Plough

A rusted farm plough sits on open pasture near the former Elrington Colliery site, outside Abernethy in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The frame and shares are heavily corroded. There are no colliery structures in view. The land is grassed and used for grazing, the same as much of the country surrounding the closed mine. Elrington Colliery was established by BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, principal shareholders being Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. A railway branch serving the site opened on 14 January 1924; the first train ran on 13 June 1928; coal production commenced in 1930. BHP designed the mine to produce 3,000 tonnes per day. It never reached that figure, producing approximately 1,500 tons per day on average in 1950 against a target set more than two decades earlier. The mine earned the nickname "the Peter Pan Colliery", because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. It never achieved its planned output. The colliery closed in December 1962 with large reserves of coal still unworked in the seam. BHP cited persistent operating losses. At closure, approximately 90 men were affected. The Elrington railway branch was dismantled in 1963. After production ceased, BHP opened an engineering works at the former colliery workshops, Elrington Engineering Pty. Ltd., which opened on 17 June 1964. The surrounding land, meanwhile, returned to what it had been before the shafts were sunk: open country used for grazing and agriculture. The plough photographed here in 2017 belongs to that aftermath. The mine is gone. The seam is still there, 1,190 ft down, much of it untouched. Above ground, the paddocks have simply got on with it.