Washhouse Exit

The washhouse at Elrington Colliery was part of the surface welfare infrastructure BHP built to serve the mine's workforce. This photograph looks from the shower side toward the exit, the door that marked the boundary between the pit and the world above it. Tiled walls, bare fittings, light arriving from the far end. Whatever noise and heat this room once held has long since left it. Elrington Colliery sits near Abernethy, approximately 6 miles south-east of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, jointly owned by the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, developed the site specifically to supply coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. Shaft-sinking commenced in January 1925. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to reach the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Coal production began in 1930. The mine was designed for an output of 3,000 tonnes per day. It never reached that figure. Ross Mainwaring's 2009 history of the colliery gave it the nickname it had always half-deserved: the Peter Pan Colliery, because like Peter Pan, it never grew up. Actual output ran at roughly half the planned capacity through the 1950s, and BHP cited persistent operating losses when it closed the mine in December 1962. At the time of closure, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam, unworked. A washhouse like this one was where a shift ended. The men came up from 1,190 ft below ground, came through here, and walked out that door. The exit in this photograph is the last frame of that sequence. By 1963 the railway branch serving the colliery had been dismantled, and the main surface structures were gone within a few years. The washhouse remained. This photograph was made in 2017.