How Did The Westgate Bridge Collapse

Nine months later the Royal Commission report was published (1971). While the Commission found that the company Freeman, Fox and Partners was to blame – lack of communication and poor decision making – all the other parties, including the Unions and the men were criticised in the report. The most quoted line of the report says much about the circumstances leading up to the collapse: ‘Error begat error...and the events which led to the disaster moved with the inevitability of a Greek Tragedy’ (Report of Royal Commission, VPRS 2591/P0, unit 14).

For the last few years, I have been working on a novel that focuses in part on the collapse of the Westgate Bridge. This article is a reflection and interrogation of some of the motivations and inspirations as well as the questions that have arisen and are arising as part of the process of writing.

Antonello survives but two of his closest friends die. The first half of the novel traces Antonello’s story up until a few days after the collapse. The second protagonist is Jo, a young working class woman born in the 1990s. The second half of the novel begins with an accident that connects Jo and Antonello. For the purposes of this paper, I am not going to discuss Jo or her story. While there are some overlaps in relation to the issues and questions that have arisen for me in writing Jo’s character there are also major differences, partly because of gender but also because of the way our understanding and experience of class identity has changed in the intervening years. The aim of this article is to focus on the issues of writing about a tragic event and about the working class men at its