Drawing Desk

The pay office at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley, is a modest room. A timber drawing desk occupies the foreground, its surface worn, facing a doorway that opens into the next space. Walls bare. Floor concrete. Whatever paperwork once covered that desk is long gone. This is where underground workers collected their wages. It is a small room for a mine that BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built to be anything but small. The company sank two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, down to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. The target was 3,000 tonnes of hard bituminous coal per day, destined for BHP's Newcastle steelworks less than 40 kilometres away. The mine never got close to that figure. It ran at roughly half capacity through much of its life, earning the nickname the "Peter Pan Colliery", because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. Coal production began in 1930. The colliery ran for just over three decades before BHP cited persistent operating losses and closed it in December 1962. Approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. A considerable body of coal remained in the seam, unworked, at the time the gates shut. The pay office in this photograph is what the administrative end of that operation looked like. The desk is a drawing desk, the kind used for plans, measurements, records. In a colliery pay office it would have served a practical function, a surface for wage sheets and tallies. The doorway beyond it leads somewhere that is now equally quiet. Elrington Colliery was photographed in 2017, part of the Elrington Colliery series.