“Probably not,” Mr Brooks, a third-generation steelworker until the plant’s final day in 1999, said.

“I think about it every day. There’s not a day gone past when I don’t think about the closure.”

Friday’s seventeenth anniversary will be a personal affair for those who observe it.

Mr Brooks and the Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association used to hold a reunion of BHP workers every year.

Their last knees-up at Newcastle District Tennis Club capped a year in which Branxton artist Will Maguire unveiled a sculpture for the steelworks’ centenary, and BHP handed over a book of its workers’ deaths.

It would be “the last hurrah”, Mr Brooks decided. The final September. This year, the man known in BHP circles as “the keeper of the flame” will drink to his old life with close friends.

“A lot of them are getting older. We’ve lost a few of them. Mates who were together for years don’t see each other now,” he said.

“I’ve seen grown men cry going past that gate. Newcastle has moved on, you can tell by the cranes over the city, but you know, you can’t have a tomorrow without a yesterday.”

Paul Cartledge has moved on.

The head of Pathways Employment Services, the company BHP set up at the time to manage its employee exodus, counts the handling of the closure as the highlight of his career.

Unemployment spiked, as feared, in Newcastle after the steelworks’ 2242 workers walked off the job for the last time.

“But the younger workers got jobs. The older workers, the over 45s, found it hard. They were jobs for life, in those days,” Mr Cartledge said.

“Those jobs for life aren’t there for anyone, anymore.”

The BHP closure in Newcastle, where men and women “walked out that gate with heads held high”, is today held up nationally as a template for shutdowns of that magnitude.

Mr Cartledge still runs into BHP men he found jobs for. Some are doing well.

Others feel like they left the best part of themselves in the steelworks’ city within a city, where everyone’s dad, uncle or brother worked amid furnaces and engines and roaring conversation, all silent, now, for 17 years.

One man recently told Mr Cartledge that he was handling his third redundancy; first BHP, then Pasminco, now Hydro Aluminium.

But Friday’s anniversary will pass without fuss from the Pathways man.

“I’ll probably send a couple of emails to some mates, nothing more,” Mr Cartledge said.

“You get to that point.”