Change Room Leaves

The concrete floor of the washhouse change room at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley, holds little now but dead leaves and a vine that has found its way in from outside. The leaves have banked up in drifts along the walls. The vine follows the floor in the unhurried way that plants reclaim abandoned buildings, advancing a little further each season with nothing left to stop it. The washhouse stood at the surface end of the daily routine for Elrington's underground workforce. Men who went down the shaft to work the Main Greta Seam came back up through it, cleaned up, and changed before heading home. That routine ran from 1930, when coal production commenced from two concrete-lined shafts each 18 feet in diameter sunk 1,190 feet to the seam, until December 1962, when BHP closed the mine. The closure came with approximately 90 men still on the books, according to contemporary press reports confirmed by Ross Mainwaring's 2009 history of the colliery. BHP's stated reason was persistent operating losses. The seam itself was not exhausted. Large reserves of coal remained unworked when production stopped, which made Elrington's end distinct from most colliery closures: the decision was economic, not geological. The mine had always underperformed against its own ambitions. BHP built Elrington in the late 1920s as a purpose-built supply mine for the Newcastle steelworks and designed it to produce 3,000 tonnes per day using modern extraction methods. It never got close to that figure. By 1950 it was averaging roughly 1,500 tonnes a day, half of what was planned. The nickname it acquired, "the Peter Pan Colliery," referred to a mine that, like Peter Pan, never grew up. What the 2017 photograph records is the change room in the years after all of that, when the building's only activity is seasonal leaf accumulation and slow vegetative entry. The concrete floor is intact. The walls hold. The vine does not hurry.