Events: Darling Downs swap meet
QLD: Swapping on the Toowoomba Showgrounds on Queensland's Darling Downs...
Darling Downs swap meet
Abright sun shone over 40 hectares of amateur pickers, car enthusiasts, bric-a-brac wranglers and professional bargain-hunters moseying across a paddock cum car park and through the gates of the Toowoomba Showgrounds on Queensland’s Darling Downs.
Once inside, they found another 40 hectares of people already there, making 15,000 of them in total, scouring through every nook and cranny of nearly 200 stalls in an ordered array in the Cattle Pavilion, down by the Indoor Arena, across the other side of the moat by the Founders’ Pavilion, circling around the Main Arena or sashaying about the Village Green.
Within those 40 hectares or 100 acres, they found more than fifty shades of bargains from piping red-hot ‘hard-to-avoid’ steals to temperate ‘think-on-it’ deals. Amongst this bounty of bargains were used tyres, car doors, and rusted hulks of once noble automobiles, vintage prams, or Dodge doorhandles, a 1929 Ford roadster cab frame, and one or two 1950s International Harvester trucks.
Then there was the fully restored Lincoln Zephyr, a 1940 Ford roadster, an assortment of 1970s muscle cars, a random Chevy of various descriptions, an iconic FJ Holden or two, an occasional Porsche, a 1952 Austin with its original 850cc engine and a bloke selling James Bond model cars including the very popular Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, just to mention few.
With a track record 43 years in the making, host club, the Darling Downs Veteran and Vintage Motor Club, certainly has the event down pat. And it’s just as well, because it takes an army of 500 volunteers to run an event that kicked off just after sunrise on the Saturday morning and didn’t stop until lunchtime on that Sunday.
DDVVMC President Trevor Hoffmann summed up the event saying, "the swap was an outstanding success. We had to turn away hundreds of people who would have loved to have a site. The weather was on our side this year. The popularity of the swap can be judged by the fact that by Sunday evening almost 90 per cent of the sites had been rebooked for the 2016 Swap Meeting." See you there.
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