Crib Room

The crib room at Elrington Colliery occupies part of the main workshop and administration building near Abernethy, in the Hunter Valley coalfields of New South Wales. It is a functional room, built for a practical purpose: underground miners needed somewhere to eat when they came back to the surface. At its peak in the 1940s, approximately 275 workers were employed underground at Elrington, and this room was part of the daily rhythm of the mine. Elrington Colliery was developed by BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with principal shareholders the Broken Hill Proprietary Company and Hebburn Limited. The mine was established specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, roughly 40 kilometres to the east. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. Coal production began in 1930. The mine was designed around modern extraction methods and a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. That figure was never reached. For most of its life Elrington produced closer to half that amount, earning it the nickname "the Peter Pan Colliery", the mine that, like Peter Pan, never grew up. BHP closed Elrington in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses. Approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam. The closure was a business decision, not a geological one. What followed is part of the same story. On 17 June 1964, BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd in the former colliery workshops. The buildings that housed the maintenance operations, the administration, and the crib room did not come down with the mine. They stayed standing and kept working. This photograph, made in 2017, records what the crib room looks like now: the surfaces, the light, the things left behind. The mine is long closed. The room remains.