Australian Markets Worth Planning a Trip Around

Most markets in this directory are for the people who live within about ten kilometres of them. That is the point of a market. But maybe two dozen across the country are genuinely worth arranging a trip around, and a surprising number of those run on exactly one day a week.

Getting that day wrong is the whole risk. Here is where they are.

Hobart, on a Saturday

Salamanca Market is Tasmania's most-visited attraction, which is a strange thing for a market to be. Three hundred-plus stallholders along Salamanca Place, Saturday only, 8:30am to 3pm, and a strict rule that everything sold has to be made, grown or crafted by the person selling it. That rule is why it has not turned into a souvenir stall row.

Stay the night. Farm Gate Market runs Sunday morning in the city and grew from twelve producers in a car park in 2009 into one of the country's top five farmers markets. Two mornings, two completely different markets, one short walk apart.

Outside Hobart, Evandale Market fills a National Trust-classified town founded in 1811 that also hosts the World Penny Farthing Championships, and Harvest Market in Launceston has been named Australia's most outstanding farmers market three times.

Adelaide's best argument for itself

Adelaide Central Market has traded since January 1869 and is now the largest undercover fresh produce market in the southern hemisphere: more than seventy traders under one roof, several of them family businesses going back generations. Con's Fine Foods has been there since 1959. It is a working produce market that happens to also be one of the city's main sights, so you get serious grocery shoppers and visitors in the same aisle.

Around it: Adelaide Showground Farmers' Market, South Australia's largest, launched in 2006 after twenty thousand people turned up to a one-off produce festival, and Plant 4 Bowden, a former Clipsal electrical factory left empty for six years and rebuilt as a market and eatery precinct with its original saw-tooth roof.

Up in the hills, Stirling Market runs monthly in a town founded in 1854 that wealthy Adelaide families used to escape to when the plains got hot.

Cairns, for fruit you have not eaten

Rusty's Markets is the best reason to spend a Friday, Saturday or Sunday morning in Cairns. One farmer started it in 1975 with six stalls. It now runs 180-plus stalls of tropical fruit, a lot of which most Australians have never tried, and it opens at 5am.

Up the range, Kuranda Original Rainforest Markets was founded in 1978 by hippie artists on land a beekeeper bought, straight out of the late-1960s commune scene, and it trades daily. And Cairns Night Markets on Abbott Street opens every night of the year, Christmas included, fully air-conditioned, which in the tropics is the selling point.

Darwin, but only in the dry

Mindil Beach Sunset Market runs Thursday and Sunday evenings from the last Thursday in April to the last Thursday in October, and not at all outside that. Over 300 small businesses, the stalls facing the Timor Sea, the crowd on the sand for the sunset. If you are choosing when to visit Darwin, this is a reason to pick the dry season over the wet.

Parap Village Markets is the year-round one, Saturday 8am to 2pm, founded by local shopkeepers in 1982, and home to Mary's Laksa, which people have been queuing for across twenty-five years of refinement.

The Sunshine Coast hinterland

Eumundi Markets has run since 1979 on a strict locally-made-only rule and now draws around 1.2 million visitors a year to a hinterland town of a few thousand people. Wednesday and Saturday, 7:30am to 2pm, rain or shine.

Go Wednesday. Saturday is the bigger version and brings the tour buses, the crowd and the parking problem. Wednesday is the one where you can actually talk to the makers.

Byron, on a Thursday

Byron Farmers Market is one of the biggest and longest-running farmers markets in the country: about seventy stalls at Butler Street Reserve, Thursday from 7am to 11am, and that is the only day. Bangalow Farmers Market takes Saturday morning in Piccabeen Park, thirty-eight stalls, run by the same association that audits every grower at Byron.

Four hours. Two mornings. Plan the week around the Thursday.

Canberra, which surprises people

Old Bus Depot Markets has been a Canberra fixture since 1994, trading inside a heritage-listed 1940s bus depot with a rare fully welded rigid portal frame, on the first Sunday of the month. Fyshwick Fresh Food Markets has been going since 1965, when growers sold from the back of trucks, and is now a permanent complex of twenty-five-plus specialty shops. Haig Park Village Markets fills Braddon on a Sunday.

And the capitals

The four largest market cities have their own guides, because a paragraph does not cover them:

• Melbourne markets on a Saturday morning, where 22 markets trade weekly and another 25 run monthly

• Sydney markets on a weekend, where Saturday is an inner west morning and Sunday belongs to the beaches

• Brisbane markets start before sunrise, which is not a figure of speech

• Perth markets, starting in Fremantle, where the best one is half an hour out of town

If you are travelling with dates already fixed, work backwards instead: markets on today and markets this weekend answer the question directly, and the full directory breaks all 627 published markets down by state and by type.