Jenny Sinclair

THREE pictures recur in images of the West Gate Bridge: the snaking line of the structure as seen from above, joining the two sides of the Yarra; the half-built elevated roadway leading into thin air during its construction; and the twisted rubble of the same roadway after it fell 58 metres to the river below.

Connection, construction, collapse. Next Friday, October 15, is the 40th anniversary of the disaster that killed 35 men and grievously injured almost 20 others, but the story is far from fading in the city's memory. 

Kate Luciano, curator of the Public Records Office of Victoria's new exhibition on the collapse, says the bridge changed the city of Melbourne, and the collapse is intertwined with its story.

Without the bridge, Luciano says, the city's west — the newer suburbs and industrial zones along the ring road, those down towards Geelong and Geelong itself — would be very different, and much less developed.

The bridge was typical of the ambitious concrete structures going up in modern cities around the world. It was conceived as a grand project to transform Melbourne — the men who worked on the bridge were extremely proud to work there, and their children would boast about their father's construction job.

It's that significance to the city, Luciano says, that makes the collapse much more than Australia's worst industrial accident. If it had happened on an office tower site, it would be a footnote to history, but even Melburnians born well after the event know about the collapse. 

The exhibition, at the Old Treasury Building, draws on the report of the royal commission that followed the disaster, which pointed the finger at animosity between the three companies working on the bridge, and, to a lesser extent, at union rules. 

Oral histories were collected from survivors and their families especially for the exhibition. The weathered faces and broad accents of the Australians in the videos — men and women born here, or immigrants from Italy and Ireland — contrast with the official record of negligence by overconfident superiors. There's something of the Gallipoli legend in the story — a sense of pointless sacrifice. 

The images of the rescue effort, too, have a whiff of the trenches about them: the workers themselves were the rescue crew, digging in the mud for their mates. In archival photographs, grim men carry injured comrades on stretchers, while other stretchers are covered with sheets. Men sit against fences like rag dolls, with white bandages around their heads and arms, and there's a general air of shock.

The day also hasn't faded for those who were there. One worker told Luciano: "The shaking continued and I knew something had to be wrong. The bridge started to sink . . . It was like slow motion . . . The next thing I knew I was under the water . . . All around me I could see people. All hurt. All pieces."

To tell the story from a wider perspective, Luciano has collected artworks, including several pastel-toned strip-shaped gouaches by Fred Williams, which show the bridge half-constructed, to the point where it collapsed. Williams's widow, Lyn, said the artist planned to paint the length of the river, but after the collapse, he "lost heart in the project".

Another painting, by Victorian artist Tony Lloyd, shows the bridge's massive supporting pylons and the roadway from underneath, cutting through a blood-red sky.

Newspaper reports of the time have been pasted together to create a wall of words, as "a way of presenting a huge amount of information, but also emotional information", Luciano says.

Not in the exhibition are countless other references to the bridge in popular culture: artist Rick Amor sketched metalworkers there in the 1970s and painted it repeatedly in his waterfront series; Don Henderson and Mark Seymour made it a topic of their songs, as did independent band Sleepy Township.

A lesser-known bridge song came from vaudeville performer Edna "Elsa Phar Lap" Davis, who was getting on in years when the redesigned bridge was opened in 1978, but made a special effort to sing and dance her way up the empty lanes at the opening with her self-penned Mighty West Gate Bridge March, accompanied by the RAAF band. Earlier, resplendent in sequins and heavy make-up, Davis had declared the bridge better than the pyramids, and certainly better than Sydney's bridge, because it was longer. "What a wonderful effort it is for mankind to build anything like this," she told Mike Willesee.

Davis was "totally nuts", Luciano says with a laugh, and the footage of her performances is a lighter note in the tribute to the bridge workers.

Across town at the Police Museum, newly discovered photographs of the aftermath of the collapse are also on show. And at Monash University's engineering faculty, several massive pieces of twisted metal are kept in the gardens.

"We usually take our visiting professors down there [for] a sobering thought of what can happen," says the faculty's Emeritus Professor Paul Grundy. The pieces, some up to three by four metres of structural steel, "are all distorted and twisted and tattered and torn".

Luciano says that bridge building sites around the world were shut down after the West Gate collapse, and the royal commission report sold out in minutes as engineers internationally tried to understand what went wrong.

"People didn't understand what was going on [structurally]," Grundy says. "The West Gate was probably the most notorious of all the collapses."

The only good to come out of the collapse, Luciano says, was the better understanding of and the dramatic improvements in workplace safety and post-incident procedures. At the time, the workers themselves spent all day and night digging for their mates in the mud and rubble. Then, as one survivor told the interviewers: "The bridge collapsed on the Thursday, we got sacked on the Tuesday and then we started going to funerals." Because the site was shut down, the workers lost their jobs with no compensation or counselling; it took a public outcry for that to happen, and a proper memorial park was not opened until 2004.

The story of the men who fell while trying to reshape the city keeps reappearing — Melbourne choreographer Lucy Guerin took the ideas of physical tension and collapse in her 2006 bridge-themed dance Structure and Sadness, which was restaged at Malthouse earlier this year. Peter Temple's multi-award-winning novel Truth opens with two policemen on the West Gate, one telling the other how his grandfather survived the collapse: "Never go over here without thinking," he says, going on to say his grandfather "rode the dunny all the way down". 

A few men did "ride it down", Luciano says, including one who had been shepherded into a lift by a friend who stayed on the bridge and died minutes later. 

But 35 men died, and that, as much as the importance of the bridge itself is, Luciano says, why anyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when it happened: "It was a September 11 moment for Melbourne." 

West Gate Bridge Collapse: 40 years on runs from October 15 to March 27 at the Old Treasury Building. Disaster at West Gate: Images From the Police Archives until January 7 at the Victoria Police Museum, World Trade Centre. 

Jenny Sinclair is the author of When We Think About Melbourne.