Pay Office Windows

The pay office at Elrington Colliery sat at one end of the surface complex, the main engine house at the other, with the workshop and washhouse occupying the ground between them. This photograph, made in 2017, frames the pay office windows against that distance, the engine house readable in the background and the surface layout implied by what stands between. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited opened Elrington to supply coking coal to the Newcastle steelworks, less than 40 kilometres away. Two concrete-lined shafts, each eighteen feet in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. The coal there is hard and bituminous, with low ash content and high volatile matter, well suited to steelworks use. BHP designed the mine for a target of 3,000 tonnes per day. It never came close. The mine became known, not without affection, as the Peter Pan Colliery, because like Peter Pan it never grew up. Coal production commenced in 1930. The railway branch connecting the colliery to the South Maitland Railway network had opened in January 1924, with the first train running in June 1928. By the time men were regularly descending the shaft, the surface buildings were already settled into their positions along the pit-top, the pay office and the engine house anchoring opposite ends of that arrangement. BHP closed the mine in December 1962 with large reserves of coal still in the ground. The company cited persistent operating losses. About 90 men were affected. The surface buildings remained, taken over first by Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd, which opened at the former colliery workshops on 17 June 1964, and later by the firm now occupying the site. The pay office windows look out across the same ground they always did, the engine house still standing at the far end.