Stand on Alfred Street at Circular Quay — near Loftus, with Customs House on one side and the ferry wharves on the other — and try to picture water under your boots. In 1788, when the First Fleet anchored in Port Jackson, the head of Sydney Cove was a V bisected by the Tank Stream, which entered the cove roughly where Pitt Street meets the Quay. Surveyor James Meehan’s early plan still shows today’s Alfred Street drowned at high tide. That foreshore is where the colony’s first Government Wharf went up between 1788 and 1790 — eastern side of the cove, hard by the present Customs House frontage — so government boats and stores had somewhere dry to tie up.
Nothing of that timber jetty survives. Semi-Circular Quay reclamation from the late 1830s into the 1840s–50s filled the mudflats, covered the Tank Stream mouth as a drain, and pushed the shoreline out to the stone quay we walk today. The live note that points at the Paragon Hotel corner (Alfred / Loftus) is useful as a landmark for the old waterline, not as a claim that the hotel is the wharf. Read it as a lost first infrastructure site: Phillip’s cove, the Tank Stream delta, and the government landing that made Sydney Cove a working harbour before Circular Quay existed as a name.