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YOU could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather at the start of the month when BHP Billiton rang me from Melbourne to say that one of its executives had tracked down the long-lost book of Newcastle steelworks fatalities to its archives in Victoria.
As readers will have learned this week, a lot of people, myself included, had asked for this record to be made public over the years, but the response had always been some version or other of a simple two-letter answer: no.
But this time around, something was different.
The day after the ceremony unveiling and blessing sculptor Will Maguire’s beautiful memorial to ‘‘the workers who died and the people who mourn them’’, I had written, not for the first time, asking BHP Billiton to solve the riddle of the register.
Did it exist? And if it did, would they hand it over? I had not held out a lot of hope. I don’t think anyone did.
So when BHP Billiton public relations manager Deirdra McCracken-Tindale rang me a little while later to say that a team of BHP executives wanted to ring me from Melbourne to discuss the book, I had no idea what to think.
As I reported in Wednesday’s Newcastle Herald, academic John Lewer had written about the ledger in his new book, Not Charted On Ordinary Maps, endorsing the belief of former Newcastle Herald columnist Jeff Corbett, that the company’s reluctance lay in ‘‘its concern that an accurate honour roll created from its records would be disturbingly long’’.
If such fears were behind the apparent reluctance of an earlier generation of BHP managers to set the record straight, they were not enough to stop BHP Billiton’s Melbourne-based workers’ compensation manager, Darren Bowey, from ordering a search of the archives, which resulted in five boxes of documents, including the elusive register: ‘‘the holy grail’’, as third-generation steelworks employee Aubrey Brooks quickly dubbed it.
Bowey met with Brooks and another former BHP employee, Bob Cook, who along with Brooks is a mainstay of the Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association set up after the steelworks closure to keep the steelworks flame burning in the public memory.
As we sat in the Crowne Plaza Newcastle two Mondays ago, Brooks kept looking from the book, to me, and back again, saying ‘‘I can’t believe I am holding this!’’
The response this week from readers has been as uniformly enthusiastic and positive as I had believed, deep down, it would be.
I have had a number of conversations with people whose memories came flooding back, often with deep upwellings of emotion, when they read the name of someone dear to them who had died on the job.
Because the disclosure was so unexpected, a number of people rang to thank the Herald and BHP Billiton for bringing to public notice the otherwise forgotten sacrifice of the individuals involved.
Somehow, these memories need to be captured and recorded for posterity, before we lose the last living links with those men who died in the early years of the works.
From the modern perspective, with the steelworks replaced by 140hectares of near empty level space, and the sky a rich blue without the once-permanent pall of black smoke and dust, it is hard to imagine the physical impact the steelworks had on Newcastle, let alone its dominant role in the social structure and the economy.
As Lewer recounts in his book, ‘‘the steelworks ruled the local labour market for much of the 20th century’’.
Almost 4000 people were employed at the start and ‘‘by 1933, one third of all Newcastle men [there were, at least initially, few women] were employed at the works’’.
Even in 1982, the 12,000 people employed in the pre-restructuring era accounted for 10per cent of the Newcastle labour force.
The descendants of many of the early workforce are still living in the region, and if those who have contacted the Herald this week are any guide – and I believe they are – then there is very strong public support for a formal ‘‘honour roll’’ to complement Maguire’s already moving sculpture.
After all these years, there’s no pressing hurry. As Bowey said last week, finding the register is the start of the process, not the end.
