There’ll be melons at your feet, in your hair and on the streets soon with the highly anticipated Chinchilla Melon Festival back on again this year.
The weekend of February 13 to 16 will celebrate melons and a community gathering to enjoy free activities, food, music and a great family atmosphere.
This year’s Melon Festival will have a street parade, markets, beach party, free family activities such as farm tours, an arena full of melon-related activities such as Melon Skiing and Melon Bungee, and more.
There will be a choice of more than 200 stalls of handmade crafts and local food vendors on offer.
Australian music icon Kate Ceberano will perform on the Saturday evening of the festival.
The Chinchilla Melon Festival committee is proud to offer an event that is free to attend.
The biennial event is now in its 31st year, borne from a concept a local melon grower presented in the early ’90s.
At the time, Chinchilla was growing a lot of watermelons in the district.
Chinchilla Melon festival vice president Darryl O’Leary said the few growers left in the region got together and grew an extra crop of long melons for the festival.
He said they used melons to gather the community together and put on a great event.
“We had 23 growers here in the mid ’90s now we have three,” Mr O’Leary said.
“The 2010/2011 floods put a knife in the operations, and we’ve tried to get back up since then but it’s a pretty hard business to be in.
“We’re getting pushed out of the market and years ago it was easy but now it’s hard to be a grower, competing with big operations and here we’re family operations and it becomes a pretty big job.“
Mr O’Leary laid his first crop of melons in 1988 at Paramagh Farming and now runs it alongside his son.
He has long been involved with the festival and commits to donating melons each time because it’s a significant event for the region.
The Chinchilla Melon Festival is the biggest event in the Western Downs, attracting more than 15,000 people to the town and surrounds over the three days.
“We strive and strive for this event, we really focus on making sure whoever wants to be involved can be involved and can get something out of it,“ Mr O’Leary said.
“The people it brings to our region is an influx into the area and it is a big drawcard for the community with most of the places in town booked out for the weekend.
“Every community organisation in Chinchilla has the opportunity to get in and do something and make some money out of it.“
The Chinchilla Melon Festival is run by a volunteer committee, with some being involved since the very first meeting.
“We built another pulling machine so we will have three (watermelon skiing lines going this year,“ Mr O’Leary said.
“It’s electronically driven, and pulls you along on 50 metres of plastic, if you can stand up.
“We used to do the skiing by hand back in the day, but you couldn’t do much else after that.
“We love it, it’s great for the town, the only place in the world you can go melon skiing is in Chinchilla.”
