Port Kembla At Night

Port Kembla Steelworks does not go dark. The photograph made in 2019 shows why: towers and structural forms rising against a night sky, steam venting from multiple points across the complex, and an orange flare burning on the right of the site. The facility occupies 760 hectares on the coastal plain south of Wollongong, bounded by Five Islands Road to the west and Port Kembla harbour to the east. At night, with no horizon detail and no ambient light to compete with, what remains is the glow of the works itself. Construction began in 1926 under Hoskins Iron and Steel Co. Ltd, using a blast furnace design by Freyn Engineering of Chicago. No. 1 blast furnace was blown in on 29 August 1928. Charles Hoskins, who had purchased the land from the Wentworth Estate and staked the family business on the project, had died in February 1926, before a tonne of iron was made. His widow, Emily Hoskins, lit the furnace at a ceremony described at the time as being "of the most practical character." The furnace carried her name. The works passed through Australian Iron and Steel Ltd and then became a BHP subsidiary in 1935. BlueScope Steel Ltd took over operations in 2002. Six blast furnaces were built between 1928 and 1996. By 1973, steelmaking exceeded 4,000,000 tonnes per year and the workforce exceeded 20,000. The site is Australia's largest crude steel production plant. When this photograph was made in 2019, No. 5 blast furnace was operating, having been relined in 2009 at a cost of $372 million. No. 6 blast furnace had been mothballed since 2011. Since then, BlueScope has approved a $1.15 billion reline of No. 6, with completion expected mid-2026, extending its operational life by a further 20 years. No. 5 is scheduled for retirement by 2030. The flare in the frame is not decoration. It is the mark of a plant that has not stopped since 1928.