Industry > Abattoirs
Abattoirs
It was hard to grow crops in Pyrmont, but easy to raise animals. Surgeon Harris made Ultimo a deer park. Others operated small dairies – often a shed and a couple of cows: five of Sydney’s eight dairies in the 1890s were in Pyrmont, and one in John Street kept going into the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, people kept pigs, goats, rabbits and fowls in their yards, to consume rubbish – until it was their turn to be consumed.
Pyrmont processed much more meat than it produced. Animals were slaughtered on the banks of Blackwattle Bay, first informally, then in facilities along Abattoir Road (now Bank Street). The colony’s first public abattoir opened on Glebe Island in 1860, linked by the Glebe Island Bridge to Pyrmont and the city. Drovers and butchers put in long hours of exhausting work before restoring their strength at the Butchers Arms (now The Dunkirk).
Because they enjoyed access to off-cuts of meat, Pyrmont’s diet was unusually rich in protein. On the other hand, the trade caused a great deal of stress. Drovers and their dogs herded bellowing animals along Pyrmont streets to their final destination, at risk to themselves and the public: in 1871 an unlucky drover was killed by a bullock that he had driven from Parramatta. Blood stained Blackwattle Bay and brought sharks.
From 1882, debate raged about the location of noxious trades. Butchers put up stout resistance to regulation until the Noxious Trades and Cattle Slaughtering Act was passed in 1894. Abattoirs continued to operate in Pyrmont, but new facilities in Homebush from 1913 gradually drew slaughtering out of the peninsula.
