Specialty Markets

Specialty markets are built around one particular focus that does not fit the other categories: flowers, craft, art, books, or a heritage hall with a character of its own. It is a small group, but each one is distinctive in a way the broader categories are not.

Fremantle Markets in Western Australia is the best known, trading in an 1897 heritage hall across Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The flower markets at Homebush West in Sydney and Rocklea in Brisbane serve florists and trade buyers and open very early in the morning. In tropical Queensland, Port Douglas and Mareeba run markets shaped by what grows locally rather than by a general stallholder mix.

Sydney Flower Market at Homebush West and Brisbane Flower Market at Rocklea are both wholesale operations first, trading six mornings a week and supplying florists across their respective states, but both let early-rising members of the public in alongside the trade buyers. Fashion resale has its own specialty niche now too: Love Me Again Market is Brisbane's best-known pre-loved market, and Suitcase Rummage, which started in Brisbane in 2010, runs on one rule alone, whatever is being sold has to fit in a suitcase, with no tables, tents or racks allowed.

A handful of specialty markets exist because the building does. Old Bus Depot Markets in Canberra trades inside a heritage-listed 1940s depot with a rare fully welded rigid portal frame, The Amazing Mill Markets in Daylesford fills 12,000 square metres of Victorian spa-country antique hall, and Geelong Vintage Market spreads across 2,000 square metres of a former Pilkington glass factory. In each case the venue is as much the drawcard as anything on the stalls.

Curated design markets sit at the other end of the category, ticketed and themed rather than open-door. Bowerbird Design Market in Adelaide gathers sixty curated designers inside the Ridley Centre over three days, alongside an art wall of sixty South Australian painters, and Boho Luxe Market in Brisbane sets a ticketed weekend around a tipi, restored kombis and a dedicated psychic and wellbeing area rather than a straightforward stallholder line-up. Western Australia's E Shed Markets is a specialty market by venue alone, the state's only waterfront market, trading inside a 1929 timber wharf shed that was physically rotated 180 degrees and relocated in 1995.