Paul Barry

So it's a town that has 22,000 people.

It was going to be much bigger.

It's kind of like Canberra.

It's sort of laid out very spaciously, big wide boulevards, trees down the middle sometimes, lots of brick built public buildings and a very, very friendly town.

I just got a beautiful welcome when I went there.

Wyala was started back in the 1940s as a shipyard and then in the 60s as a steelworks by BHP.

It's the only steelworks in Australia that makes, the only primary steelworks that makes what's called long steel.

And that is girders, rails, the stuff that is used in the building industry.

And if you didn't make it at Wyala, you'd basically have to import it.

Also, the steelworks is very important to the town.

Although only about 1,100 people or 1,000 people now work there, there's something like 4,000 jobs in the town estimated to be dependent on it, and that's not far off half the workforce in Wyala.

So if you got rid of the steelworks, if it went bust and wasn't rescued...

Wyala's future would be very much in doubt.

I don't know what would happen to it.

They're incredibly fearful.

Wyala is old.

It's like 60 years old at least.

It's desperately in need of investment, desperately in need of maintenance.

It went bust back in 2016 when Arium owned it, and it was then rescued after a year in administration.

And the guy who bought it, Sanjeev Gupta, was sort of seen as a saviour, and it looked like all the problems were solved.