St Andrews Community Market on the rural fringe of Melbourne has been going strong for over 40 years. People come to this weekly market to shop, eat food, drink Chai, listen to music and catch up with friends.

The goal of this project is to print a book that is a collection of stories and images of the people at market and celebrates the everyday narrative and the importance of sharing, listening and connecting to others. 



The idea for this project came about as Jo was completing her Honours project for an Anthropology degree and Arrayah was studying photography.  We discovered a shared interest in personal narrative in both the written and visual form. This project began as a discussion over a cup of Chai at market. Sitting and enjoying the atmosphere of market and discussing our love of narrative we had one of those light bulb moments!  Why not combine our skills and talents and celebrate what it is we love about market so much?

After almost two years of 'working' each week at market we are ready to present our completed project. We have conducted interviews, both long and short, heard and recorded some amazing life stories, driven to all sorts of interesting places to visit some of the fabulous producers at market, and taken hundreds of photographs. The result will be a coffee table book approximately 210mm x 250mm, 176 pages in length, printed in full colour on matte paper.

We have chosen the book to be printed in Melbourne at Printgraphics, a company that cares about the environment and makes positive choices in both inks, papers, waste management, water usage etc. Whilst we could have found a cheaper price by going offshore we believe this choice reflects the ethos by which we have undertaken the project and that of the market in general

We offer you the opportunity to support us by pre-buying a copy of the book. This will allow us to print the book at a lower cost per unit and enable us to sell it to you at a special price of $40 per book.

Follow our page on Facebook for videos, blogs, photos and more about the book. 

Please browse the following low resolution sample pages of the book.

We need $17,000 to get the book printed and distributed.

We are hoping to raise the full amount through this campaign but have set the target at $10,000.

If we reach $10,000 but don't get the full $17,000 we will fund the rest ourselves.


 

We are confident with our ability to produce a high quality product through both our own work and our choice of printer. 

We are operating on a tight timeline because we want to have the book available prior to Christmas. This will mean a busy few weeks distributing the book to all the potential buyers. We don't foresee any problems with this, just hard work but it should also be fun and satisfying. We cannot guarantee delivery before xmas of books that require postage although we will try our best. Come on Aussie Post! If you are in Melbourne we suggest the pickup option by driving out to the market and experiencing it for yourself.......and then Meet me at Market!

Getting enough people to pre-buy a product they haven't seen could be a challenge. We are going to use social media and also have market stalls to encourage people to pre-order a copy of the book. We will do a media release for the local newspapers. We believe people will see the quality of the finished project through viewing printed page samples and online images of the book.