Washhouse Exterior Wall

The washhouse at Elrington Colliery sits toward the edge of a site that BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built from the ground up in the 1920s. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. The branch railway had opened on 14 January 1924; the first train ran on 13 June 1928; coal production began in 1930. The whole operation was purpose-built to supply hard bituminous coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. In the background of this photograph, the gantry crane of the main workshop building rises above the roofline. That 15-tonne overhead crane was used to unload heavy machinery and service coal wagons, the kind of equipment that kept a colliery running across shift after shift, year after year. BHP had planned Elrington for an output of 3,000 tonnes a day. The mine never reached that figure. Actual output in 1950 averaged around 1,500 tonnes a day, roughly half the target. The mine acquired a nickname: the Peter Pan Colliery, because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The gates closed in December 1962. BHP cited persistent operating losses. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam, unworked. About 90 men were affected by the closure. The site did not go quiet immediately. On 17 June 1964, BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd at the former colliery workshops, employing around 50 tradesmen. The workshops have remained in industrial use since. In this 2017 photograph, the washhouse wall and the crane structure behind it record what is left of a mine that spent 32 years falling short of what it was built to be.