Sydney Fish Market is a place Dad and I would spend Sunday mornings, when I was a kid, eating whitebait and watching the harbour. It’s also the third-largest fish market in the world, a rough, raw home for fishmongers since 1966. Shoppers, workers, the day’s catch, rats – everything melding into an energetic, sometimes overwhelming space.

Early next year, our Blackwattle Bay market moves to its flashy new home: a staggering $750 million architectural feat that’s slowly risen up on a site just across the water.

Ahead of our last laps of the original, and before the final 36-hour seafood marathon in the lead-up to Christmas, I’ve captured the fish market as it is. To preserve what was here, on the land of the Gadigal and Wangal people, of the Eora Nation, who have been living on and caring for this place for millennia.

This photo essay is a record of a market that for a long time expected to get the next facelift in Sydney’s cosmetic journey, so never bothered to clean up its rough edges. Old netting, forgotten fish traps, gulls fighting over guts, cats prowling for rats – the last vestige of working Sydney Harbour, in the middle of our city. A place that simply sold this harbour city fish.