Eight

Shack number Eight at Tin City sits in the middle of the row, walled in mixed corrugated iron and timber cladding with the numeral 8 painted on the front. The shack is single-storey with a low-pitched skillion roof. A timber-framed window in the front wall is shuttered. Sand drifts along the southern end. The cladding is a patchwork: corrugated iron on the lower courses, timber boarding on the upper, with the joins between materials covered by a vertical batten. The painted numeral 8 is large and white against the wall behind it.

The shacks at Tin City carry their numbers as the working names the residents have always used. Numbers do the same work that street addresses do in a town: identifying which shack is which when supplies arrive, when repairs are organised, or when somebody is talked about in the absence of formal numbering. The settlement was technically illegal for most of its history; the informal numbers stuck. Tin City sits on Worimi country at the Stockton Bight. The land was returned to Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council ownership on 1 February 2007 and leased back to the NSW Government, with the surrounding lands gazetted under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974.