Tiny House Blog

Crater Cove Shacks

Occupancy of Crater Cove started around 60 years ago when weekend fishermen built the first huts. During the depression of the 1930s, some of the huts may have been occupied full time. Nowdays Crater Cove is managed by NPWS and cared for by volunteers since 1987.

Crater Cove looks directly out toward the entrance to Sydney Harbour. I have cunningly included North Head and South Head in the background of this picture. There are no roads into Crater Cove: it can only be reached by walking there along a bush track, or by boat from the harbor.

Since the Depression, there have always been a small collection of huts in the cove, used as weekenders, or occupied by squatters. When the land became part of the Sydney Harbour National Park, the residents were evicted, and the plan was to demolish the huts. This provoked a good deal of public protests. So, the huts have been retained as part of our heritage, and volunteer caretakers look after the places.

LAST century, at least for an inventive few, building your own weekender could be as easy as finding a secluded bay and gathering a few bits of driftwood and local stone for walls and sheets of discarded tin for a roof.

In Sydney the best examples of the art of this pure, makeshift beach retreat are still standing in a hidden enchanted cove near Balgowlah, looking directly out Sydney Heads to the vast Pacific Ocean beyond.

The seven shacks – at Crater Cove – were knocked up between 1923 and 1963 from available materials by fishermen on army land (now part of the Sydney Harbour National Park) and these days are lovingly repaired and maintained by caretakers.

If you press your face against the window of any of the improvised dwellings you’ll see an idyllic vision of a simple unadorned existence. Walls are wood panelled and the sun streams in. In one there’s the simplest of wooden benches, with a wok sitting on a gas burner ready to cook the evening meal.

It’s rustic pared-back living of a kind that speaks to a primal part of the Australian psyche. It’s a pure distillation of our beach-house dream. It’s a romanticised promise of instant escape from our complex urban lives.

More professional photos here…

Ben Wheeler visited Cannery Row and the Aquarium in Monterey, California and shot a few photos of some worker’s shacks that were on display.

A chorus of cannery whistles, each with its own unique call, summoned the Cannery Row workforce. Men and women in rubber boots and oilcloth aprons showed up to clean, cut, pack, cook and can the sardines that were a major part of Monterey’s economy for more than three decades.

The work was dirty and hard, cold and wet, and the smell was terrible–but it was the smell of prosperity. The stench of sardines, reduced to fertilizer, fish meal, and chicken feed, permeated the Row. Continue Reading »

The other day I received a package in the mail from Shelter Publications, located in Bolinas, California. They had contacted me earlier in the week to see if I would review some of there books and that they have a book on Tiny Houses in the works.

They sent some terrific books and I have decided to share with you the oldest one, because it has some neat ideas and really gets back to the basics of building construction.

In the classic book Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties: And How to Build Them, D. C. Beard covers a wide array of possibilities for building your own dwelling out of nothing but materials provided by nature. This book was originally published in 1914 and Shelter Publications has chosen to reprint it and make it available again.

D. C. Beard explains how to construct a variety of worry-free shelters appropriate to a natural environment that is by turns both friendly and foreboding. Included are a sod house for the lawn, a treetop house, over-water camps, and an American log cabin. I even found a shanty plan that looked remarkably familiar to the Sonoma Shanty. It just had a lower pitched roof, otherwise the dimensions are almost identical.

Fully recognizing that the outdoorsman builds a shelter with the intention of inhabiting it, Beard explains how to build hearths and chimneys, notched log ladders, and even how to rig secret locks. Illustrated throughout with instructional line drawings, Shelters, Shacks and Shanties goes back to the can-do spirit of the American frontier and belongs in your library of tiny house books.

I really like this book, the sketches are wonderful, the information is timeless. If you are looking for a book to get you back to the basics, this is it.

by Kent Griswold (Tiny House Blog)

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