Window

The workshop building at Elrington Colliery sits near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley, approximately 10 kilometres south-east of Cessnock. This window, broken and open to the weather, looks out toward the rural bushland that now presses close to the old structures. The workshop itself was the working centre of the surface operation, housing the machine shop, electrical workshop, and a 15-tonne overhead crane. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited developed Elrington as a captive coal supply for its Newcastle steelworks, sinking two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, to reach the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. The first manager, H. M. Hindmarsh, was appointed in January 1925 when shaft sinking began. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed for a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day, a figure it never reached. It ran at roughly half that capacity through the 1950s, earning the nickname the Peter Pan Colliery because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. BHP cited persistent operating losses when it closed the mine in December 1962. Approximately 90 men were affected. What made the closure unusual was what remained: large reserves of coal were still in the ground when the gates shut. The seam was not exhausted. The economics no longer worked. The workshops did not sit idle for long. On 17 June 1964, BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd on the same site, employing approximately 50 tradesmen to service mining equipment and general industrial orders. The operation eventually passed into private ownership and continued into the 1970s. This photograph, made in 2017, records the workshop building at a point well past both the mine's closure and the engineering works that followed it. The window frame holds what glass remains. The bush outside has not gone anywhere.