Pay Office Stairs

The pay and manager's office at Elrington Colliery was a two-storey brick building that served the administrative functions of the mine across its entire working life. The internal staircase in this photograph connected the ground floor to the first floor, where staff managed the paperwork of a colliery that BHP had built to be something considerably grander than it turned out to be. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited commenced coal production at Elrington in 1930, after sinking two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, to a depth of 1,190 feet to reach the Main Greta Seam. The mine had been designed to deliver 3,000 tonnes of coking coal per day to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. It never came close to that figure. In the early 1950s, actual output averaged around 1,500 tons per day, roughly half what the original plans called for. The mine operated for 32 years before BHP closed it in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses. A significant amount of coal remained in the seam when the gates shut. Approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. The staircase recorded here is plain and functional: timber treads, a painted handrail, bare plaster walls. It is the kind of construction that nobody photographs when a building is in use. It sits at the centre of the office building not because it is remarkable but because it is necessary, the connection between one level of work and another. What remains is a quiet geometry of light on worn surfaces, and the outline of a place that once ran the accounts for a mine that BHP described in 1935 as "hardly excelled in modern equipment and methods of working." This photograph was made in 2017. It is part of the Elrington Colliery series.