Bulletin Place is a short Quay-end lane between the Pitt Street / Bridge Street warren and Macquarie Place — one of the few Sydney thoroughfares named after a publication. J. F. Archibald’s weekly The Bulletin was published from here after its foundation in 1880, with stores and offices toward the Pitt Street end, until the paper moved to larger George Street premises in 1897. Writers including Henry Lawson and A. B. “Banjo” Paterson knew this pocket of the city; the mid-nineteenth-century warehouse façades that survive are the bit of olde Sydney” the steel-and-glass Quay has not quite erased.
Jazz fans will think of The Basement — long a Circular Quay institution — but be precise: the club’s famous addresses were in the Reiby Place / Macquarie Place block next door, not a doorway halfway down Bulletin Place itself. Treat it as the same Quay warehouse precinct, not as proof the lane was the club.
The Bulletin, the warehouses, and the Tank Stream ground underneath are enough. Leave romantic guesses about Paterson’s dingy-office lines for another day unless a sourced note turns up.