"PADDY'S MARKET"

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 55, 14 September 1928, Page 9

"PADDY'S MARKET"

A SYDNEY INSTITUTION (From "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, Gth September. For more than 100 years, Sydney's markets have been given up one day a week only to retail stallholders. By way of experiment, they nrc now to be handed over to them three days in the week. "Paddy's Market," 'as it is known when it is given over to the retailers on Fridays, is ono of Sydney's most picturesque and popular institutions, espoeially at night. There is no other placo in Sydney like it. There, amid a strange human medley of dealers which give it an exotic touch and amid crowds of people of all classes and ages, one can buy anything from the provorbial needle to the anchor, and can eat almost anything. Whether "Paddy's Market " will lose something of its spell and incidentally something of its smell, under the new order, remains to be seen. It is to be hoped not. Sydney, without this popular institution on Friday nights, would be something like Hamlot without the melancholy Dane. It offers a truly wonderful study of humanity. Rubbing shoulders with people who run the whole gamut of tho democratic working order ono finds many smartly-dressed men and women who have come along in aristocratic motor-cars to pick up something cheap in the way of pot plants or vegetables or whatnot. Somo of tho stallholders there have amassed quite a lot of monoy. One of them is to-day a big Sydney business man and an owner of racehorses.