
Issue No 13		14 May 1999

History

Remembering BHP: Memory and Industrial Heritage

By Dr Nancy Cushing - School of Humanities, University of Newcastle

The announcement of the intended closure of BHP's Newcastle steelworks heightened the awareness that industrial heritage is more than derelict sites of production.

A range of bodies, from universities, to the ABC to BHP itself, have begun to gather stories about the steelworks from the people whose lives it touched. The memories captured in this period of flux, between the announcement of the closure in April 1997 and the actual shutdown in September 1999 constitute a significant industrial heritage.

This article will explore public recollections of BHP created since the closure announcement, arguing that its gradual withdrawal from Newcastle since the early 1980s has affected the way that people remember it.

My sources are limited to the spoken or written word. Unlike other subjects of popular memory which have been studied, such as the Depression, the Homefront in World War II or domestic work, the steelworks has rarely been represented in popular culture. There is little likelihood that memories of BHP have been affected by film or television portrayals although such films as Flashdance or The Full Monty could make an impact. Formal records of work experiences are lacking

The commissioned histories of BHP put the company at their centre, while academic studies have focused on economics and workplace disputes. The BHP Review, an in-house publication, recorded retirements of long serving employees, featuring their photographs, but not their stories. In one example from June, 1938, the Review covered the function marking the retirement of Mr Jack Young at which Mr Alf Davis 'told the gathering of some amusing incidents in which he and the guest of the evening had figured during the early days of the erection of the Newcastle plant'. The memories themselves were not recorded. There are no physical memorials to BHP or its workers in Newcastle to act as aide memoires.

Elements of the site serve this purpose now, but once decommissioned, it is likely that buildings, roads and railway tracks will be removed to make way for other uses despite the recognition by the NSW Heritage Office and the National Trust that many elements of the site possess heritage value. Ironically, the building perhaps most likely to be preserved is the Inter-War Georgian Revival Administration Building constructed in 1921. With its imposing front staircase, columns and formal balance, it is a building which says much about the Company's self-image but little about the experience or process of making steel.

It is likely that the informal modes of transmission of memory - gossip, stories and jokes - will continue to be more important locally than the more formal channels of film, text and memorial. The break with the past signalled by the closure of the steelworks may be met with the establishment of a museum recording the history of the steelworks, but the principal repositories for this heritage will be public and private archives and the minds of local people.

At a national level, memories of BHP are based not in direct experience but largely through media representations. As Lucy Taksa noted in 'The Masked Disease', press accounts affect what stories are possible, how they are told and how they are transmitted.

Capital city newspapers covered the closure announcement as though Newcastle was defined by BHP. A Daily Telegraph cartoon portrayed Newcastle as an oversized tin man weeping while a small frock coated, cigar smoking man labelled BHP strode away with his heart. Beneath it, Mike Gibson opined that, 'after 82 years, it [BHP] was closing down the heart and soul of the city that had made this company the success story that it is'.

Mark Stoker, acting assistant secretary of the Australian Workers' Union, said, 'They have reached into the heart of Newcastle, its people, its heritage, and they have torn the heart out'. History and memory were used to build up the magnitude of the event. Bruce Hextall, in the Sydney Morning Herald, covered the closure in a story entitled "World War I blast furnaces can't soldier on' and linked it with the retreat from ANZAC Cove. From a distance, BHP is perceived as Newcastle's powerhouse, providing the life blood which animates the city.

The view from within gives BHP less centrality and less power to cause the death of the city. The decision to close the steelworks came as no surprise to the people of Newcastle. As one steelworker said, for the past five years he had been 'Putting patches on patches'.

Since the early 1980s, BHP had been shifting its focus of steelmaking away from the Newcastle plant. The company will not entirely disappear from Newcastle as a new wire mill will be established there but the closure of the steelworks will mark a break in people's personal histories of the city.

When considering memories of BHP in Newcastle, gender is an obvious starting point. Very few women have been employed within the gates, principally in the administrative section and only in the past few decades in the area of production. In contrast, a significant minority of men in Newcastle have had some experience of working at BHP.

Women's memories of BHP are therefore limited in their range. Like women on the Homefront, or in coal mining or factory towns, they remember as those who waited for fathers, husbands and sons sent daily to the steelworks or as more or less interested spectators.

Men have been permitted the full range of viewing positions. As a major employer of less skilled and casual labour, BHP took in students seeking summer employment, youths and those between other jobs. Short term employees often saw the worst of the steelworks and the inefficiencies of a large organisation.

The asthmatic husband of one informant suffered debilitating attacks after exposure to fumes at BHP. A student worker told me of returning over several years and being set to painting metal work which had never been stripped. His three or four coats of paint were added to the mass already there with no consideration of their utility.

For these men, who took other paths through life, the steelworks was a rite of passage into whose mysteries they received only a limited induction. Their memories provide masculine credibility over the public bar or dinner table when talk of BHP arises.

Memories of BHP are much more central to those men who spent a significant proportion of their working lives at the steelworks. Some of these were captured in a Radio National broadcast entitled 'Work: Now and Then'.

Most informants mentioned their fear and revulsion when first confronted with the heat and dirt of the steelworks and the real dangers faced by workers only balanced by their relief at having a job.

A clear generational divide in memories is apparent with older workers feeling a strong attachment to the steelworks. Until the early 1980s, an apprenticeship at BHP was seen as a wise step and a good opportunity for young Novocastrians who could expect security and high rates of pay.

A Macedonian immigrant said of BHP, 'For 36 years it's been like a home to me'. Younger men interviewed by Radio National were more critical of BHP and their elders' loyalty to the company. A current employee recalled his grandfather and father's attitudes to BHP: 'They always thought BHP was God. I mean they always said if you get a job at BHP you get a job for life.

Well those days are finished, of course'. One man described his father-in-law, a loyal employee of over forty years standing, as being like a slave on an Alabama plantation in his attachment to the Company which had exploited him for decades. A more empathetic younger man noted that BHP appeared to be like a family business for many families who had worked for three generations in the steelworks.

As so often happens when a group faces an external threat, the community surrounding the works was bonded by it. When an accident occurred:

"news would come home with the men from the shift and spread up and down the street. It was often a Mayfield man, someone's father or brother, pinned under a load of steel that slipped, mangled by a machine that should not have been turned on, or, horrid beyond imagining, slipping into a vessel of molten steel. "

These memories of hard work and mateship are the memories of the minority in Newcastle, those who actually worked at the steelworks.

Although the steelworks holds such sway over ideas about Newcastle, most Novocastrians have never entered the BHP site. A woman who has lived in Newcastle for fifty years admitted that while she had toured the steelworks at Port Kembla, she had never visited the local steelworks.

For such people, BHP functions as a backdrop for their lives, looming large at times but generally simply being there as a presence on the skyline, marked by its large plume of smoke and steam. Bruce Wilson recalled that growing up in Mayfield in the 1940s, 'the steelworks were simply there ... It was the steelworks that defined Newcastle and made us what we were'.

The sheer bulk of the steelworks was strangely reassuring, like a great fortress protecting a medieval European town. Michelle Gunn remembered 'a golden flame flickering out of a giant chimney ... There night and day, it was reassuringly constant'.

This role of BHP as background came through clearly in the popular collection of short stories compiled for Newcastle's bicentenary entitled Novocastrian Tales. In none of the stories is BHP a setting, but many of them refer to it, like a river or mountain, as part of the landscape.

After an adventure, two boys in Marion Halligan's 'The Perfect Fish' pause on a railway bridge: 'Over behind BHP, great white billows of cloud climbed slowly into the hot blue air and beneath their feet a train rushed through the station without stopping'. Trying to account for an explosion, Michael Stevens' characters suggest: 'BHP?' he enthused. 'Too close.' BHP is mentioned only in a few of the dozens of stories in the volume and then not as a site of action or of employment for a major character but as part of the scenery against which the story is told. This seems to epitomise general memories of BHP. For the majority, BHP has been a latent force in their lives, a presence on the margins of consciousness.

In their memories of the steelworks, Novocastrians construct BHP as an alien imposition upon their city. Workers recall a battle with BHP which demanded perseverance, mateship bravery and could cause injury or even death. Citizens remember the steelworks as a backdrop to their activities impinging upon them only incidental ways.

Instead of becoming an organic part of the community of Newcastle, BHP remained geographically and metaphorically on its margins. As in Broken Hill itself, the Company kept a wary distance and avoided intimate engagement with its site of production.

To Bruce Wilson: "BHP Newcastle has never belonged to the community. It was an outpost of an empire centred on Melbourne. Novocastrians were merely a commodity, hired for as long as we were needed."

BHP is remembered as an Other, taking in young men, providing them with a living and making them old, but not really part of the community known locally as 'Our Town'. Far from being Newcastle's heart, directed by faceless men in a distant capital, BHP was heartless.

Having waged its struggle with Newcastle for almost a century, BHP has at last announced not defeat, but strategic withdrawal. Perhaps a more apt bodily metaphor, although one which would be perceived as controversial in Newcastle itself, would be that BHP was a cancer. The cancer will be excised this year and Newcastle, while depleted, will carry on to share its memories of survival.

The era of steelmaking in Newcastle is about to come to a close. The years 1915 to 1999 will become an epoch to be recalled and revisited through heritage interpretation. In its afterlife, as personal memories are affected by those in the public domain, there may be a tendency for the BHP steelworks to be viewed as the heritage site which was Newcastle's heart, the motive force of its glory days. Like Port Arthur, the scene of labour, hardship and conflict could be transformed into a place for a picnic with the family, or, should the site be put to another industrial use, a pleasant day's reminiscences.

Oral testimony being gathered by Rosemary Melville, a doctoral candidate at the University of Newcastle, from long serving employees of BHP indicates that BHP is central to their Newcastle, as to many others in the city. However, many of the steelwork's positive associations - as a place of certain work and high wages, for example - have been eroded over the past fifteen years.

The contemporary memories as recorded in newspaper and magazine articles, radio broadcasts, works of fiction and conversations since the closure announcement are of uncertainty and running down, of BHP as a backdrop for lives proceeding in different directions.

As Newcastle survives this latest challenge and goes on to capitalise on its location, physical beauty, stock of nineteenth century buildings, port facilities and other assets, it is more likely that the public memory of the BHP steelworks will increasingly converge with the local memory which places BHP at the margins rather than the centre of Newcastle.

Dr Cushing can be contacted at mailto:[email protected]

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  Issue 13 contents

Interview: Really Caring
Sam Moait will be sending a message from the 48,000 nurses who she represents when she takes her seat at the Drug Summit

Unions: Kicking the Habit
The architect of a trade union drug and alcohol program has revealed his own battle with drugs motivated him to help other workers kick the habit.

History: Remembering BHP: Memory and Industrial Heritage
The announcement of the intended closure of BHPï¿½s Newcastle steelworks heightened the awareness that industrial heritage is more than derelict sites of production.

Review: Ten Songs to Revolution
We ask Labor Council's resident music critic to name the ten songs that define the nineties.

International: Union Lifts Lid on Rio Tinto Shame File
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