THERE was an “air of excitement” in Red Cliffs on Sunday as Sunraysia’s biggest market returned almost one year after it was last held.
“We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Red Cliffs Country Market committee member Dianne Dalla Santa said.
“After 12 months, our little town seems like it’s had a shot in the arm,” she said. “We are noticing a lot of very happy faces here.”
Mildura Rural City Council gave the market committee the all-clear last month to run the market after a year-long pause due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ms Dalla Santa said Sunday’s market had a full range of products on offer and plants were particularly popular.
Gardening had grown in popularity “because that’s what a lot of us turned to during the last 12 months”, she said. “Lockdown was your home, so you got into the garden.”
The market had 104 stalls, a little short of the 120 stalls that normally turn out.
“There’s a few that didn’t quite get prepared in time,” Ms Della Santa said. “Because we’ve only had a few weeks’ notice to be able to go ahead with our market.”
But she expected there would be “an additional 20 to 30 stalls” on the next market day, Easter Sunday.
The market is now running with a COVID-safe plan in place, including signage, QR codes for checking-in, volunteers roaming the crowd in high-visibility shirts to remind people of social distancing rules, and hand sanitiser on offer.
Members of the Red Cliffs Services Club put their hands up to bolster volunteer numbers, Ms Dalla Santa said.
“It gives (customers) that little bit of reassurance that we’re following all the COVID-safe practices.”
“We have something like four hectares of space that we can use in this township,” she said, with stallholders spaced out in Barclay Square and under shopfront verandas.
“We’ve got a huge amount of ground that people can move around.
“There’s just this lovely air of satisfaction for being back doing something that we think is normal.”
