City Centre

The City Centre at Tin City is the main cluster of shacks that gives the settlement its name. The structures sit on a low ridge of the Stockton Bight dunes, looking out over the Pacific to the east. The shacks are timber-framed and clad in corrugated iron, most of it salvaged or recycled. Each shack has been built and rebuilt by its owner over decades. The cladding is patched, painted, and re-painted. Some sections are red, some white, some bare galvanised metal. The shacks sit close together, separated by narrow sand pathways that the wind keeps shifting.

The habitable shacks at Tin City date from the 1930s, when Depression-era squatters built tin shelters on the dunes at a peak of around 36 to 38 structures. The Army cleared the site during World War II for a coastal camp; the squatters returned afterwards to find their huts buried by sand, and rebuilt with driftwood and discarded military crates. On 1 February 2007 the Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council received freehold title to the surrounding country and simultaneously leased it back to the NSW Government, with the Stockton Bight reserves gazetted under Part 4A of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974. Tin City itself is not heritage listed. The 11 shacks that remain are held under licences administered by the Worimi Conservation Lands Board of Management; they cannot be sold and they pass to family or friends.