Aerials

An aerial view across the Stockton Bight dune field puts the Tin City shacks in scale against the surrounding sand. The settlement reads as a thin line of rooflines along a low ridge, with the Pacific to the east, the deep dune field to the west, and the long pale strip of Stockton Beach running away to the south. From this height, the shacks are small. The dune field is enormous. Wind ripples mark the upwind face of the larger dunes, the patterns shifting daily. The line of shacks looks held in place against a landscape that is plainly not.

The Stockton Bight sand dunes stretch roughly 32 km from Stockton at Newcastle to Anna Bay at the northern end. NPWS describes the field as the largest mobile coastal sand mass in the Southern Hemisphere. The dunes migrate approximately 4 m northward each year, driven by the prevailing southerly winds. The shacks were buried once already, during World War II, when the Army cleared the site for a coastal camp and the sand moved in. The settlement that exists today was rebuilt on top of what the sand had taken. Tin City sits on Worimi country, returned to Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council ownership on 1 February 2007 and now jointly managed.