Field Lamp

Between the workshop building and the main engine house at Elrington Colliery, a mercury vapour lamp still stands in the yard. It is a practical object, the kind of fitting that existed to solve a straightforward problem: workers needed to see where they were going when they crossed between the surface buildings. In the dark of an early morning shift or a late winter afternoon, this lamp would have been the thing that made that movement possible. Elrington Colliery sits near Abernethy, roughly 10 kilometres south-east of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, whose principal shareholders were the Broken Hill Proprietary Company and Hebburn Limited, built the mine specifically to supply coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The design was ambitious: two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, sunk through 1,190 feet of rock to reach the Main Greta Seam. BHP planned to extract 3,000 tonnes a day. The mine never came close to that figure. Coal production began in 1930. Through the 1950s, actual output ran at roughly 250,000 to 340,000 tons a year, consistently short of the target that had justified the mine's construction. The colliery closed in December 1962. When it did, approximately 90 men were affected, and large reserves of coal remained untouched in the seam. BHP attributed the closure to persistent operating losses. The railway branch that had served the colliery was dismantled in 1963. The following year, BHP opened an engineering works in the former mine workshops. That business eventually became Elrington Industries, which still occupies the site. This photograph, made in 2017, records what remains of the surface yard. The lamp stands where it always stood. The buildings on either side of it are still there. The yard it once lit is quiet.