Front Yard

The front yard of one of the Tin City shacks is a small fenced area of bare sand in front of the porch, marked off by a low timber fence of mismatched palings driven into the dune. A few items of yard furniture sit inside the fence: a folding chair, a small table, a cooler box on its side. A piece of dried-out driftwood has been propped against the corner of the porch as a kind of post. The fence is decorative more than functional. Sand drifts through it and around it, and a strong southerly will redistribute everything inside the enclosure within an afternoon. The yard reads as the personal space of the shack's owner.

Tin City's working yards are practical spaces with informal edges. A fence marks where one shack's territory ends and the next one's begins, even where there's nothing physical to keep separate. Yard furniture moves around with the weather. The 11 remaining shacks are administered by the Worimi Conservation Lands Board of Management under the 2015 Plan of Management; the licences cover the shacks themselves and the immediate surrounds. Yards and porches are part of how the residents make a place to live out of structures that were never planned as a residential settlement.