Crib Entry

The doorway photographed here leads from the yard into the crib room at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. It is a plain brick opening, worn at the frame and threshold, the kind of entry a person passes through without thinking. For the underground workers at Elrington, it marked the boundary between the surface world and the break from the seam below. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with principal shareholders the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, developed Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. BHP intended the mine to produce 3,000 tonnes per day and to demonstrate modern extraction methods on the Hunter coalfields. Neither goal was fully realised. By the peak years of the 1940s, approximately 275 men worked underground at Elrington. During shifts, the crib room was where they ate. It was a functional space, close to the pit top, and this doorway was the way in from the yard. The work the men came up from was conducted in a hard bituminous seam deep enough that the descent alone was significant. The mine closed in December 1962. Contemporary press reported that about 90 men were affected by the closure. Large reserves of coal remained unworked at the time. BHP cited persistent operating losses as the reason. The railway branch serving Elrington was dismantled in 1963. What the 2017 photograph records is the doorway as it stood after more than five decades of disuse as a working colliery entry. The brick is weathered, the frame worn, the yard beyond visible in the light. The crib room behind it is quiet. The mine it served has been gone for more than sixty years.