Notes
- Ribbons of Steel was a multi-disciplinary project (with a budget of over $600,000) organised by Arts Hunter to mark the closure of BHP. The web page (www.artshunter.com.au/ribbonsofsteel/) describes its large scale, visually spectacular performance commemorating and celebrating the eighty-four years of BHP steel-making: fire sculptures, a choir of eighty voices and a twenty-eight-piece band for a twenty-four-minute cantata, plus other staged performances). There was also a ceramic tile project in which local ceramic artists collaborated with BHP workers to create individual tiles, recording personal responses/experiences.
- In addition, a temporary exhibition of BHP memorabilia and art worked by local contemporary artists looking at their responses to BHP and its closure was set up in a building near the main gate. At the end of two weeks the exhibition was dismantled and the building was locked up; there is no permanent exhibition. S.S. commented that it looked like a collection of relics. R.W. replied that it was in fact, ‘our worst nightmare. At the first meeting, I actually said, the last thing you want is a room full of sad relics of the plant. And that's exactly what happened’.
- Former industrial/docklands area.
- An article, ‘The Muster Point’, by Susan Stegall, has been published in Deborah Malor and Heather Johnson (eds), The Unillustrated Proceedings of Watch this Space a Conference on Public Art, Sydney: Australian Journal of Art and the School of Fine Art, University of Newcastle, 1999, pp. 81–84.
- The salamander is an inchoate mass of cooled metal at the base of the blast furnace. This molten metal has seeped down into the earth, spreading like the roots of some massive tree, conforming to the Oxford dictionary's definition of ‘an elemental spirit living in fire’.