ANOTHER sticky, melon-covered body slips and smacks into a rapidly expanding mound of ravaged fruit.
Thousands revel in the joyous destruction that is watermelon-skiing as the sweet, juicy flesh sprays like blood and the crowd shouts encouragement.
On the ground, roughly 1100 melons lay like carcases, the victims of watermelon-themed iron man, chariot racing and all manner of other quasi-sports with "multiple hazardous outcomes" where "injuries are likely" and melon madness is guaranteed.
The town's footy team and Bruce, the mechanical pulling machine, ensure the long, black, fruity slip-and-slide has a constant stream of willing victims in their watermelon clogs.
Welcome to Chinchilla, the self-styled melon capital of Australia, where it's more profitable to smash fruit than to eat it.
Across one weekend every second February, the population of this rural town two hours' north-west of Toowoomba swells from 5500 to up to 15,000 in an ode to all that is melon.
From Thursday to Saturday just gone, more than 700 visitors pitched tents or parked caravans in town, with many more staying in other accommodation nearby or driving in for the day.
According to organisers, revellers ate more than 800 melons and smashed another 1100, roughly 20-25 tonnes in total, all donated by local farmers.
There were complaints of food wastage, but for farmers who might have earned a few dollars a kilo before Christmas, and much less now, it was melon well spent.
Two years ago, economic consultant Reuben Lawrence helped the Western Downs Council calculate the Chinchilla Melon Festival's economic value to the town.
Using attendance numbers of roughly 15,000 combined with average spend per day and a few other figures, they came to an estimated $3.5 million of benefit the festival brings to town.
According to festival president Doug McNally, that means each tonne of fruit destroyed or handed out brings in more than $125,000.
"That's some of the most profitable fruit you'll ever see," said Terry O'Leary, whose family was one of first to grow seedless melons.
Clearly, not all of that money went back to the farmers (Club Hotel owner Justin Burn, who supplied the festival as well as doing a roaring trade himself, guessed roughly 150,000 tinnies helped lubricate the masses) but Mr O'Leary said it was more than worth it.
He said seedless melons had come to dominate the market so thoroughly that he would lose money if he tried to sell fruit with seeds.
But those long, heavy melons with the love-'em-or-hate-'em black pips (or a specially bred shrunken version of them) are still essential to the growing process.
Seedless melons, while sweeter, firmer and more convenient, can't reproduce, so farmers have to plant the pitted variety to pollinate them.
Usually placed at a ratio of about one in four, those melons are often so worthless that the only thing to do is leave them for the cattle.
The 34-year-old said he would lose about $100 a tonne if he tried to sell them in Brisbane, once picking, packing and shipping costs were taken into account.
"Nobody wants to buy them," he said.
"A lot of people say to me, 'Oh we'd buy them if we can find them but your independent fruit shops, they're not even really stocking them much anymore.
"It's a market, so if the customer doesn't buy it then you don't produce it."
Instead, why not turn them into watermelon skis? Why not smash them in a fruit-salad gladiator arena at the local school? Why not send tourists hurtling in their hundreds into great stacks of them?
Mr O'Leary said even the premium-quality, seedless fruit given away for free all Saturday afternoon would only fetch about 70 cents a kilogram ($700 a tonne) for growers if sold at this time of year.
"It's a cost to the grower obviously but they see it as an investment in their industry," festival president Mr McNally said.
"The net benefit outweighs the loss, I'm sure."
According to Tourism and Events Queensland, the Darling Downs town is the melon capital of Australia, producing about a quarter of the country's watermelons.
Australian Melon Association industry development manager Dianne Fullelove disputed that figure but said the promotion and publicity from the festival for the industry as a whole was invaluable.
