Electrical Workshop Windows

The electrical workshop at Elrington Colliery sits within the surface complex that BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built during the late 1920s, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley. Steel-framed windows run along the workshop wall, letting in a flat, even light across the concrete floor. Whatever equipment once occupied the space is long gone, but the structure itself holds: brick walls, exposed framing, the kind of room where close, careful work got done. The work here centred on the mine's battery locomotives, which ran on 3 ft 6 in gauge track underground, hauling coal from the face to the shaft bottom. Maintaining that equipment was its own discipline, separate from the general mechanical trades working elsewhere on the surface. The 1951 AEU stoppage that briefly shut collieries across the Hunter Valley began here, triggered when an electrical fitter at Elrington was suspended for refusing to do turning work. The union's position was straightforward: turning was the work of a fitter and turner, not an electrical fitter. The demarcation lines inside a place like this mattered. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited sank two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, to reach the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine had been designed to deliver 3,000 tonnes per day for BHP's Newcastle steelworks; it never got close to that figure. By December 1962, with large reserves of coal still unworked in the seam, BHP cited persistent operating losses and closed the mine. Approximately 90 men were affected. The surface complex did not stop with the colliery. BHP opened an engineering works at the former mine workshops on 17 June 1964, and the site has continued in industrial use since. This photograph, made in 2017, records the electrical workshop as it stood: emptied out, but still structurally intact, its windows doing the same job they always did.