Welcome to Tin City, Stockton

It sits just north of Newcastle, behind an endlessly long stretch of sand called Stockton Beach, which is itself just south of the resort town of Nelson Bay. With the perfectly acceptable Newcastle to the south and eminently enjoyable 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.

There are no roads to Tin City. You drive along Stockton Beach (in a 4WD, unless you enjoy getting bogged). As you drive, you will 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. Several scenes of the hit 1979 movie Mad Max were filmed here.

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. "Oh no, I love company!" long-time local Alwyn Garland says. "I don't mind talking to visitors at all."

Garland has been living in Tin City, on and off, since 1978. He is 66 but thermonuclear-scale sun damage covers every inch of what he calls his "poor old Irish skin". A retired iron worker, he built his shack by hand, from scraps of corrugated iron and tea trees he cut out of the forest behind the dunes. "The floor is old conveyor belts that the blokes who worked in the coalmines used to get," says Garland, who has an ancient red cattle dog called Sandy for company.

Garland uses solar panels, with a generator for back-up. He gets his water from a "spear point" – a long tube stuck down through the sand into the aquifer that sits just metres below us. For food, he fishes.

According to Garland, Tin City was started by homeless men during the Depression. 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. "No women or children were allowed in them days," he says. "It was a men's domain."

They had picked this area for the fishing. Then, as now, the beach is crawling with pippies and worms; the outer sandbanks are guttered with dips and trenches full of feeding fish– bream, whiting, tailor. "I've caught 100 tailor in a day off here!" Garland says. "Big greenbacks. I was giving away bags of 'em."

There are also lots of sharks. Garland once saw a white pointer fly out of the water, jaws gnashing, scooping up mouthfuls of baitfish. A few years ago local fishermen made news when they caught great whites off the beach, using surfboards to drop giant baited hooks.

The huts are not owned, in the traditional sense, by anyone: according to by-laws established by the Worimi Conservation Lands Board of Management, which administers the area, Tin City "residents" are not allowed to sell their shacks. They simply pass them down, through families, or onto friends. Garland never had a family of his own, but his long-time girlfriend had five sons, and so he would bring them up to stay.

Garland doesn't live here full-time; he has a unit in Newcastle, which he returns to from time to time. The trouble is 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, dunes so gargantuan that when the photographer and I start walking up them in order to "get some perspective" we give up after 20 minutes, having only ascended one quarter of their height.

These dunes 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. Then, a jet fighter will scream overhead, on a training run from nearby Williamtown air force base.

"I just love the place," Garland says, gazing out to sea. "You get attached to it." He squints at the dunes, then at the ocean, searching for the right words. Instead, he says: "Visit again some time. I'll be here."