Margaret Colliver was part of the committee that set up the Tongala town garage sale more than a decade ago, and hasn’t missed a year since.
Crossing the road in Tongala isn’t usually too much of a challenge, peak traffic times pretty much restricted to school drop-off or pick-up and home games for the football netball club.
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That is, of course, unless it is the first weekend in October when the sleepy dairy farming town throws open its doors for its annual town garage sale — then looking left and right before you cross the road is essential.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic along Gooda and Miller Sts isn’t unusual on garage sale day, when the Tongala Development Committee, which now runs the decade-old sales event, attracts 50-plus home owners to empty the contents of their garages on to their front lawns.
Each item either had a price tag attached or the vendor was more than willing to enter into a verbal negotiation to find common ground with the prospective buyer.
On the weekend there was to everything from old toys to clothes, musical instruments and big ticket items ranging from ride-on lawn mowers to generators and boats.
Fifty front lawns were overflowing with everything from toys to musical instruments, books and sporting goods at Tongala on Saturday.
Red and yellow top bins acted as makeshift sign posts to promote the garage sale venues by taking their place on the nature strip on a day well outside of their usual roster. Attached to the wheelie bins were the obligatory balloons and a variety of garage sale signs that occasionally included drawings, glitter and even, one case, flashing lights.
Margaret Colliver was there when the town garage sale concept was born, part of a six-strong subcommittee that oversaw the initial years of the event before handing over the reins to the highly energetic and enthusiastic development group, which is – in this case anyway – headed up by Kellie Brennan.
“They do it much better than we ever did. The last couple of years have been a bit down, but the people are definitely back this year,” she said from the lawn of her Nihill St home, with daughter Heather and son-in-law Graeme surveying the street for potential buyers.
Margaret is one of a number of Tongala residents who have been a part of every sale since its inauguration in the early 2010s and her pride in her adopted town was obvious.
“I retired up here 20 years ago and I think the sale is fantastic. It certainly brings a lot of people to the town and I know places like the bakery and fish and chip shop do really well out of it,” she said.
The offerings at the Nihill St home were typically varied in their nature, Margaret and Heather offering their jewellery wares (which they also sell at markets in the region), while Graeme had a number of small engine machines lining the driveway.
Gooda St in Tongala became a bustling thoroughfare on garage sale day as hundreds of people descended on the town to find a bargain.
“The rider mower out the strip has attracted plenty of attention, a lot of people have told me they will be back,” he said.
Good-natured bartering remains a popular part of the garage sale and most prices are negotiable.
Aside from Margaret’s offerings, there were vintage fishing reels on offer at another site, a 500-litre water tank, a dishwasher, stamp albums and a three-seater pram.
Three Torney St families even combined resources to display everything from gold coin offerings to much more valuable antique items.
And for those of you that turned up after lunch time, maybe next year it will be worth joining the early birds who could be seen not long after 7am inspecting the venues before the official opening of the sale an hour later.
