Storage Room

The storage room sits inside the office building at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. From this building, the mine's management and administrative staff ran the day-to-day operations of one of the Hunter coalfields' most ambitious, and consistently underperforming, collieries. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited as principal shareholders, developed Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to 1,190 ft below the surface to reach the Main Greta Seam. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed for a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day; it never came close to that figure. By 1950, actual output averaged around 1,500 tonnes per day, roughly half the target. The office complex was the administrative nerve centre of that operation from the first year of production through to the end. When BHP cited persistent operating losses and closed the mine in December 1962, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam, unworked. The branch railway that had connected Elrington to the South Maitland Railway network since 1924 was dismantled in 1963. The main colliery structures, shaft collars, screens, surface buildings, were demolished by the late 1960s. The office building survived longer, left largely as it was found after the gates closed. By the time this photograph was made in 2017, the storage room had been empty for decades. What remains in the frame is the fabric of a place that once kept a coal mine running: surfaces worn by years of use, the particular stillness of a room that has not been opened for a working purpose in a very long time.