Tyres

A stack of car tyres sits beside one of the Tin City shacks, half-buried in sand, the rubber bleached pale grey from years of UV. The tyres are mismatched in size and tread pattern, the kind of pile that builds up around any place that runs 4WD vehicles over soft ground. Some are still serviceable; others have collapsed on themselves. Sand has worked into the inside walls and packed the rims solid. A length of rope has been tied through one of them, the end disappearing under the sand. The colour palette is salt grey, sand pale, rust orange where the steel belt is showing.

Vehicle access to Tin City is by NPWS-licensed 4WD over the Stockton Bight dunes. Tyres take a heavier beating in this country than on a sealed road: airing down to drive on soft sand, then airing back up, and dealing with whatever the salt and the heat does to the rubber between visits. Spare tyres accumulate at the shacks because getting a stuck vehicle out of the dunes is a problem worth being over-prepared for, and because old tyres can be repurposed as windbreaks, retaining walls, or weights for tarpaulins. The pile in this photograph is doing some of those second jobs. The dunes will keep moving past it.