Before Blackwattle Bay and the tourist queues at today’s Sydney Fish Market, the city’s first purpose-built fish market sat hard against Woolloomooloo Bay. The City Council built it in the early 1870s (commonly dated 1871–72) to regulate a trade that had long mixed harbour-side hawking, boat sales and street cries of “Fish O!” with recurring complaints about quality and public health. The market stood in the Forbes / Plunkett / Bourke Streets precinct — a working harbour of fishers, coastal traders and timber yards.
The Eastern Fish Market (as Woolloomooloo became known) was extended in 1888 and 1893 until it covered the block bounded by Bourke, Plunkett, Forbes and Wilson Streets. A privately owned Southern Fish Market opened at Redfern in 1891; later the municipal City Fish Market at Haymarket drew trade away. The Woolloomooloo building was sold in 1911 and operations left the bay. The market structures were eventually demolished; the Astor apartments rose on the site in the 1960s. Fish marketing later centred on Haymarket and, from 1966, Blackwattle Bay — the lineage of today’s Sydney Fish Market — but Woolloomooloo remains where the city’s first formal fish market began.
Woolloomooloo Fish Markets - Woolloomooloo - NSW
