Pay and Managers Office Entrance

The pay and manager's office at Elrington Colliery stood at the administrative centre of a mine that BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built to supply coal directly to its Newcastle steelworks. The entrance recorded here in 2017 opens into the building where wages were collected and the colliery's day-to-day management was conducted. Paint has lifted from the surfaces over time, and the structure carries the particular quiet of a building that once saw regular foot traffic and now sees none. BHP sank two concrete-lined shafts at Elrington, each 18 ft in diameter, reaching the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed for a target output of 3,000 tonnes per day, supplying hard bituminous coking coal to the steelworks less than 40 km away. That target was never reached. The colliery ran for 32 years before BHP closed it in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses. At closure, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam, unworked. The mine had not been exhausted; it had simply stopped being viable on BHP's terms. This photograph records what the entrance looked like in 2017, more than five decades after the last shift. The pay office once processed wages for workers who had come up from 1,190 ft underground. The manager's office handled correspondence, arbitration matters, and the running of a colliery that, for all its modern equipment, never quite delivered what its operators had planned for it.