Washhouse Rear

The brick washhouse at Elrington Colliery sits near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley, roughly 10 km south-east of Cessnock. Its rear wall faces away from the old pit-top, a plain elevation of weathered masonry with empty window openings and vegetation pressing in at the base. This was a functional building, built to clean men up after they came out of the ground. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited developed the mine from 1925, sinking two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. The mine was established specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, and coal production commenced in 1930. The seam was hard, bituminous, low-ash coal, and the company designed Elrington for a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day. That figure was never reached. In practice, the mine averaged around 1,500 tons per day in 1950, roughly half the target. The "Peter Pan Colliery" nickname came later: like Peter Pan, Elrington never grew up. The washhouse would have seen steady use across the mine's three decades of production. Workers on the Main Greta Seam rode down nearly 120 storeys in the manriding shaft, worked a shift in hard bituminous coal, and came back up. The washhouse was where the shift ended. BHP closed the colliery in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam at closure. Approximately 90 men were affected. The Elrington railway branch, which had first carried a train in 1928, was dismantled in 1963. An engineering works opened at the former colliery workshops in June 1964, and the site has remained in industrial use since. This photograph was made in 2017. The washhouse rear wall stands largely intact, the brickwork holding its form while the surrounding site has been reclaimed by time and growth.