Office Stairs

The stairs at Elrington Colliery's pay office are a plain piece of functional construction: concrete treads, a rendered masonry wall, a timber handrail. Nothing about them signals importance. But this is where the transaction happened. After the cage ride up from the Main Greta Seam, 363 metres below the surface, underground workers came to this level to collect their wages before walking out into the yard. Elrington Colliery was developed by BHP Collieries Proprietary Ltd, with principal shareholders Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd and Hebburn Limited. The mine was built with a single purpose: to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, were sunk to 1,190 feet to reach the hard bituminous coal of the Main Greta Seam. Coal production commenced in 1930, following shaft-sinking that began in early 1925. BHP intended Elrington to demonstrate modern mechanised extraction methods. The planned output was 3,000 tonnes a day. The mine never reached that figure. Actual output ran at approximately 1,500 tons per day in 1950, roughly half the target. The mine's failure to meet its design capacity became something of a case study in the limits of early mechanisation on the Hunter coalfields, enough that it acquired the nickname "the Peter Pan Colliery", because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. In December 1962, BHP closed Elrington with large reserves of coal still in the seam. The company cited persistent operating losses. Approximately 90 men were affected. The pay office stairs, worn from decades of boots on concrete, remained standing after the mine shut. This photograph was made in 2017.