Beehives Closeup

The paddocks surrounding the former Elrington Colliery site, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley, carry no obvious sign of what once operated alongside them. Grass grows where coal infrastructure once stood. A beehive sits in the open, the kind of thing you'd pass without a second thought on any rural property in the region. Elrington Colliery was developed by BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with principal shareholders the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, specifically to supply coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The railway branch to the site opened on 14 January 1924; the first train ran on 13 June 1928. Coal production commenced in 1930, drawn from the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface through two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter. The mine was designed with a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. It never came close. Actual output through the 1950s ran at roughly 250,000 to 340,000 tons per year, consistently less than half of what BHP had envisioned when it sank the shafts. The mine became known, in time, as the "Peter Pan Colliery", because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The nickname stuck. In December 1962, BHP closed the mine. Contemporary press reported that about 90 men were affected by the closure. Large reserves of coal remained in the ground at the time; BHP attributed the closure to persistent operating losses rather than exhaustion of the seam. The railway branch was dismantled the following year. The colliery workshops did not sit idle for long. Elrington Engineering Pty. Ltd. opened at the former mine site on 17 June 1964, employing around 50 tradesmen. The site has remained in industrial use since. The paddocks around it, though, went back to farming. This photograph, made in 2017, finds a beehive where the colliery once cast its shadow.