Eastern Market, Melbourne
[9] In 1871 a writer for The Australasian recalled the early years of the market in less than flattering terms: It was originally a dreary waste with an ugly looking gaol shrinking away in the farthest corner of it, as if ashamed both of its purpose and of its appearance.
It is no exaggeration to say that by the time I reached Stephen-street the encampment was a heap of ruins, and the owners of the tents were surveying their blackened ite with such a look of incredulity and amazement that there was quite as much of the ludicrous as of the pathetic in the incident.
After this, I think, no more tents were suffered to be erected; but hay and corn factors set up their sentry-boxes on the scene of the fire; and then stall keepers were permitted to utilise the vacant ground; and there might be found the strangest assortment of damaged provisions to be met with outside of the New Cut, the Whitechapel-road or the High-street, Shoreditch.
There were cheeses strong enough to waft their odour to Carlton, dried fruits that had been honeycombed by insects, salt fish of perdurable toughness, tins of jam and bottles of pickles with the shabbiest of anonymous labels, sides of bacon of wonderful antiquity, and a conglomerate of so-called dates which appeared to have been cemented together with paste blacking.
[10]Descriptions of the Eastern Market from 1854 mention 'wooden buildings' erected 'for a temporary period under peculiar circumstances'[12] and 'a gigantic wooden structure, a tunnel over the new weigh-bridge' which had 'a most frightful and enormous steep roof'.
Produce arrived from the 'many acres of land, within an easy distance of the city' that were: under cultivation by market gardners – at Moorabbin, Dandenong, the Plenty, Heidelberg, Northcote, Merri Creek, Kew, Hawthorn, Richmond and Keilor.
'[20] Engravings from the period show the exterior shop rows,[20] the curved roof and pillars of the interior market space[20] and an artist's impression of Saturday night scenes.
'[22] The editorial response in the same edition suggested that design of the 'new' building was at fault: What with outside shops and inside stalls, the proper area of the Eastern Market place has been so curtailed that carts cannot be allowed to occupy stands therein.
They dislike unpacking articles which may be sold for delivery elsewhere, and they refuse to recognise the reasonableness of asking them to employ men and boys to take their carts and horses into the open streets, there to stand exposed to wind, rain, and the elements generally, until business is over.
We venture to think that if the Corporation is intent on restoring the Eastern Market site to popularity, it will have to abolish a large number of the interior stalls, and make what provision it can for carts and those who wish to sell from them.
He engaged a band, spent a comparatively large sum on advertising and installing electric lighting in July 1881,[25]and made the market a popular resort, rather than a place to buy fresh food, a model which proved a success.
The novelty of Saturday night opening was still evident from the account of an interstate visitor in 1884[27] but its role as the premier fresh food location was permanently surrendered to the expanding Queen Victoria Market.
[33] A coloured postcard from early in the new century shows the shop row of the Eastern Market on Bourke Street with a horse-drawn carriage sharing the road way with a cable tram.
[37] The Eastern Market's final decades had a 'sideshow raffishness' with 'fortune tellers, test-your-strength machines, electric-shock therapists, tattoo artists, taxidermists and bric-a-brac dealers were among the last ghosts to desert it in the 20th century'.
