Charge Crane Hook

The charge crane hook is a piece of working steel, shaped entirely by function. Photographed in 2016, it shows the cumulative wear of heavy industrial service: a surface pitted and marked by decades of load, heat, and mechanical stress. Nothing about it is decorative. Everything about it was necessary. Crane equipment of this kind operated throughout Port Kembla Steelworks, moving material through production areas spanning the full length of the site's 760-hectare footprint. The hook in this photograph carries no load. What it carries instead is the physical evidence of how many times it did. Port Kembla Steelworks was constructed by Hoskins Iron and Steel Co. Ltd from 1926, with the first blast furnace designed by Freyn Engineering of Chicago to a capacity of 800 tonnes per day. No. 1 blast furnace was blown in on 29 August 1928 by Emily Hoskins, widow of company founder Charles Hoskins, who had died in February 1926 before the works were completed. The furnace was subsequently named Emily in her honour. The commissioning ceremony was, by contemporary account, of the most practical character. The works passed to Australian Iron and Steel Ltd in 1928 and became a BHP subsidiary in 1935. Through the following decades, five further blast furnaces were added. Open hearth steelmaking ran from 1931 until the last furnace closed in 1982, replaced by basic oxygen steelmaking introduced in 1972. At the workforce peak in 1973, steelmaking exceeded 4,000,000 tonnes per year and more than 20,000 people worked on site. BlueScope Steel took over Port Kembla operations in 2002. The steelworks remains active. No. 5 blast furnace is currently operating, with retirement scheduled for 2030. No. 6 blast furnace, mothballed in 2011, is under a $1.15 billion reline expected to extend its operational life by 20 years. The hook in this photograph predates all of that redevelopment. It records a steelworks still in full industrial use, its equipment worn to the shape of the work it was built to do.