People travelled from far and wide for a chance to hug and shake hands, and to share a drink with old mates who in some cases hadn't seen each other since they marched out of the works and into history on Thursday, September 30, 1999.

For organiser Aub Brooks, the enthusiastic gathering was a vindication of all of the effort that he and others have put in over the years in promoting the reunions and their fundraising efforts.

Some individual departments and workplaces still hold smaller reunions but this is the first works-wide reunion since 2015.

"I'm overwhelmed, it's brought me to tears," Brooks said on Saturday.

"Look at all these people. Isn't it fantastic? They're the men and women of steel."

This year, the reunion raised $4500 for the Hunter Prostate Cancer Alliance: $500 raised from cash donations and raffles on the day, and $2000 each from Hunter United Credit Union and Phoenix Health Fund, both organisations having grown out of the steelworks.

The afternoon kicked off with a message from Balmain Tigers legend Gary Leo, 75, who played in the club's upset 1969 grand final win over South Sydney.

He moved to Newcastle in 1975 to be captain-coach of Norths.

He sits on the alliance board having been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005. He said he had started treatment again after his PSA levels began to rise once more about 18 months ago.

"When I first knew I had the cancer, a couple of Balmain guys rang me and said they had it too, but they never talk about it," Leo said.

"I'm just out there talking to people about it, urging blokes to have a check-up. It's only a blood test."

Leo struggled to make himself heard at times but he said later that it was alright because he knew everyone was so enthusiastic about catching up with each other.

Spilling out onto the verandah - and onto the green when the Herald herded everyone together for a group photo - the air was full of talk of blast furnaces and coke ovens and skelp mills and precipitators.

Records show the works had about 2800 employees when the closure was announced in 1997.

About 600 left in the intervening two years.

Another 450 went to the BHP rod and bar mills, which were staying open.

About 1800 people, the "vast majority" male and with an average age of 42 (or 62 now) were left at the end.

All three groups were represented on Saturday, as well as contractors and those who retired or lost their jobs sometimes well before the closure.

THE STORY SO FAR

Lynette Garrett of Woodberry, Liz Mudd of Medowie and Paul Parsons of Morisset said they were among hundreds of apprentices who were retrenched after finishing their apprenticeships in the early 1980s, when the steelworks were laying off thousands of people under the Hawke government's industry plans.

All three received their fitting and turning trade certificates, and Garrett said "only about 5 per cent of the apprentices were kept on".

She finished in 1985, Mudd and Parsons the year before.

"There were about 100 fitters, and the same number of boilermakers and electricians every year," Garrett said.

"If you ask what it meant to me, it was hard work, great friends and a lot of skills that I still use now."

Tom "Magoo" McGeechae, who clocked up 37 years over two stints at the works, finished in 1997 and says it took "two years to get over it because I missed my mates so much".

McGeechae and his old mate Victor Bazelej laughed about the tower of Babel that was lunchtime.

"When I got there, all these Greeks, Italians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, they're all going hammer and tongs at each other, abusing each other, and I'm thinking it's going to break out into a fight," McGeechae said.

"But it was just the banter. They were great mates, It was just the way they talked to each other!"

There was plenty of banter yesterday between some of the men who finished up in 1999 and those whose good luck or good management meant they stayed on at the steelworks with jobs at the rolling mills.

Brothers Gary, Brad and Dale O'Connell all worked at the mills, and were talking with old mates David Graham, Maurice Mather and Alan Hamilton.

Like many families, the Graham's had a multi-generational history at the works, with David Graham saying his father, George Graham, had put in a long stint at the works.

The mills crew said they were often bagged by their colleagues on the blast furnaces or the coke ovens as being "too clean" to have done any really hard work.

"Let's face it, there were some shit jobs over there," Mather said.

"So there was a bit of 'us and them' about it. But then when they put a new end on the bar mill and it was the same again, between the new clean end and the old dirty end."

Carrington's popular bowlo was an appropriate venue for Saturday's BHP reunion, with the silver wheat silos that dominate the view looking east along Cowper Street a reminder of the docks at the start of the steelworks channel and the industry still clinging on in an increasingly gentrified inner city.

The din inside the club early on was tremendous, as conversation and laughter built up in waves with each new arrival and each forgotten anecdote suddenly remembered as the bonhomie and the beer flowed: although perhaps not as freely as it once did.

One retired train driver reeled off a list of places to me where that section kept their beer on ice during each shift.

But that was long ago, he said, before the modernisation and the downsizing and the increasingly stringent safety standards that might have been resented at the time, but which saved limb and life alike, judging by the noticeable improvement in injury rates towards the end of the plant's 84 year life.

From time to time conversation at a particular table would grow a bit sombre, as the misfortune of absent friends was remembered.

"At the start of every shift you'd look up at the flag on the main gate," one man told me.

"If it was at half mast, you knew there's been a fatality."

As I've observed in the series of articles the Herald has produced in the past week to mark the 20th anniversary of the steelworks closing, almost every former BHP worker you listen to believes things were better off when the plant was running.

People were still arguing on Saturday why it shut, but the popular verdict is that it shouldn't have shut.

Darren Williams, an Electrical Trades Union delegate member of the Transition Steering Team that was formed to manage the final phase of things once the closure was announced in April 1997, said those two-and-a-half-years were the "most rewarding" of his working life.

He said the various unions put aside their differences and their broader political positions, and worked together as one to present a united front to management.

He said that once the employee side of the TST realised they couldn't change the closure verdict, their only agenda was to maximise the benefits to the workforce, and "save the jobs at the mills" that kept running after the Newcastle works closed, fed with steel from Whyalla and Sydney.

One employee from the bloom mill remembered the final two years as a time of record steelmaking.

After the reunion he found a January 1997 letter from management that thanks the employees in the steelmaking and bloom caster sections for their production efforts, giving everyone a free double movie pass to the Hoyts cinemas at Charlestown, inviting them to "one of the work group BBQs being arranged".

The same letter, however, describes the monthly safety record of one lost-time injury and four medical treatment injuries as "a disappointing result".

"It is critical that we maintain our safety focus and ensure that our target of ZERO injuries and safety incidents is achieved," the letter says.

As a means of encouraging everyone to "buy in" to the works improvement programs that were under way at the time, were given a list of seven records that had been set that month: five relating to tonnages and two to costs.

The letter can be read in the gallery above.

Jason and Renae Jenkins, whose steelworks kiss became a closure motif that the Herald revived on Saturday, took their two boys, Michael, 11, and Lachlan, nine, to the reunion.

Jason is still at the rod mill, now rebranded along with the rest of the former OneSteel companies as InfraBuild, under the ownership of entrepreneurial Indian-born British businessman Sanjeev Gupta.

Today, Monday September 30, marks the 20th anniversary of the closure, to the day, and the Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association - whose members are mainly former BHP employees - will conduct a ceremony at 11am today, with the final manager of the Newcastle steelworks, Lance Hockridge, as the guest of honour.

Tours of Delprat's cottage, the Muster Point closure installation and the 2015 centenary memorial will continue today, from 10am to 3pm.

The gathering point for these events is a signposted carpark near the historic BHP administration building,, on the corner of Industrial Drive and Selwyn Street, Mayfield East.

As well as Mr Hockridge, a number of other former BHP managers are expected to attend. Association president Bob Cook is urging anyone interested in the history of the city to attend.

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