Pay Office Corridor

The corridor runs through the pay and manager's office at Elrington Colliery, a two-storey brick structure that served as the administrative hub of BHP's coal operation on the Greta Coal Measures near Abernethy, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. This was where the mine's paperwork and wages were processed, and where management decisions about the operation were made. The brick construction set it apart from the corrugated iron and timber that characterised much of the colliery's surface infrastructure. Elrington Colliery was established by BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, whose principal shareholders were the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited. The site was developed specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The railway branch serving the colliery opened on 14 January 1924, and the first train ran on 13 June 1928. Coal production commenced in 1930, drawn from the Main Greta Seam via two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, sunk to 1,190 ft below the surface. BHP designed the colliery to produce 3,000 tonnes per day, intending it to demonstrate modern extraction methods in the Hunter Valley coalfields. It never reached that figure. By 1950, actual output averaged approximately 1,500 tonnes per day. The mine earned a nickname that followed it to closure: the Peter Pan Colliery, because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. At its peak in the 1940s, Elrington employed around 275 underground workers. By December 1962, when BHP closed the colliery citing persistent operating losses, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained untouched in the seam. The Elrington railway branch was dismantled in 1963. The pay office corridor, photographed here in 2017, records what remains of the building where that operation was administered across three decades of coal production.