Workshop Wall

The wall stands inside what was the main workshop building at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy in the Hunter Valley. The building held the machine shop, electrical workshop, and compressor room under a single roof, with a 15-tonne overhead crane running the full length of the structure. It is the kind of building that was built to work, not to impress. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited developed Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to the Newcastle steelworks. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 ft in diameter, were sunk to the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 ft below the surface. Construction work began in January 1925 under the first manager, H. M. Hindmarsh, previously under-manager at the Balmain Colliery. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed for 3,000 tonnes per day. It never came close. Actual output averaged around 1,500 tonnes per day in 1950, roughly half of what BHP had planned. Mainwaring's 2009 history of the colliery records both the effects of the Great Depression and the resistance of an experienced workforce to new extraction methods as factors in the mine's failure to reach its planned capacity. The Peter Pan Colliery, it was called: like Peter Pan, it never grew up. The mine closed in December 1962, with large reserves of coal still in the seam. BHP cited persistent operating losses. About 90 men were affected by the closure. The workshops did not go quiet for long. On 17 June 1964, Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd opened at the former colliery site, employing around 50 tradesmen and taking on mining equipment and general industrial work. The business later traded as Elrington Industries and continued operating into the 1970s. This photograph, made in 2017, records the wall of that workshop as it stood decades after the last shift. The layers of paint, the fittings, the marks left by machinery and time, are what remain of a building that outlasted the mine it was built to serve.