Peeling Paint

The engine house at Elrington Colliery stands near Abernethy, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. This photograph was made in 2017, inside that building. Paint has lifted from the wall in large sections and what remains is not simply bare surface, the material holds the exact shape of every piece that has come away. Each missing section has left its outline pressed into the substrate, a negative impression as precise as a cast. It is the record of something that was there, made by the thing leaving. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built the surface infrastructure at Elrington between 1925 and 1930. The ground lease was executed on 13 November 1925. Shaft sinking had already commenced by January of that year, with machinery installed and two 18-foot concrete-lined shafts being put down toward the Main Greta Seam, 1,190 feet below the surface. The engine house was part of that original surface plant, constructed as BHP pursued what it described in its own 1935 jubilee publication as a mine "hardly excelled in modern equipment and methods of working." Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was established specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, with a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. That figure was never achieved. Actual output ran at roughly half the target through much of the mine's working life, averaging around 1,500 tons per day in 1950. The colliery closed in December 1962 with large reserves still untouched in the seam. BHP cited persistent operating losses. Approximately 90 men were affected by the closure. After the mine shut, an engineering works operated from the former colliery workshops. The surface buildings saw continued use. The engine house remained. What the photograph records in 2017 is a wall that has been painted, and repainted, and left, and now the layers are coming apart on their own terms, each one revealing the shape of what sat above it.