Lamp Cabin Racks

The lamp cabin at Elrington Colliery held one of the more direct systems a surface crew had for knowing whether the men below were safe. Each numbered lamp corresponded to a miner. At the start of a shift the lamp left the rack; when the shift ended and the man came up, the lamp came back. Any number still showing on the board after the cage had stopped running meant someone was still underground. The system required no radio, no telephone, no relay of information through a chain of supervisors. The rack itself was the record. Elrington Colliery began producing coal in 1930, sunk through two concrete-lined shafts each 18 feet in diameter to reach the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. The mine was developed by BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, whose principal shareholders were the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, with the explicit purpose of supplying coking and steelworks coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. BHP intended the mine to produce 3,000 tonnes per day and to demonstrate modern extraction methods to an industry that had been slow to move away from hand-mining. It never reached that figure. The mine closed in December 1962 with large reserves of coal still in the ground. BHP cited persistent operating losses. Approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. The lamp cabin and its racks recorded the end of that last shift the same way they had recorded every other: lamps returned, numbers accounted for, men on the surface. This photograph was made at Elrington Colliery in 2017, part of the Elrington Colliery series documenting the surviving fabric of the former mine near Abernethy, New South Wales.