Until 1850, Ultimo was semi-rural, with cornfields and cow paddocks. Members of the Gadigal people still harvested cockles on its foreshores.

Then the landscape was remade by sandstone quarrying on Ultimo’s western edge and by the construction of a railway and goods yard on its eastern shoreline. The suburb became crowded with factories, woolstores and workers’ housing.

Today it has a new identity as a cultural precinct as industrial sites are adapted for entertainment and education. This tour of Ultimo starts in greyness and ends in the technicolour of Darling Harbour.