There were various  iron-making ventures during the 19th Century, and steel was made but only on a very small scale.
The first commercial scale production of steel in Australia was by William Sandford Limited at the Eskbank Ironworks at Lithgow, New South Wales, in 1901. The plant became Australias first integrated iron and steel works in 1907. It was later expanded by Charles Hoskins. The first steel rails rolled in Australia were rolled there in 1911. Between 1928 and 1932, the operations at Lithgow were transferred, under the management of Cecil Hoskins, to a new plant at Port Kembla, still the site of most of Australias steel production today.
The Minister for Public Works, Arthur Hill Griffith, had consistently advocated for the greater industrialization of Newcastle, then, under William Holman, personally negotiated the establishment of a steelworks with G. D. Delprat of BHP. Griffith was also the architect of the Walsh Island establishment.
In 1915, BHP ventured into steel manufacturing with its Newcastle Steelworks, which was closed in 1999. The long products side of the steel business was spun off to form OneSteel in 2000. BHPs decision to move from mining ore to open a steelworks at Newcastle was precipitated by the technical limitations in recovering value from mining the lower-lying sulphide ores. The discovery of Iron Knob and Iron Monarch near the western shore of the Spencer Gulf in South Australia combined with the development by the BHP metallurgist, Archibald Drummond Carmichael, of a technique for separating zinc sulphides from the accompanying earth and rock led BHP to implement the startlingly simple and cheap process for liberating vast amounts of valuable metals out of sulphide ores, including huge heaps of tailings and slimes up to'  high.