Chinchilla Area

Chinchilla holds a genuinely strange piece of history: in the 1920s, farmers introduced the cactoblastis moth from South America specifically to destroy the invasive prickly pear choking local farmland, and it worked. That story is told at the town's museum, alongside the first-ever Qantas ticket, issued for the airline's original Longreach-to-Cloncurry flight, and steam-era transport relics. Chinchilla also calls itself the melon capital of Australia, once producing a quarter of the country's watermelons, and the biennial Melon Festival still proves the point with races and stunts built around the fruit. It's a small town with an unusually good collection of stories.