Mt Martha South Beach Market

Almost every market in this directory runs on a weekend. The Mt Martha South Beach Market runs on public holidays, which is a genuinely different scheduling idea: Australia Day, Easter Monday, the King's Birthday, AFL Grand Final Eve and Melbourne Cup Day have all carried a market date. It first ran in April 2019, and the format has stayed the same since, four hours from 10am to 2pm on the Mount Martha House lawn.

Eighty stalls on a lawn above the bay

The stall count sits above 80, split between boutique handmade makers and street food, with live music through the middle of the day. The offering is one-of-a-kind gifts and artisan goods rather than produce, which suits the audience: people already down on the Mornington Peninsula for a long weekend, looking for something to carry home. The Mount Martha House lawn sits directly above Port Phillip Bay, so the market has a view most Melbourne markets can only describe.

Because the dates follow the public holiday calendar rather than a day of the week, this market never appears in a weekly listing and cannot be found by turning up on spec. It is run by Unrivalled Events, a Mornington operator that runs several markets across the peninsula, so the same team's dates turn up elsewhere on the calendar too.

Good to know before you go

Check the date, always. There is no weekly or monthly rule here, and the only way to know the market is on is the operator's published list. Public holidays on the peninsula mean traffic, so leave earlier than the drive time suggests and expect the Esplanade parking near Mount Martha House to be full by late morning. The four hour window is short for a market this size, so arriving at 10am rather than 1pm is the difference between browsing 80 stalls and catching the tail of them packing up. Bring a hat on a summer date, since the lawn is open, and bring bags. This is Bunurong country.