Managers Office Exterior Wall

The pay and manager's office at Elrington Colliery is a two-storey red brick building that once housed the mine's administrative staff and the pay office where workers collected their wages. By 2017, a vine had begun its slow work across the facade, tracing the mortar joints between courses of brick that had been laid decades earlier. Elrington Colliery was established by BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited to supply coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The colliery sits near Abernethy, approximately 6 miles south-east of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, and was developed in partnership with Hebburn Limited. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. BHP designed Elrington for a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day, a target the mine never reached. For this reason it became known as the "Peter Pan" colliery, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. Actual output ran at roughly half the planned figure through the 1950s. The mine closed in December 1962, with large reserves of coal still unworked in the seam. Contemporary press reported that approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. BHP cited persistent operating losses as the principal reason for shutting the operation. The pay office building recorded here was the point at which the financial life of the colliery met its workforce. Miners came here at the end of the working week; the manager's office above oversaw the administration of a mine that ran for 32 years without ever fulfilling its original ambitions. The vine now moving across the brickwork is the quietest possible commentary on that history.