Chinchilla was first officially recorded by Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt in 1844 during one of his expeditions out west, and there is some debate over where the name ‘Chinchilla’ came from. There is a town named Chinchilla in Spain, or a small rodent called a Chinchilla (the fur of which was a valuable commodity - and early settlers in the Chinchilla area trapped possums for their fur). However, most agree that it came from the local Aboriginal word for the Cypress Pine, Jinchilla. Local legend says that when the application for land was made in 1846 by the first white settler, Matthew Goggs, the Sydney Registrations Office changed the name from Jinchilla to Chinchilla.
However, Chinchilla was officially surveyed and established in 1877. Its main industries were agriculture, timber and dairy. Today the main industry is agriculture, and Chinchilla is famous for its melons (which are delicious) – the town supplies approximately 25% of Australia’s melons.
In the 1890’s, the prickly pear pandemic arrived in Chinchilla and everything they tried to remove the pear failed. In 1925 the government introduced Cactoblastis cactorum, a moth from South America. It lays its eggs on the plant and when the larva hatches it eats its way through the plant, eventually killing it – it was so effective that it brought the pandemic under control after just one year. The Boonarga Cactoblastis Hall was built, and is the only building in the southern hemisphere to honour an insect.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Chinchilla
Where To Stay & Best Hotels in Chinchilla - updated May 2024
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Chinchilla Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
