Nature Always Finds a Way

The concrete floor of an industrial workshop is not the most hospitable ground. It was poured to handle machinery, foot traffic, the weight of working equipment, and decades of industrial use. It was not poured with any expectation that something would grow through it. And yet, in one of the former colliery workshop buildings at Elrington Colliery near Abernethy, a plant has done exactly that, finding a crack wide enough to matter and pushing through. The workshops around it have not been idle. When Elrington Colliery closed in December 1962, the mine buildings did not simply sit. BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd at the former colliery workshops on 17 June 1964, employing around 50 tradesmen and taking on mining equipment and general industrial work. The operation continued under private ownership and the buildings have remained in industrial use since. The plant growing from the floor exists, then, not in an abandoned ruin but in a working space, one that has been occupied continuously for more than sixty years since the coal stopped coming up. Elrington Colliery itself had a particular kind of history. BHP established it to supply coking coal to the Newcastle steelworks, sinking two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. The plan was to produce 3,000 tonnes a day using methods that were, at the time, among the most modern in the Hunter Valley. The mine never reached that figure. It closed in December 1962 with large reserves of coal still in the ground, BHP citing persistent operating losses as the reason. What this photograph records is not decay. The building is occupied. The floor is industrial concrete, worn and discoloured from long use. And from one crack in that floor, a plant is growing, steady and unhurried, in a space that has been given over to other purposes for the better part of a century.