Mirrabooka Friday Market

The Mirrabooka Friday Market has been trading for 47 years, which makes it older than most of the housing around it. It sets up every Friday from 7am to noon on Mirrabooka Open Space, the ground behind the Herb Graham Recreation Centre on Ashbury Crescent, and it is run entirely by volunteers. Entry is free. So, in effect, is the profit motive: every dollar the market clears goes back into local sports clubs, schools, community groups and seniors groups, and into events supporting the Telethon Institute.

New, second-hand and everything between

This is a general market in the oldest sense of the phrase, not a curated makers market. Sellers turn up with new stock and second-hand stock side by side: homewares, clothing, toys, plants, gardening gear and tools, alongside fresh fruit and vegetables and a run of food and drink stalls. The mix is the appeal. You can be buying tomatoes at one table and sorting through somebody's spare spanners at the next, and the prices reflect a market that answers to its stallholders rather than to a shopping centre lease.

Mirrabooka is one of Perth's most culturally mixed suburbs, and a weekly open-air market where anyone can take a table reflects that faster than any council strategy does. The Herb Graham Recreation Centre next door anchors the site, so the market has real parking, real toilets and a sealed approach rather than a paddock. Being outdoors, it does run subject to weather.

Good to know before you go

Bring cash and bring your own shopping bags, both of which the City of Stirling specifically asks visitors to do. Come early rather than late: a market that opens at 7am is at its best in the first couple of hours, and by 11:30am sellers are packing down. Parking is available onsite behind the recreation centre. Because the whole thing is outdoors on open ground, check the forecast in winter, and dress for a Perth summer morning if you are going in January, since there is limited shade once the sun is up.