I'm in Chinchilla in Queensland's Western Downs region
on Barunggam Country
and I'm here for the Chinchilla Melon Festival,
a left-of-centre celebration of all things watermelon.
I first visited this biennial event 14 years ago.
It was started by struggling melon farmers
during a bad drought in the '90s
to help revitalise the community spirit of the town they love.
But before I show you around this year's festival,
I'm catching up with Darryl and Terry O'Leary,
father and son watermelon farmers,
who I first met back then.
They've been growing out here for a seriously long time.
I started as a 12-year-old kid working for the Dickman family.
So I've been 52-odd years picking and packing melons.
Wow. And how long has this farm been in the family?
We've been growing melons here since about 1986.
How's that feel as a timeline? Oh, going pretty quick, I think.
Darryl is one of the founding members of the festival.
He's recently retired from farming,
but he's still on hand to help out.
These days, Terry and his wife Aja handle the day-to-day operations.
She's, you know, come back here with me from overseas
quite a number of years ago.
And just, yeah, picked up absolutely everything
and knows just as much as me these days,
so keeps me on my toes, which is always a good thing.
Yeah. (LAUGHS) Yeah.
It's a family affair.
It's great to have our kids out here.
You know, they're getting to the age now, teenagers,
they can come out, they can learn just like I did at the same age.
The girls do all sorts of jobs around the farm
including packing and weighing.
High five!
Ow!
Hopefully, they'll be able to carry on the tradition.
You know, I can feel the heat on these as they're rubbing past me,
like from being in the sun.
Yeah, melons are a desert plant, watermelons.
A lot of people forget that.
They do love, you know, a free-draining soil, they love heat.
They just like a good, you know, drink of rain every now and then.
They can poke away and do things that nature's always intended.
This region is unique
because local rainfall is about 700mm a year.
This is an amazing bit of tech that's going on here,
but it's got to be run by humans.
No robots yet,
so you can see out there we got the four guys down there picking away.
Then we have the three ladies up here that are packing out
and doing quality checks.
We just poke away with that with a tractor driver
and then ourselves and then some other staff
just help ferry the trailers in and out.
What exactly do you grow here?
Yeah, so these are all predominantly seedless watermelons.
The best way to describe the seedless watermelon is it's a mule.
So you get a horse watermelon and a donkey watermelon,
those are hand-pollinated
and then the seed that's formed
is actually what we're growing here now.
We still need to have your normal seeded watermelons in there
because, as the seedless watermelon is a mule,
we need male pollen from a normal seeded melon
to be able to go to generate that female flower into a fruit.
So the seeded versus the seedless, what's your position on that?
Seedless every day of the week.
Can't sell a pollinated melon, a seeded melon.
Nobody really wants to buy them anymore.
If you grow a good seedless,
they're crisp, they're red,
they can be sweeter than any seeded melon.
So when it gets planted, what's the timeline
on a seedling through to one of these babies?
We'd be looking at around that nine-week time scale
from when it's planted to when we harvest.
It depends on the time of the year, sorry, I should clarify.
Earlier on when we're planting,
it's about three months,
but these ones here that we've planted,
a good peak summer and they're ready to go now.
Across acres and acres of flat green vines,
they're currently sending out truckloads a day.
How long does it take, for example,
to get a melon like this from Chinchilla to the customer?
This will all be going out on a truck at 2:00 today
and it'll be hitting a major retail distribution centre
about 2:00, 3:00 in the morning.
From there, it'll get sent out to all the stores
and it'll be cut by their staff and put on the shelf.
It's such big sky country here.
It is. It's beautiful and flat.
Darryl and Terry have a few tips to share
for those of you starting on your melon journey
for the first time.
Mid 30 degrees is the perfect sort of daytime temperature
for watermelons.
Depending on your soil type, don't over-water them.
Make them work hard early so you get a good big root system
and they won't need as much water later on.
You know, I'd really encourage anyone if you want to give it a go
make sure that you've got plenty of space
and some really good free-draining soil as well.
When you've got a melon growing,
it can be really hard to tell from the outside when it's ripe.
But fortunately, Darryl's got a foolproof technique
that he swears by.
By tapping with me hand, with the open hand,
not your...not your fist like a lot of people do.
So that melon there, he wouldn't be far off the job, I wouldn't think.
So...
That's it.
And then this one. Yeah, he's green as.
Oh, yeah! That's a much higher pitch.
Yeah.
Mum and Dad were the first people
to successfully grow seedless watermelons in Australia
back when I was a wee little kid.
So, you, uh, you reckon you're off your L plates?
You're never off your L plates in this game.