Shunters were crushed between trains. Riggers fell from scaffolding. And heat and gas were everywhere.

A Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate account of February 1919 tells of John Henry Ryan, 35, killed on night shift when a gas cylinder exploded in a pool of molten blast furnace slag.

At an inquest that week, the attending doctor said "death was due to extensive injuries to the skull".

"It would have been possible for the injuries to have been caused by an explosion of gas, by the deceased having been hurled against some object, Fix this textor by having been struck with some object travelling at a high velocity," he concluded.

At another inquest, in July 1938, the court heard that Thomas Valentine Locke, 44, a greaser, of Chaucer Street, Beresfield, was found asleep near a gas heater at the end of a day shift the previous month.

"He was awakened, but walked only 100 yards when he collapsed and died," the Herald reported.

"On the medical testimony, I have no doubt that Locke died from carbon monoxide poisoning, but I cannot attribute his death to any carelessness by the management," the coroner said, noting that Locke had worked there for 22 years and should have been aware of the dangers.

Gas was again the culprit in June 1951, when three boiler cleaners were asphyxiated when furnace fumes blew through a seal in a faulty valve.

George William Sewell, 56, of Carrington, had fought with the British in the Battle of Mons and served in the Merchant Navy in WWII.

It was his birthday three days before his death, and his wife's a day after it.

John Fairhall, 54, of Kenrick Street, The Junction, had worked in that section for 30 years.

Jakob Prychockle, 30, of Mayfield West migrant centre, had a wife and child at the Greta migrant camp. They'd all arrived the previous year.

Safety improved with time, as new equipment replaced old.

The arrival of a basic oxygen steel or BOS plant in 1961 was a major improvement, said John Risby, works manager 1980-86, in the 1999 BHP book, A Future More Prosperous.

"It finally got rid of some of the horrific jobs that men had to do with open hearth furnaces," Risby said.

Hot flues under the open hearth needed cleaning once a week and teams of "demolishers" with "corn bags wrapped around their legs and waists and over their heads" would remove the heavy dust particles that accumulated in the tunnels.

"They'd work a half hour on, half hour off," Risby said.

"All the furnace work was hot, before any of the mechanical equipment was installed."

As a reporter visiting the works in the 1990s, it was apparent that safety was paramount.

Production was up and injury rates were down, as management pushed various high-profile safety programs that were light years ahead of what I'd experienced working in power stations in the early 1980s.

Even so, five people were killed on the job in its final four years of operation, and another lost his life during the works' demolition.

Until 2015, no-one knew how many people had died on the plant, and even now, we don't know the exact number.

The best estimate we have is about 280, including 90 regarded as non-work-related - a surprisingly low total in some opinions.

As far as serious injuries, rather than deaths, are concerned, the accident toll must be orders of magnitude greater.

NSW government figures published this year for the mining industry - a reasonable proxy for steelmaking - reveal a rate over time of 35 serious injuries for every fatality.

Add workplace-related health problems - especially of the lungs - into the equation, and there would have been many thousands of casualties over time.

Whatever the number, it's a toll that some say was downplayed when the works were operating, and wrongly overlooked in hindsight.

Today, two major monuments stand to commemorate the sacrifices of those who died making steel, while BHP also put up most of the money the Anzac Walk above Bar Beach, conceived by restaurateur Neil Slater as a centenary memorial both to Gallipoli and the start of the steelworks in 1915.

The first, the closure-era walk-through installation The Muster Point, was built by Novocastrian sculptor Julie Squires, with help from a team of BHP workers.

Squires also created the winged figure of Destiny on Newcastle Harbour's Dyke Point.

The second memorial stands on the same parcel of land near the BHP administration building.

It was commissioned from another Hunter artist, Will Maguire, and unveiled at a centenary ceremony in 2015. A time capsule to be opened in 2065 was added soon after.

Soon after, BHP handed over a long-rumoured "fatalities" register in a gesture of goodwill that was built on, using other records, to produce the presently understood totals.

Although calls for a detailed accounting of the steelworks death toll came from various quarters, the path that took us to where we are today can be traced to the 1995 deaths of crane drivers Kevin Fenning, 55, and Peter Naylor, 37.

Every year, Fenning's widow Beryl would place a memorial for her late husband in the Herald, and in July 1999 she lodged a Phone Your Say agreeing with another reader's call for a memorial.

In the years after the closure we worked with Mrs Fenning to locate a small bundle of memorial plaques - including one to her husband and Naylor - that had been taken down from a wall in the plant and then apparently lost.

They were eventually located at Christ Church Cathedral.

Along the way, Mrs Fenning's determination to ensure the sacrifices of her husband and others were not forgotten, engaged the support of Bob Cook and Aub Brooks, two high-profile former BHP employees with a keen interest in steelworks heritage.

Founding members of the Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association - which is now based permanently at the historical steelworks building Delprat's Cottage - the pair began a fund-raising effort to build what became the 2015 "mourning circle" memorial.

Early on, there was a determination to ensure that the memorial named all of those who lost their lives on the plant.

But as time passed, and the much-talked-about fatalities book failed to materialise, the concept changed to a more general memorial to ''the workers who died and the people who mourn them''.

After its dedication service in June 2015, attended by about 400 people, I wrote: "While I heard a lot of praise on Tuesday for Maguire's creation, I also heard repeated calls for a list of names to go with it."

A month later, those calls were answered.

Returning to Melbourne after attending the service, BHP Billiton (as it was at the time) workers' compensation manager Darren Bowey ordered a search of the Melbourne archives, coming up with various items including the ledger that Brooks and others had described as "the holy grail".

''It took five years of effort to build the memorial and we got it done in time for the centenary of steelmaking," Brooks said back then.

"This list is a wonderful first step along a massive journey.''

Beryl Fenning and others had wanted a memorial wall along the line of the Jim Comerford memorial wall at Aberdare, built in 1995 by the mine workers' union with inscriptions for each of the 1800-plus fatalities in the Hunter industry since 1801.

For various reasons, such a wall is yet to eventuate. Initially, the association felt that starting a chronological list too early would prove troublesome if more fatalities emerged, as they expected would be the case.

This week, Cook said the site owner, the NSW government, may sell the former BHP site where the memorials stand, in which case they would be moved to a "heritage curtilage" surrounding the nearby administration building.

The 2015 memorial included sandstone blocks from the old BHP pattern store, and there were enough set aside to add to it if the time came.

Brooks believes officialdom should step up in some form to see the job through.

"We did it originally because no-one else would.

"This region and its prosperity owes a lot to the people who gave their lives in that place."

University of Newcastle chancellor Paul Jeans, who ran the Newcastle works from 1991 to 1993, will tonight launch photographer Marty McKean's Steel Life exhibition at the Callaghan campus gallery at 6.30pm.

Lance Hockridge, steelworks manager during the closure, will be the guest speaker at a ceremony at Delprat Cottage at 11am on Saturday. Hockridge went on to run the Queensland-based rail company Aurizon, between 2010 and 2016. His present board roles include Huawei Technologies (Australia).

McKean, nowadays a freelance professional photographer, shot the images in this exhibition during the demolition of the works.

Promoting the exhibition - a revival of an original showing in May 2014 - the university says McKean's photographs show the site "in a state of ruin".

"Detritus from the steelworks is sprawled across the landscape in a kind of wreckage that documents the monumental scale and emotion of that time in Newcastle's history," the university says.

"The residual materials, and the evidence of absent workers, and workers as they clear the site, will remain tangible for many . . . 20 years on."

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