How South Australia's Third Largest City Is at Risk of Becoming an Ungentrified Detroit

Whyalla is a city on the central South Australian coast built by one business: steel. Steel built the roads, steel opened the shops and steel brought in the people. Steel gave people a good life and so long as the steelworks were running, it was a guaranteed future. Today, a quarter of Whyalla‘s population either works for Arrium, the company that owns Australia‘s last steelworks, and everyone else who doesn‘t makes their money off those who do.

And on April 7, Arrium threatened to take away the whole lot when it announced it was going into administration.

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This was a product of simple economics. Company management racked up $4 billion in debt making bad decisions during the best years of the mining boom, and when it was over, the company sank with the price of iron ore. Things were going to be bad, people said, and this feeling was confirmed six weeks later when Dr John Spoehr of Flinders University released an impact analysis saying that if the steelworks closed, it would be worse than what has happened in Detroit.

“You came here for the state of the nation?” Trevor Garde asks, standing in the door to his garage workshop. “Well I‘ll give it to you straight: I have never seen this town this bad.”

Trevor is 64, born and bred in Whyalla, with a habit of telling it like it is. He ‘s been around long enough to have come of age during the town‘s glory days and now he‘s watching what happens when 23,000 people collectively go through a period of loss.

“And from what you read in the paper and what you hear around the town, it‘s not going to get any better.”

It‘s a feeling that permeates the town. Anecdotally, at least, domestic violence is up. A employee at Centacare, an organisation that provides financial and counselling services, explained the place has been operating at capacity since the start of the year.

But not everyone has given up. After months of fighting to get people to care about Whyalla, the town‘s leadership is striking a new tone. Acting Mayor Tom Antonio, 54, is a local business owner with three sons at the plant. Over the last few months he has been pulling 14-hour days trying to get the word out that Whyalla isn‘t screwed, and the town is fighting back.

He explains the plant has stopped redundancies and the company hopes to be out of administration by Christmas. Plus the steelworks and port are going up for sale. Once that goes through, the port will be opened up for commercial use. Until now, it‘s only been used by Arrium.

All that‘s needed, he says, is time. But when pushed on how long it may take, he can ‘t put a number to it. He knows this uncertainty is a problem. As long as there‘s no timeline for salvation, Whyalla is at risk of rapid depopulation.

This makes perfect sense. When people look around at Whyalla‘s empty homes, and count the “for lease” signs going up everywhere, they start asking, should we stay or should we go?

Bruce Balderstone and his wife Lorraine are asking themselves this same question. They own a fish and chip shop, the oldest in the town. Up on the wall, there are black and white photos from Whyalla ‘s golden age. Bruce shows me a laminated chart of the town ‘s population that peaked at around 33,000 in the 70s, just before the shipbuilders shut down.

“If you were in Year 12 right now, would you stay?” He asks. “There‘s just nothing else here.”

Asked what his plans are, he says he doesn‘t know. Soon he‘ll go to his accountant where he‘ll ask how long they can keep on. They used to employ five people in the shop, not including themselves, but now they‘re down to three. If they didn ‘t start laying people off, they‘d be bankrupt right now.

“But I can‘t sell up because no one‘s buying,” he says. “You know, I ‘ve always put something away in the good times knowing there‘ll be hard times, but I never knew it was going to be this bad.”

All he can do, he says, is hold on. See how it plays out.

Whyalla isn’t alone in this. Next year the Australian car industry will close across chunks of South Australia and Victoria, hollowing out a little more of the country‘s manufacturing base and eating away at the Australian middle class. For now though, Whyalla and its people just happen to be the latest example of an Australia being divided by the end of manufacturing.

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