BHP 20 years on: The final two years as BHP shuts its Newcastle steelmaking plant|NEW GALLERY

Two years and five months earlier, on April 29, 1997, BHP had confirmed the long-expected closure of a plant that had come to characterise Newcastle for good and bad in so many people's eyes.

Uncertainty had dogged the works for years. It had been a time of rapid change for the steel industry as tariff protection was pulled away as part of a broader deregulation of the Australian economy.

BHP's push into steel in 1915 began Australia's industrialisation in earnest.

Now, the 20th was drawing to a close and the Newcastle works were being consigned as a relic of an earlier era, although not without enormous controversy, and a dogged fight led by the workers through their unions to keep the place open.

Still, when the big day came, it was a carnival and a funeral.

Read more:You must remember this: the steelworks kiss

There was plenty of laughter among the tears, and the Men and Women of Steel choir sang the procession through the gates with a rendition of the troop ditty, Bless 'Em All ("the long, the short and the tall").

Why so happy? For starters, the sight of the finish line would have been an enormous relief after 29 months of waiting, especially for those in the Transition Steering Team and related committees charged with negotiating on behalf of the workforce.

Thanks to the Pathways program, many of the younger employees had already found work, or would do so in the coming weeks, knowing that their colleagues appeared to have relatively little trouble.

Those who had squirrelled away the overtime they had earned over the years were already in reasonable positions financially, meaning that having a rental property or two on the side was not that unusual on the shop floor. Newcastle houses were a lot cheaper back then.

Yes, there were predictions of doom and gloom, and these were weighing heavily on some at the time.

Back in April 1997, the Herald described the review that BHP had used to help justify the closure as "the trial to provide the evidence to support the [pre-determined] verdict".

BHP kept saying to us, if you do this, you've got a job and the place is viable. They've given us a litany of lies

he late Maurie Rudd, Newcastle AWU secretary, about BHP and Newcastle

But early anger gave way, as it usually does, and by closure time most had more or less accepted their fates.

A month after the closure, one of the leading players on the BHP side, public affairs manager Greg Cameron, was also out of a job.

At the time, he acknowledged the role that public relations had played in having the closure accepted in the Hunter as an inevitability, and a step forward.

BHP had spent half a million dollars - a fair amount of money back then - on an artistic program, Ribbons of Steel, that resulted in the Muster Point installation, more than a dozen books from various perspectives on the Newcastle plant, and a string of theatrical and artistic events.

Cameron described Ribbons as an outlet for the "outpouring" of emotion unleashed by the closure announcement, "wholly" intended to "deflect" criticism of BHP.

Like Steel River and the container terminal proposal, it was part of an exit strategy that began before the 1997 announcement.

Today, Cameron says that strategy "involved identifying and understanding the needs of employees and the community and responding to those needs as best as we could".

This was explained to community leaders and the media, who accepted this was the strategy," Cameron says.

"If anyone had a better way of doing things, we wanted to hear it."

After years of speculation that the works were doomed, the closure confirmation had an immediate impact.

In Newcastle, most of the workforce downed tools on strike, with 2000 workers turning out at Dangar Park, Mayfield to call for a national steel strike that went ahead later that month.

Australian Workers Union leader Maurie Rudd, already gravely ill with lung cancer, berated BHP for profiting at the expense of the workforce.

"BHP kept saying to us, 'If you do this, you've got a job and the place is viable', and they kept that bullshit all the way through," Rudd said.

"They've given us a litany of lies."

Nationally, the company's share price started to surge as the financial markets applauded The Big Australian for having the strength to take what analysts viewed unemotionally as a tough but necessary decision.

Although Victorian Liberal MP David Hawker had begun a review into Australian steelmaking, the Howard government's instincts were to let BHP do what it wanted.

Even so, the PM surprised many in June 1997 when he appointed Rudd as co-chair with former BHP boss Robin Chenery to a task force to advise the government on its response to the closure.

It was this group's report, given to the PM during a visit to Newcastle in April 1999, that forecast an economic and social malaise after the closure.

On the Labor side, condemnation rang out from the treetops. Premier Bob Carr stood on the administration building steps to decry "a boardroom betrayal".

Federal opposition leader Kim Beazley flew in.

Federal Labor MP Allan Morris had been in Canberra since 1983 and was bitterly angry at BHP's actions after the help the Hawke government had given the company, especially the steel plan named after long-serving industry minister John Button.

ACTU leaders Bill Kelty and Jennie George made their presence felt as the unions pushed the company to minimise the workforce pain by maximising the exit benefits.

More broadly, the state and federal governments were hoping that subsidies from a purpose-built Hunter Advantage Fund (HAV) would attract new business to the region.

Clive Palmer, then a relative unknown, promoted Austeel, a $2.8-billion plan to build an electric arc furnace at Tomago that would have been fed on pelletised magnetite ore from his leases in Western Australia.

Today, that ore is processed and sent to China and is the source of Palmer's considerable, if sometimes overstated, wealth.

Proposals came and went at Steel River.

One was a barramundi farm.

Phoenix Technology, which claimed it could create 1700 jobs with a revolutionary new process making building tiles from household waste, flared for a while before disappearing.

Major backers were supposedly interested in building an international airport on Kooragang Island that would use Steel River as a freight hub.

And so it went, into the 2000s before the HAV hype finally faded into the background.

Despite the importance of the steelworks, and the way the BHP packed its bags with relatively little rancour, only one book has been written about the subject, Not Charted On Ordinary Maps: The Newcastle Steelworks Closure by Newcastle academic John Lewer.

Published in 2015, it looks critically at the events of those times, and I can highly recommend it.

Lewer reminds us that BHP's negotiations with the Hawke government over the Button plan gave what Herald columnist Phillip O'Neill had described in 1997 as "a generous subsidy to capital and a handsome victory to BHP's political strategists".

BHP had promised an electric arc furnace steelmaking plant for Newcastle, but it went instead to Rooty Hill in Sydney's west.

It was this, Lewer says, that produced "so much acrimony" in the broader labour movement, as well as those directly affected.

Kevin Maher, who succeeded Rudd as AWU branch president when his mate was too ill to continue, believes now that "things went as well as possible" although he says he still comes across people who "didn't find work for a long, long, time and when they did find work it usually paid a lot less than before".

Working for Abigroup now after leaving his union job in 2008, Maher says he can see both sides of the coin now in ways that weren't always apparent as a union official.

He laughingly calls himself "chicken little" over the post-closure collapse that never came, even if those predictions were based on work done by the Hunter Valley Research Foundation.

"Probably for the first year after closure I'm waiting for things to really go belly up," Maher says.

"And they didn't. The sun came up the next morning, people were going to work, there was no massive increase in the crime rate because people weren't going to work, the place wasn't depressed."

• BHP Reunion: Today, Saturday, Carrington Bowling Club, 12pm to 5pm
• BHP history tours:Tomorrow andand Monday, Selwyn Street entrance off Industrial Drive, 10am to 3pm both days
• 20th Anniversary Closure Ceremony: Monday, 11am, Muster Point, Selwyn Street carpark
  
  

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THE STORY SO FAR

• Murray McKean's demolition photos Steel Life
• The steel industry today
• Men and women of steel
• Reflections on the end of an era
• Timeline and gallery
• Remembering the human toll
• Newcastle since the steelworks shut