Newcastle still sits in the same place on the map it was in 1999.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Apart from the high-rises sprouting in the CBD and the new housing estates creeping their way around its western outskirts, the general area still looks much as it did back then.
But successive waves of change have swept through the lower Hunter since BHP closed the steelworks. For most of the former workforce, life as they knew it, and loved it, ended on that September Thursday, and no amount of facts and figures showing the objective improvements that have occurred since then will convince them that Newcastle has done well - and in some ways thrived - since the closure.
The most recognisable and quickest change was visual. Looking east from Blackbutt, or travelling along the Pacific Highway from Charlestown, the haze that hung over the city in all but the strongest of winds was suddenly gone. Thanks to an industrial history began half a century before BHP, the water of the steelworks channel and the harbour was generally an industrial grey.
But it cleaned, too, almost immediately after steelmaking finished. It deteriorated again when the steelworks channel was dredged and remediated, and nowadays looks an apparently healthy blue.
Newcastle house prices had tended to sit well below the Central Coast to the south, and Foster/Tuncurry to the north, but they moved quickly after the closure. Stories abounded of canny investors snapping up incredible bargains.
From as far back as the 1970s and '80s, Newcastle's unemployment rate had been consistently above the state and national averages, and to a considerable degree. It was well into double figures for much of the 1990s.
In the lead-up to the closure, studies produced by the Hunter Valley Research Foundation and others had predicted increases in an already worrying jobless rate, together with various dire predictions about a loss of social structure.
To the surprise of just about everyone, the jobless rate improved, and dramatically so. At the peak of the mining boom, unemployment in the lower Hunter fell below the state average, an undreamed-of outcome.
Social cohesion was a problem in some places - the Mayfield shopping strip, especially, fell on hard times soon afterwards - but today it looks as almost as busy as it was back then.
Although BHP can be accused of not putting enough money into the Newcastle works in their final decade, it needs to be remembered that the steel industry - indeed the entire Australian manufacturing sector - was feeling the winds of change brought on by the Hawke government's steady dismantling of the tariff barriers that had long protected Australian business against overseas competition.
It was get big or get out, and Newcastle's blue collar workers paid the price.
Until recently, the mainstream consensus was that Australia as a whole had benefited from the dismantling of tariff barriers and the resulting globalisation, but nowadays Donald Trump and other "nationalist" leaders are working to discredit these concepts.
As to why things turned out so differently from the dire predictions of post-closure trouble, it's worth remembering that Newcastle is sometimes viewed as a place that resists change, with a related fear that the sky will somehow fall in if the established order of things is not maintained. On this view, the battles over Merewether Surf House and the Laman Street figs are two examples.
Another possibility is that Newcastle simply over-estimated the importance of the steelworks to the economy.
For people to discover they could fly, without the steelworks there, is an amazing thing.
- University of Newcastle chancellor and former steelworks head Paul Jeans
University of Newcastle chancellor Paul Jeans ran the Newcastle plant in the early 1990s, preceding Bob Kirkby, who was in charge when the closure was announced in April 1997.
A Teralba boy who went to Newcastle High and sat his mechanical engineering degree at the old university college at Tighes Hill, Jeans says: "I think Newcastle felt it was more dependent on BHP than it really was.
"When I started there in 1959, one in 10 people worked in the steelworks. By the 1990s, one in 100 virtually did because the greater Newcastle area, was so much larger. Psychologically, I think people still felt that great dependency, and I think that to discover they could fly, without the steelworks there, is an amazing thing. Newcastle is an exciting place now, it is, it really is."
The closure is generally referred to as a Newcastle story but the impacts reverberated across the valley. Workers came from all over the Hunter to do their shifts, and those who came down from Kurri Kurri and Cessnock and Branxton were travelling back and forth on some pretty basic roads.
Today, the vineyards are half an hour closer to Newcastle thanks to the Hunter Expressway, a Rudd government GFC stimulus project that opened in 2014 and is surely one of the biggest improvements to the Hunter's road network in many years.
It should be remembered, too, that the Newcastle steelworks wasn't the only big employer in the region to shut during this period.
About 500 jobs were lost when Newcastle tailors Rundles shut its Kotara factory 18 months before the steelworks closed.
In January 2000, four months after the BHP closure, National Textiles at Rutherford closed, putting 300 people out of work. As it happened, the company was chaired by Stan Howard, a brother of PM John Howard, who stepped in to cover at least some of the money owed to workers, resulting in today's taxpayer-funded General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme or GEERS.
Pasminco's Cockle Creek lead and zinc smelter went into receivership in September 2001. Last shift was Friday, September 12, 2003, putting 350 employees and 70 contractors out of work.
During this closure, the Pasminco workers were helped by Pathways, which had kept on going after its birth at BHP. Owner Paul Cartledge says "we did every major industrial closure in the Hunter after BHP", and he estimates about 10,000 workers had used the company's services by the time he closed it in 2015.
In 2002, Alcan sold its Kurri smelter to the Norwegian company Norsk Hydro, and once it shut in 2012, that left the Tomago Aluminium smelter as the last of the region's big manufacturing employers.
If the coal industry and the coal-fired power stations at Vales Point, Eraring, Bayswater and Liddell go the way of the dinosaur - as so many people want to happen - then the Hunter region will be unrecognisable, economically, from the valley that was famed around the nation, and abroad, for its industry.
This industry did not only shape the region economically, it shaped us culturally as well. It is difficult to find a former blue-collar BHP worker who doesn't put "camaraderie" at the top of the list of the things they miss about working there. It's the mateship, they say.
The public image of the BHP steelworker came to be characterised by a man - although women had long been part of the production workforce - with a weathered face, covered in sweat and bathed in the orange glow of the furnace. It was "standing side by side with your mate", as plenty of people have told me these past few weeks, to get the job done.
The industrial battles were often characterised as workers responding in the only way they could to the impossible demands of management, and while that description can be rightly applied to some disputes, it wasn't the case all the time.
Thursday afternoon was a popular time to down tools and walk off the job, helping Australia maintain its reputation "the land of the long weekend".
Those days are long gone, and while the industrial areas at places such as Tomago, Thornton and Beresfield still provide a modicum of what was once universally characterised as blue-collar work, these jobs are a world away from the labouring jobs that employed many thousands of people at BHP and the smelters.
Today, the Newcastle economy is far more diversified, with the education and service sectors leading the way. The various steel mills - indeed most of the projects touted during the closure period - did not eventuate, but we survived anyway, a prosperous enough town, but no longer a company one.
- BHP Reunion: Tomorrow, Saturday, Carrington Bowling Club, 12pm to 5pm
- BHP history tours: Sunday and Monday, Selwyn Street entrance off Industrial Drive, 10am to 3pm both days
- 20th Anniversary Closure Ceremony: Monday, 11am, Muster Point, Selwyn Street carpark
While you're with us, did you know Newcastle Herald offers breaking news alerts, daily email newsletters and more? Keep up to date with all the local news - sign up here.
THE STORY SO FAR