“We all felt the thud. It shuddered right through the West.” At the age of 12, Dennis McIntosh watched the West Gate Bridge collapse. It was lunchtime on a Thursday, and he was standing on the netball courts on the roof of his school in Newport in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

“We saw the smoke, we heard the sirens and then a few days later, there were a few funerals at our school,” he recalls.

Dennis McIntosh in the West Gate rehearsal room. Photo © Emily Doyle

It was 15 October, 1970, and the West Gate Bridge was halfway through construction.

On the day McIntosh heard the terrible thud, 35 men were killed and 18 injured. Some men were working high in the air, others were having lunch in the workers’ huts underneath, when 2,000 tonnes of steel came crashing down. Many of the men were local, from Newport, Spotswood or Footscray, and around a third were migrants.

The collapse of the West Gate Bridge was, and remains, Australia’s worst industrial disaster. Designed to connect Melbourne’s central and eastern districts with the western suburbs and Geelong, this...