A lean-to workshop interior at Elrington Colliery. Corrugated metal walls and roof sheeting, heavy timber framing, a concrete floor. Workbenches line the walls. Tools and equipment left in place. Natural light enters through gaps in the cladding and an open doorway.
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The blacksmith's shop at Elrington Colliery occupies a lean-to addition to the main workshop building near Abernethy, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. It is a working space built to a working standard: corrugated metal walls and roof, heavy timber framing, a floor worn down by decades of use. Tools remain on the benches. The overhead crane rail is visible from below. Nothing here was built for appearances. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, principal shareholders the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, sank two concrete-lined shafts at this site, each 18 ft in diameter, reaching the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed from the outset to supply hard bituminous coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, with a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. That figure was never reached. In practice the mine averaged around 1,500 tons per day in 1950, roughly half of what BHP had intended when they committed to the site. The workshops were fitted with a 15-tonne overhead electric crane and standard-gauge rail access, used for repairing the coal wagons that carried the mine's output along the Elrington branch to the South Maitland Railway network and on to Newcastle port. The blacksmith's shop was part of that repair and maintenance operation, keeping underground and surface equipment serviceable across more than three decades of production. BHP closed the mine in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses. Approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained unworked in the seam at closure. The mine had never grown into what its builders planned, a fact local rail historians would later record by calling it the Peter Pan Colliery, because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The workshops did not close with the mine. BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty. Ltd. on the former colliery grounds on 17 June 1964, employing approximately 50 tradesmen. The business continued under private ownership into the 1970s. This photograph, made in 2017, records what remains of the blacksmith's shop inside that structure.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
The blacksmith's shop at Elrington Colliery sits in a lean-to addition to the main workshop building near Abernethy, NSW. BHP fitted the workshops with a 15-tonne overhead electric crane and standard-gauge rail access for repairing coal wagons, the heavy infrastructure of a mine that was purpose-built to supply coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The mine ran from 1930 until December 1962, when BHP closed it citing persistent operating losses, with large reserves still in the ground.
Brett Patman
05·SIZE GUIDE
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