Buoys

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.