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ONE hundred years ago today, the industrial marvel that was the new Broken Hill Proprietary Company’s steelworks was officially opened by the governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson.
Sir Ronald arrived by special train from Sydney, accompanied by the governor of NSW, Sir Gerald Strickland, and his Tasmanian counterpart Sir William Ellison-Macartney. As the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate reported, they were joined by federal and state MPs as well as ‘‘captains of industry of almost every important manufacturing and commercial centre within the Commonwealth’’.
It was a big show.
Steel had been coming out of the plant since early April, but June 2 was the day chosen to mark the opening of a business that had been decades in the making.
In the northern hemisphere, iron and steel had helped drive the industrial revolution. Big improvements in blast furnace technology – and the development of the Bessemer converter to turn iron into steel – had led to the industry’s dramatic expansion in the second half of the 19th century.
Entrepreneurial colonial businessmen, aware of the independence that a home-grown steel industry would provide, worked hard on this dream, but it took a number of false starts with smaller plants in three states before the dream was fully realised in the shape of the Newcastle plant in 1915.
One such earlier plant was the Eskbank iron and steel works at Lithgow, where steel was first poured in 1901 and a blast furnace opened to great ceremony in 1907.
The BHP was formed by seven shareholders in 1883 and incorporated in 1885 to mine lead and silver in the NSW outback town of the same name.
BHP gained its Iron Monarch leases from the South Australian government in 1899, ostensibly to provide ironstone flux for the Broken Hill smelters, although the company soon realised it had far more iron ore than it could use in smelting.
As part of this process, it had taken an option on part of the eventual steelworks site back in 1896. But it was not until 1912, that BHP under its Dutch-born general manager Guillaume Delprat, made its official entry into the iron and steel industry.
Iron ore was not the only resource BHP needed. High quality coal, known as coking coal, was also needed to make steel. Iron ore was in South Australia but the coal was on the east coast. BHP decided to bring the iron ore to the coal. Newcastle won out over Port Kembla, which would get its own steelworks in 1928, built by the interests behind the Lithgow works but taken over by BHP in 1935.
Building the Newcastle steelworks was an enormous financial and industrial endeavour.
The Steelworks Act of 1912 gave BHP five years to build the plant. Delprat set a personal deadline of 30months and beat it by four months, all at a time when Australia was on a war footing.
Most of the BHP land was mangrove swamp and was still under water in April 1914 – an ‘‘appallingly wet’’ year with 54inches or 137centimetres of rain – but construction of the mainly imported plant was ‘‘well advanced’’ when war was declared on August 4.
The arrival of the steelworks and the downstream businesses that soon sprung up around it had a dramatic impact on the once quiet municipality of Waratah.
Look across the ridge that separates Maitland Road, Mayfield, from the steelworks, and you will see dozens of big, stately homes dating from the 1880s through to about 1910, when families of wealth had decided it was a desirable address. But once the smoke and noise began, the wealthy residents left, selling their mansion estates for subdivision into workers’ housing.
Mayfield became an industrial suburb, home to tens of thousands of steelworks’ employees over the decades, as the plant with the belching chimneys that came to characterise Newcastle began to dominate the landscape.
The steelworks was profitable from the start, and new furnaces and mills were added soon after opening.
By 1919 the steelworks and the nearby Walsh Island state dockyard employed more than 7300 people between them.
Under another famous industrialist, Essington Lewis, BHP expanded its steel interests, both by adding new plant and by buying steel-using businesses such as Rylands Brothers, Lysaght Brothers and Stewarts and Lloyds.
There were hard times in the Great Depression and the steelworks, like the neighbouring coal industry, did a lot to inculcate the community-wide belief in collective action that underpinned the region’s long allegiance union membership and the ALP.
Newcastle grew with BHP, and so did Australia. World War II triggered another era of expansion, but the writing was on the wall by the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the modern era of global trade and economic deregulation began the decades of change that have brought us to the present day.
The steelworks’ workforce peaked, in modern times, at more than 11,200 in 1981.
The total number of employees over the 84years of steelmaking is unknown, but a reasonable estimate would be more than 50,000, many of them working there for decades on end.
It will be 16 years on September 30 since the Newcastle steelworks held its tearful official closure.
All these years later, the outside world still seems to see Newcastle as a steel town. National or international media coverage of the city will almost always focus on its industrial face, often using historical footage of the plant at its height, as though outsiders cannot see the economic and social transformation that has taken place since Newcastle stopped being a company town.
As is often the case, the truth is often more complex than the surface message, and we sometimes forget that while BHP shut the blast furnaces and coke ovens that made the steel, it held on to the rod and bar rolling mills that took up more than half of the steelworks footprint, and which have been fed since Newcastle’s closure by ingots from Whyalla.
The mills are still running, operated by BHP offshoot OneSteel, which changed its name to Arrium in 2012 while retaining the OneSteel brand for its steel division. And steel is still manufactured in Newcastle, at the former Commonwealth Steel electric arc furnace at Maud Street, Waratah, which has also
been part of the OneSteel brand since it bought out Smorgon Steel in 2007.
In the lead-up to the steelworks closure, there were widely held fears that Newcastle would enter a period of economic collapse. In April 1999, then prime minister John Howard was handed a 130-page report commissioned from the Hunter Valley Research Foundation, which warned that ‘‘domestic violence, suicide, family breakdown, crime and alcoholism [would] soar’’ when the steelworks was shut.
Doubtless, individual lives were turned on their heads when steelmaking finished, and many of the older workers, especially, found it hard to find work, or to adjust to life outside of the company.
But from most angles, the steelworks closure is credited as the act that gave impetus to the creation of a modern and diversified Hunter economy.
It is true that Newcastle and the Hunter was always much more than simply BHP.
And the closure of the steelworks was followed shortly after by probably the biggest employment and investment boom the Hunter coal industry has ever seen.
But most observers believe Newcastle is a more rounded economy today, with the ‘‘company town’’ mentality long gone.
One disappointment, however, is the relative lack of use that has been made of the 145 hectares of former BHP land handed over to the state government a year after the closure – 15years this month.
BHP had envisaged a container terminal on the site and despite the best efforts of a small group of boosters, such a project looks more remote than ever.
With the exception of the sprawling neo-Georgian BHP administration building, dating from 1921, and two modern BHP buildings – one a lab, the other a computer building – the site has been cleared, levelled and mostly remediated.
Some development has taken place. The state government has built the Mayfield 4 wharf, where cruise ships and other vessels tie up, and a fuel depot has been built near the boundary with the OneSteel mills.
Most of the site was transferred last year to the new private operators of the Port of Newcastle under the state government’s 98-year lease.
After a decade as a major tenant of the administration building, Hunter Business Chamber moved out last April to the TAFE building in Parry Street, leaving just a handful of businesses in the cavernous rooms.
The April super storm damaged the tiled roof, letting in water and resulting in a framework of scaffolding being erected around the western rear face of the building as repairs continue.
On April 29, 1997, those steps were thronged by hundreds of steelworkers as then premier Bob Carr denounced the impending closure as a ‘‘boardroom betrayal’’.
Today, they are dusty, the once neatly-tended courtyard is ankle thick in leaves.
I’ve made various trips to the building in the past 16 years with former BHP workers, and their invariable response is to shake their heads and say they can’t believe it.
As third generation steelworker and Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association ‘‘keeper of the flame’’ Aub Brooks said last week: ‘‘If my dad could see this now, he’d roll in his grave.’’
RIP Newcastle BHP steelworks.
