Chinchilla Before CSG

New well pad near Chinchilla

Karen Auty moved to the town of Chinchilla in Queensland’s Darling Downs in 2007. She was familiar with area as relatives lived there. It was a wealthy town surrounded by multimillion dollar cropping farms, watermelon farms and feed lots for beef cattle. The CSG industry was just starting but was not evident.

‘I moved to Chinchilla because house prices were affordable, the schools had a good name and it was a clean, tidy town with good people and clean country air. It had twelve churches and three pubs and a population of around 4,000. It’s the Bible belt, which is good and bad, but the good side is that you have neighbours you can trust. 

I bought a great little house, which has the best water supply in town, an aquifer of incredibly good quality. The bore has been down for 30 years and through seven year droughts it has never gone dry and I’ve never had a draw down. We left vehicles out the front of our house with the keys in and nothing would ever be knocked off. I never locked my house, even when I went away for holidays. Chinchilla was a quiet, peaceful and safe place to live.

Looking back Karen realises that there were warning signs that something was going to change. A report by the Local Government Reform Commission advised that small councils should amalgamate and not be divided into wards. Few objections were made. Five local government areas, including Chinchilla and Dalby, were amalgamated to form the Western Downs Regional Council in 2008.

‘When CSG came knocking and approvals were needed it was easier for the mining companies to knock off one council rather than approach five,’ said Karen.