Administration Office

The administration office at Elrington Colliery occupies a room in the main management building, positioned beside the electrical workshop on the colliery grounds near Abernethy, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. It is a modest space: painted walls, a timber floor, cabinetry fixed to the walls. The kind of room where shift records were kept, correspondence filed, and the business of running a mine transacted without ceremony. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, whose principal shareholders were the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, established Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The railway branch serving the site was opened on 14 January 1924, and coal production commenced in 1930 after two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. BHP designed the mine to produce 3,000 tonnes per day. It never reached that figure. Actual output ran at roughly half the planned rate through much of the mine's life. The mine became known informally as the Peter Pan Colliery, because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The mine closed in December 1962. At the time of closure, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained unworked in the seam. BHP cited persistent operating losses as the reason for shutting the operation. The Elrington railway branch was dismantled the following year. This photograph, made in 2017, records the administration office as it stood more than five decades after the last coal came up the shaft. The room remains largely intact, its surfaces carrying the marks of years of disuse. Part of the Elrington Colliery series.