For many years, BHP Steelworks had a big hand in defining Newcastle and it provided valuable employment for many people in the Lower Hunter outside The Steel City.
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This month marks a century since BHP Steelworks opened in Newcastle.
It also marks the 16th anniversary of the closure of BHP’s The Front End facility, which employed many people from the Maitland area over the course of several decades.
Maitland residents will attend a final anniversary celebration in Newcastle on Saturday, as a kind of “last hurrah” for former steelworks employees. For some, including Stanford Merthyr resident Darryl Cook, a job at the steelworks was their first real job as a teenager.
Mr Cook told the Mercury that he would catch a double-decker bus from Weston to Maitland and back again every day as a youngster to learn his trade as an apprentice electrician, and later a boilermaker, at the steelworks.
He spent 15 years working for the company before he left to work in the mines. Mr Cook is one of many people from the Maitland area to whom BHP provided a steady pay cheque.
When the steelworks closed in 1999, Newcastle’s unemployment rate was one of the highest in Australia at about 12 per cent.
In 2009, a decade after the closure, Fairfax Media noted that a report funded by the federal government estimated that it would have taken the creation of about 10,000 jobs to replace the hole that the steelworks left in the Hunter when it closed.
That goes to show what a vital part of the region’s economy it was.
The Mercury wishes the best of luck to the former BHP employees this weekend as they celebrate the company’s contributions to the Hunter Region.
