Lake Macquarie, New South Wales - 1930s-present

Tin City

Tin City is a settlement on the western foreshore of Lake Macquarie, built from fibro and corrugated iron by its occupants without council approval from the 1930s onwards. The land is Crown land. The structures have no planning approval. They have been there for 90 years.

The settlement grew during the Depression, when access to conventional housing was beyond what most people could manage. The lake foreshore was technically unavailable for permanent settlement, which also meant it was unpoliced as such. People built what they could afford with what they could find. They stayed. They improved what they had built. Their children stayed after them.

Tin City has no consistent architectural vocabulary except the logic of self-build: each structure reflects the decisions of a specific person at a specific moment, extended and modified as circumstances changed. There is no developer's brief. There is no street grid. There are structures that have been continuously occupied for 9 decades on land where no structure should legally stand.

The photographs were made in January 2018. The settlement is not derelict. Most of it is actively occupied. What distinguishes it is not decay but the specific character of a built environment assembled entirely outside institutional processes.