Before white settlement...

Traditional owners, the Barungam, once roamed freely over the entire region, from the Dividing Range in the north, to the far west.  The area around Chinchilla was a great meeting place for them before moving on to the Bunya Mountains feasts, and a number of ceremonial sites remain as evidence of their occupation.

Explorer Ludwig Leichhardt encountered the Barungam on his first expedition in 1844, and again in 1846 when his party camped at Charley’s Creek (named in honour of Leichhardt’s aboriginal guide Charley Fisher). He described them as tall, strong, healthy and helpful. With the arrival of the first settlers, their helpfulness turned to violent resistance, resulting in death and destruction from both sides. In 1912, those who had avoided slaughter by the Native Mounted Police and the settlers were forced to live at the Aboriginal settlement at Taroom, thereby removing them from their homeland forever.

The first settlers...

The first white settler, Matthew Goggs, was granted a 14-year lease over Chinchilla Station in 1848 and built a simple homestead on the property in 1850. In 1852, Goggs married Bridget Burke, reputedly the first white woman to arrive in the district. They had three children, none of whom survived, and the Goggs family left Chinchilla in 1857.

Margaret McGregor is officially recorded as the first white child born, in 1863. The family left shortly afterwards, but returned in 1881. Margaret married James Rider, the station manager at Wongongera and lived for 11 years in the slab hut now proudly on display at the Chinchilla Historical Museum.
A succession of “good seasons” in the 1850s and early 1860s led other landholders to take up properties adjoining the Chinchilla Station, but the severe droughts notably of 1866 and 1868 took their toll.

Undeterred, the intrepid pioneers came and conquered, stayed and prospered; their passage and progress marked by the ebb and flow of schools and community halls that dot the region, and the descendents of those early settlers who remain.

The beginning of Chinchilla town...

When bullock wagons could no longer reliably transport the produce, people looked to the railway line to open up the west. The rail link from Toowoomba to Dalby in 1868 was the first step, a link to Roma the next. The short bridge crossings needed over Charley’s and Rocky Creeks, made it the preferred route, and in June 1876 construction began on the Dalby to Charley’s Creek section of the rail line to Roma. The availability of water at Charley’s Creek made it an ideal place for a settlement. In August the San Francisco Hotel opened, and by early 1877, a lawless, shanty town of tents and public houses had sprung up along Charley’s Creek.

And the rest, as they say, is history...