After a 20 minute drive along Stockton Beach when you're well away from civilisation, it emerges out of the sand dunes like a mirage. Tin City.
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But Tin City is not a city at all, nor is it made just out of tin as it name might suggest. And while it may look deserted, people do live there.
Tin City is a unique collection of 11 self-built shacks located about 11km south west of Anna Bay, nestled behind the endlessly long stretch of sand and the shoreline of Stockton Beach, a significant site of indigenous history and its traditional custodians, the Worimi People. It is the Worimi Conservation Lands Board of Management that oversees the sand dunes.
There are no roads to Tin City.
You drive along Stockton Beach (in a 4WD, unless you enjoy getting bogged). As you drive, you marvel at the crazily raw and elemental beauty of this beach - the colossal sky, the foaming sea; the way the ocean meets the earth here like a smack in the chops.
There are no signs of human habitation. It's just sand and rolling dunes until suddenly a cluster of 11 shacks appears, off behind the beach, half buried and looking quite strange and lonely.
With the urban centres of Newcastle to the south and Nelson Bay to the north, it seems reasonable to ask why anyone would want to live in Tin City.
But Tin City has what neither Newcastle nor Nelson Bay has, namely: solitude. Serious, hard-core, A-grade solitude. That, and exceptional fishing.
Tin City has no power, no water, and no sewerage. It pretty much defines the term "off the grid".
You might think, because of this, that the locals would be all toothless hermits who shoo you away when you approach, but that is not the case. In fact, the residents are quite welcoming.
According to research by The Lost Collective, the shacks are governed by a 100-year lease signed in 1920 under longstanding squatters settlement.
"The shacks are not owned in a traditional sense, but they are privately occupied and passed down to family and friends. Under this agreement, the shacks cannot be sold or rebuilt, but they can be maintained."
Tin City is widely known as the last legal squatter settlement in Australia. Its existence seems unreal in today's society - the idea of it as wild as the city surrounded by a sea of sand itself, which is one of its greatest appeals.
So how did Tin City get its start?
It is understood that in the late 19th century shipwrecks became so common Stockton Beach that two tin sheds were built to hold provisions for shipwrecked sailors.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s homeless men turned to the sand dunes and Tin City grew by 36 more shacks.
When World War II came along, these men went off to war. By the time they came back, their huts had been buried by sand, so they rebuilt them, using driftwood and old military crates that washed up. Today, just 11 of these shacks remain.
The constantly shifting sands, ocean winds, and sea spray require Tin City's residents to maintain the ever-evolving structures through repairs, reinforcement and patch ups. Perhaps the fact that the shacks cannot be rebuilt is what gives them such a unique character.
In 2013, Tin City local Alwyn Garland, who split his time between his unit in Newcastle and hut among the dunes, told the Newcastle Herald that trouble with spending time away from his beach house was that when he comes back, he might find his hut buried.
"That's one of the biggest problems," he says. "Sand. It's a constant battle to keep it from building up." Winter is the worst, when the southerlies blow. "They can cover your place in two days. And if it's raining, the sand on the roof gets wet and the weight of it can collapse your shack."
Needless to say, you see a lot of shovels at Tin City.
Then there's the sea. Erosion of the frontal dune has become so bad that when the tide is high and surf big, waves rush up and into the huts.
All of this is, of course, part of Tin City's charm. It's not just surreal, it's post-apocalyptically surreal, from the half-buried shacks and the wind that goes shooshooshoooo in your ear to the Sahara-like dunes that tower over the shacks to the west.
The dunes also have secrets. One day in the 1980s, Garland found the half-buried skeleton of an Aboriginal girl. There are also ancient Aboriginal middens, dotted throughout the sandy swales, white shoals of sun-bleached shells periodically uncovered by the wind. Some of them date back 1200 years.
In the surrounding dunes, World War relics, including explosives, and parts of planes that have crashed over the years are uncovered with the right amount of dune shifting. Then, a jet fighter will scream overhead, on a training run from nearby Williamtown air force base.
"I just love the place," Garland says. "You get attached to it."
