Spare Parts

Beneath the winding house at Elrington Colliery, a set of shelving units holds the spare components BHP kept on hand to support the mine's winding machinery. The racks are still stocked. Dust has settled over everything, and the light falls unevenly across the shelves, catching edges and leaving the back of the space in darkness. What remains is orderly, the kind of order that suggests the parts were never needed rather than that they were used up. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited developed Elrington from 1925, sinking two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, through more than 1,190 ft of rock to reach the Main Greta Seam of the Greta Coal Measures near Abernethy, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The mine was built with a specific purpose: to supply hard, bituminous coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. Coal production commenced in 1930. The winding machinery that the spare parts on these shelves supported was central to everything the colliery did. Coal came up through the shafts; men went down and came back up the same way. BHP designed Elrington to demonstrate modern extraction methods, and by 1935 the company regarded the results as worth boasting about. Its jubilee publication that year stated that the decision to develop Newcastle and Maitland coal properties "brought into existence the John Darling and Elrington collieries which to-day are hardly excelled in modern equipment and methods of working." Despite that assessment, the mine never reached its planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. It ran for three decades at roughly half that capacity, and closed in December 1962 with large reserves of coal still in the seam. BHP cited persistent operating losses. About 90 men were affected by the closure. This photograph, made in 2017, records the spare parts shelving as it stood after the mine had been silent for decades. The components on the racks outlasted the work they were kept to support.