Managers Office Wall

The opening in the wall sits between two levels of the same colliery building at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Below is the electrical workshop; above, the manager's offices. On the workshop floor, sections of standard-gauge rail are still visible under the rubble. Those rails were used to move coal wagons through the workshop for repair. The wagons that needed fixing came in on the same gauge of track that connected Elrington to the Hebburn Limited private railway, and from there to the South Maitland Railway network and Newcastle port, roughly 40 kilometres away. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, whose principal shareholders were the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, built Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to 1,190 ft below surface to reach the Main Greta Seam. The railway branch to the site opened on 14 January 1924, and coal production commenced in 1930. BHP designed the mine to produce 3,000 tonnes a day. It never got there. The mine's actual output through the 1950s ran at roughly half that target, which is partly why it earned the nickname the Peter Pan Colliery: like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The mine closed in December 1962. BHP cited persistent operating losses. Large reserves of coal remained untouched in the seam. Approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. The following year, the Elrington railway branch was dismantled. The workshops did not stand idle for long. On 17 June 1964, BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty. Ltd. at the former colliery workshops, employing around 50 tradesmen. The rail in the electrical workshop floor dates from that earlier operational life, when keeping the wagons running was part of what kept the whole operation moving. This photograph was made in 2017.