Inverloch Lions Community Farmers Market

The Inverloch Lions Community Farmers Market is one of the few markets on the Bass Coast that changes its opening time with the clocks. It runs the last Sunday of every month at The Glade, the grassed area around the Soundshell near Rainbow Park on The Esplanade, starting at 8am through daylight saving and 9am for the rest of the year. Both versions finish at 1pm.

Fifty-plus Gippsland producers on the foreshore

The stall list is regional rather than generic. Seasonal fruit and vegetables, seafood, meat and poultry, farm eggs, plants, wines, olive oils and honey make up most of it, with the jam, chutney and bread end of the trade filling out the rest. More than 50 stalls trade on a typical Sunday, run by the Inverloch Lions Club, which keeps one stall space free each market for a local community group.

Inverloch sits on Anderson Inlet at the western end of the Bass Coast, a town whose population multiplies over summer and settles back to something much quieter the rest of the year. The market tracks that rhythm: bigger crowds and an earlier start through the holiday months, a steadier local trade through winter.

Because it is a Lions market, the money has somewhere to go. Stallholders carry their own public liability cover and food traders register through Streetrader, and the club sells its Christmas cakes here through the back half of the year. Live music in the Soundshell is a fixture, and the foreshore setting means the market doubles as the reason plenty of people walk down to Rainbow Park at all.

Good to know before you go

Check the calendar rather than the season if you are travelling: the 8am start applies October to March and the 9am start April to September, and getting that wrong costs an hour of standing around. The Glade is an open grassed foreshore area, so wind off Anderson Inlet is a real factor and layers help year round. Bring a bag and some cash, and take the walk along the Esplanade afterwards rather than driving straight out.