Workshop Across the Field

The gantry crane frame above the roofline of the main workshop at Elrington Colliery tells you something about the scale of what BHP built here. The structure served a 15-tonne overhead electric crane inside, the kind of capacity needed to handle heavy mining equipment, replacement parts, and the ongoing maintenance demands of a colliery that BHP designed, from the outset, to be technically advanced. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with principal shareholders Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, developed this site near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley to supply coking coal directly to the Newcastle steelworks. The railway branch reached the site in January 1924. Shaft-sinking commenced in January 1925, the two concrete-lined shafts each 18 feet in diameter, sinking 1,190 feet through rock to reach the Main Greta Seam. Coal production began in 1930. BHP set a target output of 3,000 tonnes per day. The mine never reached it. By 1950, actual output ran at roughly 1,500 tonnes per day, consistently well below what the surface infrastructure had been built to handle. The mine became known, eventually, as the Peter Pan Colliery. Like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The workshop building in this frame was part of that surface infrastructure. When the mine closed in December 1962, with large reserves of coal still in the seam, the workshops did not simply go idle. BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty. Ltd. on the site on 17 June 1964, employing around 50 tradesmen serving mining equipment and general industrial work. The firm later became Elrington Industries, which still occupies the former colliery grounds. This photograph, made in 2017, records the main workshop as it stands now: the gantry frame still above the roofline, the blacksmith shop at the yard's edge, the building holding its shape against more than 50 years of weather since the last coal came up the shaft.