This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 26.7409° S, 150.6295° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Chinchilla grows a very large share of Australia's melons, and holds a festival built on throwing them.
The Chinchilla Melon Festival runs every second February and includes melon skiing – competitors towed across a field standing in hollowed melon halves – along with melon bungee, seed spitting and an ironman event. It began in the 1990s partly as a way to use unsaleable fruit, and it has become one of the better-known regional festivals in Queensland.
So the sculpture beside the Warrego Highway near the visitor centre is backed by something real. The Western Downs district produces melons on a scale that supplies a substantial part of the national market, and the town's identity genuinely rests on them.
A watermelon is also the best-designed produce subject available. Green rind, white pith, red flesh, black seeds: a three-colour target legible at highway speed, which is why the crop turns up repeatedly in this catalogue – the paired melon and pumpkin at Gumlu on the Bruce Highway, the produce-market landmark at Wantirna South in Melbourne.
Chinchilla's other identity is less photogenic. This is the centre of the Surat Basin coal seam gas field, and the district has been reshaped over the past two decades by wells, pipelines and workforce camps. A monument to melons is the town holding on to the thing it was before.
The sculpture's maker, dimensions and installation date are not recorded, and no approved source text is attached.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The sculpture sits beside the Warrego Highway near the Chinchilla Visitor Information Centre.
ACCESS
Navigate to the Big Melon / Chinchilla Visitor Information Centre precinct on the Warrego Highway. Current Queensland and Western Downs material places the Big Melon beside the Visitor Information Centre and confirms easy off-street parking for vehicles of all sizes plus RV parking. Use that visitor parking on arrival; the stored site point is not asserted to be the parking-area centroid.
