Altona Lions Cherry Lake Market
Eighty stalls of trash, treasure and home-grown goods spread through the parkland beside a lake that used to be a swamp and briefly a motor racing circuit.
About this market
The Lions Club of Altona runs about eighty stalls through the parkland between Millers Road and Cherry Lake on the first Sunday of every month, 9am to 1pm. It is an outdoor market in the old sense: craft and bric-a-brac, trash and treasure, toys, clothes, preserves, and home-grown and home-made goods, laid out in a park rather than herded into aisles.
A market you walk a park to see
The format suits the site. Eighty stalls in open parkland spread further than eighty stalls in a hall, so this is a market you wander rather than queue through, and the reserve's own facilities do the rest: a playground, a picnic shelter, barbecues, seating, toilets and a car park off Millers Road. Live music plays every month through the Cherry Lake Cultural Series, which showcases musicians from across Hobsons Bay rather than booking the same act, so the soundtrack changes as often as the stalls do. Being a Lions market, the money raised goes back into community work rather than to a promoter.
Market at a glance
Cherry Lake itself is worth knowing about before you arrive, because it is not a natural lake. The area was coastal wetland known as Altona Swamp, named after Robert Cherry, a farmer and landowner here in the late 1800s, and it flooded seasonally from Kororoit Creek and Cherry's Creek until retaining walls, levees and flow channels turned it into the basin you see now. The lake and its surrounding reserve are the reason there is enough open ground beside a suburb for a market this size.
Before it became parkland, the drained swamp hosted motor racing. The Victorian Sporting Car Club laid out a 2.3 mile circuit across the site in 1953 and 1954, decades before the lake basin as it stands today was formed.
Good to know before you go
First Sunday only, and it is an outdoor market, so weather can shorten or cancel it. Come in off Millers Road, where the car park is. Four hours goes quickly across eighty stalls in open parkland, and the second-hand and collectable stalls are best picked over early. Bring cash: a trash-and-treasure floor is exactly where card readers are least reliable, and haggling works better with notes. Bring your own bags. If you have children, the playground and the barbecue area make it worth staying past the shopping, and the lake circuit is a flat, pleasant walk to fill the rest of the morning. This is Bunurong country.
Frequently Asked Questions
- When is the Cherry Lake Market on?
- The first Sunday of every month, 9am to 1pm, at Cherry Lake Reserve in Altona. It is an outdoor market and is subject to the weather.
- How many stalls are there?
- Around eighty, spread through the parkland beside the lake.
- What facilities are at the reserve?
- A playground, picnic shelter, barbecue, seating, toilets and a car park accessed from Millers Road.