Looks good enough to eat, doesn’t it? Someone fetch the iced tea.
The tiny Queensland town of Chinchilla has just become Australia’s newest big thing. Literally. It’s now the home of a really, really big slice of watermelon.
As the country’s melon capital (is anyone else fighting for that title?), Chinchilla took out a nation-wide ‘Big Thing’ competition from travel site Wotif. The prize was the erection of a giant something: in Glen Innes it was a Big Kilt, in Mittagong it was a Big Tulip, and in QLD’s own Kingaroy it was the Big Peanut. Chinchilla won narrowly with their Big Melon.
Melon-related stats coming at you. The Melon is over three metres tall and nine metres wide. It’s been installed outside the town’s Visitor Centre.
Chinchilla’s annual Melon Fest is actually a lot of fun, regularly pulling over 15,000 global visitors. Unfortunately you’ve missed the boat on this year’s Fest (it ran in February), but keep an eye out next year for melon ‘skiing’, melon-eating and the slightly hazardous melon ‘bungee fling’.
Australia’s now infamous cult of ‘Big Things’ is less of a joke than you might think. There are 150 of them dotted around the country now. Several, like Cairns’ Big Scout Hat, have been Heritage Listed, and the sculptures often mean big tourism revenue for out-of-the-way regional towns: Coffs Harbour’s Big Banana drew 140,000 visitors in 2014, but there are worries about a proposed government bypass leeching visitors away from Coffs.
Want to check out the Big Melon? Chinchilla is a 3.5-hour drive from Brisbane. Just swing a right on the A2 at Toowoomba.
Need something closer to home? Here's five awesome things to do in Brisbane this week.
Image credit: Wotif