TWENTY years ago, on the last day of September 1999, the remaining few thousand workers at the BHP Newcastle steelworks took their final walk out the front gate and on to new and different lives, as the plant was formally closed after 84 years of making iron and steel and history.
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Looking back at those times it is clear that Newcastle has moved demonstrably on from the years when it was widely regarded as a noisome place best driven through without stopping.
Novocastrians have always known that a skyline dominated by billowing smoke and towering machinery was only half the story, but it took a fair while after the 1999 closure for the message to sink in more widely.
Today, the steelworks is but a fading memory, albeit one complicated by the fact that the 150-hectare site remains largely empty, mute evidence that BHP's professed "gift" to Newcastle of a shipping terminal is still mired in uncertainty all these years later.
In a similar light, BHP has acknowledged that the other half of its closure legacy - the Steel River industrial plant - has also struggled to live up to expectations.
These are important issues, and the Newcastle Herald will examine them this week as part of our 20th anniversary coverage.
For that slice of the Hunter population either too young or too newly arrived to have been part of the steelworks story, this anniversary week might help fill in some gaps. For many, though, it will be an opportunity to relive the days of the "old" Newcastle.
Former workers will have a chance to catch up with old friends, either informally, or through the first BHP reunion since 2015, at Carrington, or through the Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association's tours of Delprat's Cottage and the Muster Point.
And given the impact of climate change, this 20th anniversary of the steelworks closure is also an opportunity to reflect on the transition our miners will face if the politics of coal become toxic enough to force a virtual shutdown of the industry. Regardless of why the works shut, BHP made a serious effort to help its employees find a successful future, and to clean up or minimise the impact of the mess it left behind.
In the end, its real legacy was not Steel River or a vacant industrial site, but its freeing of Newcastle from the real - if sometimes overstated - shackles of being a company town. A town without BHP, and a town that's doing pretty well, all things considered.
Issue: 39,413.
