to instigate themselves for tedious and ultimately self-defeating reasons.

This disappointing and delusional response to a very real material crisis is impacting nobody in the country more significantly than unwaged people. But probably the most desperate and frustrating “solution” the government and media are currently promoting is the idea of young people renting rooms in older people’s houses, or moving back in with their parents, in exchange for below-market rent and the provision of domestic or caregiving labour.

There hasn’t been a lot of actual discussion on the way that this arrangement would differ legislatively from renting in a private apartment or a room in a sharehouse, but it gets described as more communal, or familial. However — keeping in mind that not all young people would be safe to return to their families, and it’s already very hard for young people to sustain stable accommodation without family support — the chances of the young people being subject to domestic violence or otherwise exploited seem extremely high.

The other party would be at risk as well, of course. Elder violence is a widely known and well-documented phenomenon, and any older person opening up their home like this would most likely already know to fear. By contrast, especially when it comes to adult children moving back in with their families, I worry that most will not expect to be abused or exploited. This troubles me, not only because I’ve experienced domestic violence quite a lot in my adult life, but also because information about how to deal with an elderly abusive parents is crowded out by advice aimed at older people being abused by their adult kids.

There are protections in the law for people who are living with their parents as adults. They’re the same protections we extend to everybody sharing a household in a family, or family-adjacent circumstance. The law is blind regarding which “family member” can experience or perpetrate domestic violence, as it should be. The ownership of the property is not a mitigating factor for it, either. However, not a lot of people seem to know this, or are otherwise uncomfortable with the implications, especially when it comes to their own parents. With rental homes continuing to escalate in price and deteriorate in quality, people who are living in such situations will have fewer options than ever before to escape it, too.

So clearly, at the very least, we would need to write new legislation to establish both the rights and the responsibilities of everyone involved in this kind of domestic relationship — including adult children moving back in with their parents.

What I want to suggest is that if you are an elderly Australian who’s electing to share your living space with a younger Australian, your house can and should no longer be entirely your own. Your young housemate, especially if they’re also now your caregiver, should be entitled to an equal share of power and a protective level of financial equity over how your household continues to function.

This idea should be common sense, especially considering how disproportionately the current approach to housing favors older homeowners against renters of all ages.

Yet every article on the topic I have been able to track down promotes the financial and emotional benefits of renting out spare rooms to seniors, while taking it entirely for granted that relief from the endlessly-accelerating cost of independent life and housing for young people will be on the terms and at the benevolence of those same wealthy homeowners.

The needs and rights of young people moving into these household arrangements are entirely ignored, or worse still, it is implied that they simply don’t exist. Yet everything about the crisis comes back to our governments’ complete and continual refusal to admit that this, like every other economic problem Australia is facing, is an issue that can’t be solved without an unprecedented downwards redistribution of wealth.

Yes, it will no doubt be unpopular politically, and since a statistically high number of Australian politicians (including the prime minister) are also landlords, it will most likely involve them making a personal sacrifice.

If the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t enough on its own to show us that an individualist approach to issues such as income inequality or climate change would never even slow the degradation we’re experiencing in almost every aspect of contemporary existence, the rapidly accelerating rate of homelessness definitely should.

What we need to solve this crisis is to simply give people their own houses. Free of any upfront costs, in places where their residents would like to live. We need to decommodify the housing market, flooding it with owner-occupiers to make sure that renting never has to be a person’s only option. We can’t allow landlords to keep the role of petty, feudal tyrants, nor let them flout our housing safety laws, or increase our average rents to unsustainable levels.

You don’t have to worry about the number of available rentals plunging if you’re simply giving people houses. Our housing bubble has been overdue to burst for years, and the propertied class will lose some of their wealth when that happens anyway. Wouldn’t it be better if we took care of the people with the most to lose first — the welfare recipients, the young people on lower incomes who have no hope of affording housing for the remainder of their lives?

The fact that even high-income earners are being forced to rent right now is a dire warning of how catastrophic this problem will become over the next few years if we continue to imagine gradual reform will fix it.

Housing is the most basic of necessities. We can’t afford to keep on treating it like a commodity. We need to see it as a human right that every adult citizen is automatically entitled to, instead of continuing to allow a vanishing minority of landlords and their descendants to dictate our approach to housing policy.

We can’t afford to keep housing a market anymore.

Image: Dejan Krsmanovic