Throsby Seafood Festival: fresh catches at the harbour

If you're after a seafood-centred weekend, the Throsby Seafood Festival — also known as the Newcastle Seafood Festival — is the one to keep on your radar. It's a family-friendly event that leans hard into Newcastle's working harbour, and it's free to get into, which makes it an easy one to drop into without much planning. The festival runs from Friday lunch on 9 April to Sunday dinner on 11 April, so there's plenty of room to pick the day that suits you best.

The heart of the thing is Pier 97 at Wickham Harbour, which is owned and operated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests and sits close to the Newcastle CBD. It's presented by the Throsby Basin Business Chamber and the City of Newcastle as a way to bring business and community together, and it's being built as a destination event on the NSW tourism calendar and a feature of Newcastle Food Month. The harbour setting is half the appeal, so expect fresh seafood, live sashimi and shucking demonstrations right where the boats come in.

What really carries the weekend, though, is how much it spills out into the rest of the city. More than 30 pubs, clubs, restaurants and takeaways across the area put on their best seafood dishes, and customers get to vote for Newcastle's Best Seafood Dish, with a prize draw for a five-star luxury weekend at the Sofitel Harbour Rocks up for grabs. It turns the whole area into a bit of a seafood crawl, so you're not just eating at the festival site.

Back at the harbour, there's a lot to keep families busy. The Fish Co-op runs open days on both Saturday and Sunday, there's an inaugural prawn peeling competition to find Newcastle's King or Queen Prawn peeler, a family fishing competition called SNAG & SNAP, and an all-ages art competition judged on the Sunday afternoon. For anyone who actually wants to learn something, NorEast Bistro's Tony Harrison runs seafood masterclasses, and there's an onboard sailing degustation and live entertainment to round things out. You can walk the marina, meet the fishermen, look at the boats, tour the back of house at the Co-op and buy seafood to take away for a picnic along the foreshore.

It's worth knowing the place behind it all. The festival sits at the Commercial Fishermen's Co-Operative, formerly the Newcastle District Fishermen's Co-operative, which was formed in 1945 to service local commercial fishers. It now has 130 shareholder members and runs retail shops in Newcastle, Swansea, Tacoma and Gorokan, with others at Nelson Bay and Tea Gardens leased to private operators. About half the catch is sold locally, with the rest going to the Sydney Fish Market, and the Co-op's administration office is based right here in Newcastle. If you want to see how it works from the water, Co-op boat tours run for A$10 a person. It's a genuinely working part of the city, and that's what gives the whole weekend its character.