Port Kembla: Steel City Heritage and Industrial Transformation

Port Kembla's steelworks, operated by BlueScope Steel on the site of the original Wollongong steelworks established in 1928, is one of Australia's most significant industrial facilities and the foundation of the Illawarra region's economic history. The steelworks' production of flat steel products for the construction, manufacturing, and automotive industries has supplied the physical infrastructure of post-war Australia, the steel in bridges, buildings, and vehicles across the country tracing its origin to the blast furnaces and rolling mills of Port Kembla.

The steelworks' transformation from the post-war peak employment of more than 20,000 workers to the several thousand who operate the modernised and automated facility today reflects the pattern of industrial change that steel-producing regions across the world have navigated. The Illawarra's economic diversification, driven by the recognition that steel employment would continue to decline regardless of the facility's productive output, has developed the higher education, tourism, and creative industries that provide employment for the workers whose parents and grandparents built the industrial economy.

BlueScope's commitment to investing in low-carbon steelmaking technology, in response to the decarbonisation requirements that climate policy and customer preferences are imposing on the global steel industry, provides the path toward a sustainable future for the Port Kembla facility that earlier industrial transitions did not have. The investment in green hydrogen and electric arc furnace technology represents the most significant capital commitment in the facility's history and positions BlueScope as one of the more advanced steelmakers globally in its decarbonisation planning.

The heritage of the steelworks is preserved through the Illawarra Museum and the community collections that document the social history of the steel era, the labour movement that organised the steelworks' workers, and the multicultural community of British, Croatian, Italian, and other immigrant steelworkers and their families that the industry attracted to Wollongong from the 1940s onward. The social history of the steelworks is inseparable from the social history of the Illawarra.

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