Christopher Jay - A Future More Prosperous

When BHP decided in 1912 to build a steel plant at Newcastle, it laid the foundations for largescale manufacturing industry in Australia, It also laid foundations physically - the place was built on tidal mudflats. There has to be filled in with dredged sand and wooden piles.

When World War II cut off overseas sources of machine tools, steelworks engineers and tradespeople built thousands of local replacements. Some were reconstructed from little more than catalogue photographs. This huge stock of wartime plant and equipment in turn underpinned Australia’s rapid postwar growth and mass immigration program, which created the Australia of today.

With the help of unpublished records from the BHP archives, here is a lively account of the challenge and dilemmas facing the steelworks people, as they coped with war, depression, industrial conflict, overseas competition and radical new steel-making technology. It is a fascinating history of the huge plant, which has dominated the Newcastle skyline for almost the whole of the twentieth century.