Pay Office

The pay office at Elrington Colliery is a small room now. Broken venetian blinds hang across the window, their slats bent and folded at odd angles. The surfaces are peeling, paint or lining curling away from walls that have not been maintained since the mine closed. Light comes in through the damaged blinds and lands on surfaces that have been giving way for decades. This is where underground workers at Elrington collected their wages. For 32 years of coal production, men who had spent their shifts at 1,190 feet below the surface, working the Main Greta Seam in the Greta Coal Measures, came through here on pay day. Elrington Colliery was established by BHP Collieries Proprietary Ltd, a company whose principal shareholders were the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited and Hebburn Limited, to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The railway branch serving the site opened 14 January 1924; the first train ran 13 June 1928; coal production commenced in 1930 from two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, sunk to the Main Greta Seam. BHP designed the mine for a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. That figure was never reached. In the 1950s, actual output ran at approximately 250,000 to 340,000 tons per year, consistently short of what the infrastructure had been built to deliver. The mine acquired an informal name among those who knew it: the Peter Pan Colliery, because like Peter Pan, it never grew up. In December 1962, BHP closed the mine. Contemporary press reported that approximately 90 men would be affected by the closure. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam untouched. The reason for closure was not exhaustion, it was economics. BHP cited persistent operating losses. The pay office in this photograph was made in 2017. The blinds are still there. So is everything the room has been shedding since.