Markets in Tasmania

Salamanca Market started in January 1972 with twelve stalls on the Hobart waterfront. It now runs to more than 350 and draws crowds that would be respectable in a city several times Hobart's size, which tells you most of what you need to know about how central markets are to a Tasmanian weekend.

Tasmania is the most geographically concentrated state in this directory. A large share of its listings sit in Hobart itself, with the rest spread thinly across Launceston, Devonport, Deloraine, Penguin and a handful of other towns. Farm Gate on Sunday morning is the producer-focused counterpart to Salamanca's Saturday, and between the two you can cover Hobart's market weekend properly.

The other Tasmanian pattern worth knowing is seasonality. Several of the island's evening and twilight markets run only through the warmer months, roughly November to April, and simply do not exist the rest of the year.

Salamanca's growth has not come at the cost of its rule: everything sold still has to be made, grown or crafted by the person selling it, which is part of why more than 300 stallholders keep turning up every Saturday. Farm Gate Market has followed a similar trajectory from the other direction, starting with 12 producers in a Hobart car park in 2009 and growing into one of the country's top five farmers markets. Launceston's Harvest Market, founded in 2012, has been named Australia's most outstanding farmers market three times over, and on the north-west coast, Penguin Undercover Market trades every Sunday inside the town's former primary school, built in 1925, as the island's largest undercover market.

History runs close to the surface almost everywhere. Evandale, a National Trust-classified town founded in 1811, doubles as the home of the World Penny Farthing Championships, and its Sunday market sits inside that same heritage streetscape. Richmond's weekly makers' market trades a few hundred metres from the oldest stone span bridge in the country, and several of the smaller country markets, at Woodbridge and Collinsvale among them, still meet in nineteenth-century halls built for entirely different purposes.