Nineteenth-century railway workshops turned into the largest contemporary arts precinct in Australia, with a Saturday farmers' market.
The Eveleigh Railway Workshops were built between 1880 and 1889 and were, for a century, the largest industrial complex in the southern hemisphere — building and repairing locomotives and rolling stock, employing thousands, and central to the labour history of New South Wales.
They closed in 1988. The carriage workshops reopened as an arts precinct in 2007, keeping the brick walls, the iron roof trusses, the travelling cranes and the rail tracks running through the floor.
The spaces are vast, raw and among the best in Australia for contemporary performance and installation.
The programme
Contemporary performance, dance, theatre, music, visual art and installation, commissioned and presented rather than toured in. Carriageworks is a producing organisation and works with artists over time.
It hosts Sydney Festival and Biennale of Sydney programmes, and Australian Fashion Week.
The organisation went into voluntary administration in 2020 when the pandemic removed its commercial income, and emerged later that year after a rescue. It has been running since, and the episode is a fair illustration of how thin the margins are for arts organisations here.
There is a strong emphasis on First Nations work, with several major commissions and a permanent relationship with Aboriginal artists and companies.
Entry to the galleries is generally free; performances are ticketed.
The farmers’ market
Saturdays, 8am to 1pm, and one of the genuinely good things about Sydney.
Around seventy stallholders — growers, bakers, cheesemakers, butchers, coffee roasters — under the brick vaults. It is a producers’ market rather than a street-food market, though several stalls do breakfast and the queues for them are real.
Cash and card. Get there before ten if you want to move.
There is also a Thursday night market in warmer months.
The buildings
Worth walking through for their own sake. The scale of the sheds, the surviving overhead cranes and the rails set into the floor make the industrial history legible in a way that most conversions lose.
The wider Eveleigh precinct includes the Locomotive Workshops, partly redeveloped as offices and technology space.
Practicalities
Redfern station is five minutes’ walk — take the Little Eveleigh Street exit.
Redfern has a significant place in Aboriginal history as a centre of urban Aboriginal community and activism; The Block was the site of the Aboriginal Housing Company’s original purchase in 1973, the first Aboriginal-owned urban land in Australia.
Combining Carriageworks with Newtown, a fifteen-minute walk west, makes a good afternoon.
