By Sarah Pawson and Ava Ferguson-Leighton
On the edge of Port Kembla, a maze of steel pipes and blast furnaces rises against the skyline. For decades, the Illawarra Steelworks have been the backbone of the suburb, but inside its walls, whispers echo of the men who never made it home. From unexplained explosions to eerie accidents, the question lingers whether the steelworks are dangerous by design, or if something malevolent is buried within, a curse that refuses to die.
When the first blast furnace was lit in 1928, it marked the beginning of a new era, one that brought prosperity to the Illawarra. Yet for many, the cost outweighed the reward. Just days after its grand unveiling, the steel had claimed its first souls. Port Kembla’s newest and most advanced blast furnace turned from a symbol of progress into a scene of chaos. Late one Thursday afternoon in September of 1928, the furnace’s tap holes erupted without warning, ejecting hundreds of tons of molten metal with volcanic force. The liquid iron cascaded across the ground in a searing tide, more than a foot deep in places, scorching everything in its path.
Workers scattered in panic as the inferno engulfed the area — eighteen men were burned, four of them seriously. Among the men was young Ernest Speechley, who stumbled as he fled, narrowly escaping the molten flow that nearly claimed his life. The explosion shook the town; crowds gathered at the steelworks gates as ambulances and police rushed to the scene. The furnace itself miraculously remained largely intact — a cold irony amidst the smouldering wreckage, where progress and peril had collided in the glow of industrial ambition.
On November 10 in 1944, the steelworks whispered its deadly promise again. A routine repair at the No. 2 blast furnace became a trap as carbon monoxide silently crept through the vessel where a dozen men laboured. One by one, they collapsed, caught in the furnace’s lethal embrace. Colleagues raced into the haze, dragging the dazed and unconscious from the manholes, tying ropes around bodies that seemed to hang between life and death, fighting a poison they could not see. The coroner later ruled the deaths accidental, but noted a series of overlooked warnings, including a gas leak days earlier, valves left untagged, and safety protocols unenforced.
More than thirty years later, the furnaces would again remind Port Kembla of their unforgiving power. In 1970, a routine day at the steelworks turned deadly when a shorted wire blew a fuse, triggering an explosion that ripped through the blast furnace floor. Electrician Tom Pawson, who worked regular duties in blast furnaces No. 4 and 6, still recalls the blinding flash and sudden chaos that followed — smoke filling the switchroom, alarms blaring, men scrambling for air.
“It all happened in a split second,” Pawson says. “The guy I was with was an asthmatic, and in the switchroom where I was, it was full of smoke… and it got him.”
When the haze finally lifted, one man was gone — a reminder that in Port Kembla, danger wasn’t always born from molten metal but from the smallest fault in a system that never forgave mistakes.
More recently, in February 2024, the Steelworks flared to life with a sudden and violent heat when an acetylene cylinder ignited, engulfing part of the plant in flames. A contractor was caught in the blaze, suffering burns that marked him as yet another victim in the steelworks’ grim history of accidents. Here, amid molten metal and hissing gas, the place seemed alive with a sinister will, the curse buried in its furnaces and walls stirring once more to claim its mark.
Today, the steelworks are quieter and automation has replaced much of the manual labour. Injuries are less frequent and safety protocols are stricter. But for cadets like Riley Buckle, who converts the pig iron from the blast furnaces into steel, the danger is impossible to ignore.
“Honestly, treat everything as if it can kill you. Working in heavy industry means everything is heavy. Instead of dealing with things that are kilos or tens of kilos, it’s more likely to be hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of kilos,” he says.
Even the most vigilant worker could fall victim, swallowed by smoke, metal, and misfortune. Every task carries the weight of history and the memory of those who didn’t make it home.
To many locals, the so-called blast furnace curse has become part of Port Kembla’s folklore, a story forged in molten metal and loss. Old-timers speak of how every new furnace seemed to demand a sacrifice, claiming lives in eerie patterns across decades.
“It’s not a curse cast by witches or spirits but by human hands and by the relentless pursuit of production at any cost,” Mr Pawson said.
Whether by coincidence or consequence, the superstition endures like a weight that never lifts, an unbroken chain of fire, iron, and tragedy that stretches from the first blast furnace incident in 1928 to the present day. It is not merely the accidents themselves but the pattern that haunts the plant. Each incident leaves its mark on the machinery, the walls, and the workers who remain. The steelworks seems to carry a memory of their own, a presence that thrives on the peril embedded in every ton of steel produced. Even with modern technology and rigorous safety protocols, that presence haunts in the hum of furnaces, in the hiss of steam, and in the heat that can flare without warning.
It might sound like superstition is a poetic way to explain the dangers of heavy industry. But to those who live with the steelworks in their backyard, the idea of a curse feels almost logical. Perhaps that’s why one question is never asked aloud, though everyone knows it’s there: is superstition a bad excuse for poor maintenance, or has the curse simply learned to hide?
