Buoys

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D850
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/8.0 · 1/60 · ISO 64
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Discarded buoys, painted in faded reds and whites, lean against the weathered corrugated iron of Tin City. Their worn surfaces show the marks of salt, sun, and years spent at sea.

Edition

Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

$100.00 AUD

Colour

Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 10 to 20 business days (framed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Buoys
Series: Tin City
Catalogue: TCI-003
Process: Giclée
Captured: 31 January 2018
Camera: NIKON D850
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/60 s
ISO: 64
Focal length: 14 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

A small collection of buoys hangs from the wall of one of the Tin City shacks, washed up at some point on Stockton Beach and brought back across the dunes as ornament or working gear. The buoys are mismatched: an orange ball with a rope tail, a yellow cylindrical fender, a smaller white sphere with the manufacturer's stencil still visible. The rope is salt-stiff. The buoys hang from nails driven into the timber framing behind the corrugated iron, the cladding flexing slightly under their weight. Sand has built up against the wall below them.

Stockton Beach is the long pale strip running south from Anna Bay to Newcastle, and the line of buoys, ropes, fishing floats, and timber that washes up here is one of the consistent supplies for the Tin City residents. Buoys serve as cheap and durable decoration, but they also work as marker floats for fishing lines, weights for tarpaulins, and bumpers for the side of a 4WD parked too close to a wall. The Worimi Conservation Lands Plan of Management 2015 governs the settlement; ongoing salvage and incremental repair are part of how the 11 remaining shacks continue under the licence system that prohibits any new construction.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A cluster of fishing buoys hangs from a corrugated iron wall. White, orange, yellow, brown. Rope netting holds a glass float near the top. Sand covers the ground between structures, smooth and wind-pushed. Across the clearing, a low shack sits under heavy cloud. Rusted iron, mismatched cladding, a television antenna tilted on its pole. The air looks thick and still.

Brett Patman

The series

Tin City

2018 · 37 photographs

Two tin sheds were put up on the Stockton Bight dunes in the late nineteenth century to hold provisions for sailors shipwrecked on the beach. During the Great Depression a group of squatters built a series of shacks around them. The settlement that grew became Tin City, on Worimi country, in the largest mobile coastal sand mass in the Southern Hemisphere.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.