It was an opening night crowd of young curiosity and weathered reminiscing on Tuesday night at the Steel Life exhibition at the University of Newcastle's Callaghan campus.
The photographs were taken in 2004 by Murray McKean, a professional photographer who was a BHP staff photographer from 1986 until the closure in 1999.
McKean said the exhibition was first shown in 2004, soon after demolition of the steelworks was finished.
It was revived for the 20th anniversary of the steelworks closure, which clocks over officially on Monday, the last day of the month.
The images are in black&white and colour, and McKean said he concentrated in some of the pictures on the abstract shapes that the industrial landscape produced.
Others show massive pieces of steelmaking equipment that once gave Newcastle its hard industrial image, smashed to pieces, fallen, defeated.
"Anyone who's worked there is going to recognise bits of their old lives," McKean said.
He has described a black&white image of a once-towering blast furnace, lying on its side, as the saddest photograph he had ever taken because of the way it once dominated the skyline.
The university's chancellor Paul Jeans - a former head of the steelworks - was the special guest at last night's opening.
Speaking to the Herald, he said the steelworks site was the birthplace of Australian heavy industry.
"Over those three or four decades up to say, the 1950s, it really was the epicentre of industrialisation, and I think that as Novocastrians, we should be very, very proud of that," Jeans said.
Trained as an RAAF photographer, McKean lists Australian photographers Frank Hurley and Wolfgang Sievers as early influences.
Hurley, who served with the armed forces in both world wars, took many famous photos of Antarctica.
Sievers specialised in architectural and industrial photography.
The exhibition is open until October 19.
More on the Newcastle Steelworks:
- Steel City 20 years on: Remembering the human toll | Picture gallery & Event detail
- Photos from Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association
- BHP Newcastle 20 years on: Former employees of BHP in Newcastle look back on the city's generation of steel
- BHP's Newcastle steelworks through the rear-view mirror, 20 years after closure
- BHP Newcastle 20 years on: Former employees of BHP in Newcastle look back on the city's generation of steel
- BHP's book of the lost found - ledger of fallen workers
