The Boggo Road Markets

The Boggo Road Markets are on every Sunday, 7am-1pm, outside Boggo Road Gaol, Annerley Road, Dutton Park.

The Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society will be having a stall at the markets on a monthly basis. Follow us on Facebook to receive up-to-date news about when we will be there.


The new Boggo Road markets opened yesterday morning and the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society was there for the occasion. We set up our stall with flyers and our Inside History books, many of which are about the gaol and the history of the local area, and these sold well. It was particularly good to see people coming up to the stall and tell us they already had some of the books and how much they had enjoyed them. A little genuine praise goes a long way with me. In fact, it was meeting various people at the stall, old faces and new, that was probably the highlight of the day for us. 

Boggo Road Markets, 23 October 2011.
There's us in the blue-and-white-striped stall (right).

Over the course of the day we had numerous long chats with people with a direct or family association with the gaol, or a long family history in the area. We also signed up several rather splendid new members to the historical society.

One of the most useful functions of the stall was updating people on news about the gaol, as we received lots of queries about Boggo Road being open for tours (despite it closing six years ago). Even people who had just spent five minutes talking at a Ghost Tours stall were still completely unaware that the gaol was not open for tours. It never fails to amaze me that we are the only source of honest and reliable information on this subject. One man even informed me that he'd heard the buildings inside the gaol walls would be ripped out and replaced with a shopping centre! We were able to work out that he was in fact referring to the planned retail strip outside the gaol.

Will the markets be a success? That remains to be seen, because although visitor numbers were good for the first morning, it was obvious from what we heard at the stall (and the size of some cameras) that many people were expecting to get inside the gaol itself. It will be interesting to see how visitor numbers pan out over the next few weeks. The weekend Brisbane market scene is already quite full, but the quality of the stalls (and, although I really hate this word, the "vibe") at Boggo Road gives these markets a good chance of longevity.

In the meantime, I would suggest that parking a big food truck right across the iconic front gates was a mistake, blocking what should have been the visual centre of the markets. The advantage of having such a unique backdrop to the markets is lost if you can't even see the thing. 

PS: This is not the first time the gaol has been used in this way. Sunday morning markets were also held there back in 2001, with stalls outside the main gates and scattered inside the grounds and corridors. These markets suffered from bad timing, and after some initial success they were wound down after an unfortunately long series of wet Sunday mornings affected visitor numbers. However, they were useful in bringing new people to the gaol. I lived just across the road from the place at the time and going to those markets was the first time I had been inside Boggo Road. To come back almost exactly ten years later, having in the meanwhile started a historical society that now has 230+ members, was a nice little way to mark that anniversary.

Have you been to the Boggo Road Markets? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

UPDATE 30 October 2011

We were back for the second week of Boggo Road markets yesterday. Numbers were down a bit from the first week, but we still had a decent day. Many people were still confused as to whether the gaol was open or not, but once again we were able to provide a bit of reliable info.

UPDATE 7 February 2012

There has been some recent confusion about the tours "around" the gaol on market mornings. Here are the facts.