Overgrown Plough

A plough sits in open ground near the former Elrington Colliery site, outside Abernethy in the Hunter Valley. The grass has grown through it and around it, and whatever purpose it once served has long since been overtaken by the paddock. Elrington Colliery operated from 1930 until December 1962, when BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited closed the mine citing persistent operating losses. The colliery had been purpose-built by BHP to supply coking coal to its Newcastle steelworks, with two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, sunk 1,190 ft through rock to reach the Main Greta Seam. The planned output was 3,000 tonnes per day. It was never achieved. The mine ran at roughly half that rate through most of its operational life, earning the informal name "the Peter Pan Colliery" because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. At closure, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained untouched in the seam below. The reason the mine stopped was economics, not exhaustion. The colliery's railway branch, which had first carried a train on 13 June 1928 and connected the site to the South Maitland Railway network and Newcastle port, was dismantled in 1963. BHP opened an engineering works at the former mine workshops on 17 June 1964. That operation continued under private ownership into subsequent decades. The land surrounding the main colliery site passed to grazing and light industry. The farm equipment in this photograph is part of what that landscape became after the mine closed. The colliery structures are gone. The paddock remains. The plough sits where it was left, the grass still growing.