Machine Shop

The tool rack on the machine shop wall at Elrington Colliery is the kind of thing that gets left exactly where it is when a building stops being used for its purpose but doesn't quite get demolished. Every tool in its place, the habit of order outlasting the reason for it. The machine shop sat inside the main workshop building at the Elrington Colliery site, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley, sharing the structure with the electrical workshop and the compressor room. Running the full length of the building overhead was a 15-tonne electric overhead crane, the kind of infrastructure that tells you what sort of work happened here: heavy components, underground machinery, equipment that needed lifting before it could be fixed. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built Elrington as a purpose-designed colliery to supply coal to its Newcastle steelworks, sinking 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 was designed to deliver 3,000 tonnes a day; it never came close to that figure, running at roughly half capacity through most of its life. By December 1962, BHP had attributed persistent operating losses as the reason to close, even with large reserves of coal still unworked in the seam. Approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. The site did not go quiet immediately. On 17 June 1964, Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd opened in the former colliery workshops, employing around 50 tradesmen. The workshop building that housed the machine shop had a second life ahead of it. What the 2017 photograph records is the shop after that second life wound down too: the tool rack still on the wall, the arrangement of the place still legible, the overhead crane still in the building. The tools stayed put. The work stopped.