Cabarlah Markets

Cabarlah Markets has been trading on the last Sunday of the month since 1994, which makes it one of the longer-running country markets on the Darling Downs. It sets up at the Cabarlah sports ground on the New England Highway about 18km north of Toowoomba, and it has been run since the start by the nearby Geham primary school community, on volunteer labour rather than a commercial operator.

Thirty years of last Sundays

The stall mix is the classic Downs country-market spread: local produce, plants and seedlings, bric-a-brac and secondhand tools, craft, and a breakfast trade in burgers and coffee that gets busy well before 9am. The market draws several thousand people on a good morning, a sizeable crowd for a village site, and the highway location means a fair share of them are people breaking the drive between Toowoomba and Crows Nest.

Cabarlah itself is a small Darling Downs settlement strung along the highway, better known regionally for its army barracks than its shopping, so the market is one of the few days a month the village sees a crowd. The pub and cafes nearby pick up the overflow, and plenty of visitors treat the two as a single outing.

Being volunteer-run shows in both directions. It keeps the market cheap and unpolished in the way regulars like, but it also means the format shifts when the roster thins. For 2026 the organisers have changed how food is handled at the market, opening the catering side to food trucks and beverage vendors rather than running it in-house, a direct response to falling volunteer numbers.

Good to know before you go

Trading runs 7.30am to 12.30pm and the produce and plant stalls thin out first, so an early arrival is worth it. The sports ground has room to park on site, which is not something most monthly markets can offer. Bring cash: this is a small country market and not every stallholder will have a card reader. It is an open ground with limited shade, so sun cover matters from about October onward.