The Chinny Charge is up and running again

Aslan Shand

He won it in 1967, celebrating the official opening of the Mullumbimby Pool, but there is ‘no way’ he is running it again.

However, Colin Creighton will be taking on the official duty of opening this year’s race to the top of Mount Chincogan, fondly known as the ‘Chinny Charge’, as it gets going again after a 16- year hiatus.

It originally started as a fundraiser for the Mullumbimby Swimming Pool and the first race was run in 1960, when Colin came in second.

He won the second race in 1967.

‘The year I won it I was cutting cane at Wooyung,’ said Colin. ‘I was pretty fit because of the cane cutting, but I had to run barefoot because a few days before I’d cut my foot and had four stitches in it.’

Mary, Colin’s wife, also pointed out that ‘He played football and had done running at school in the cross- country. We lived on the other side of the mountain so he would disappear out the back and run up the mountain for a bit of practice.’

Both Colin and Mary reminisced about the old Mullum Pool that had been on the Brunswick River near the Mullum industrial estate. It’s the location where you can now launch boats into the river.

According to Reg Byrnes’s book, Mullumbimby Happenings, in the 1920s two pontoons were built on either side of the Brunswick River.

Colin said, ‘That is where we would have our swimming carnivals when I was at Mullum High.’

During the early 1930s, a 30ft diving tower was built on the other side of the river as well as smaller diving pool. This was dismantled in the late 1930s after a major flood weakened the poles.

Further flooding damaged the pontoons in the river and, in 1949, a group came together to work towards a chlorinated learn-to-swim pool in Mullumbimby.

Colin is thrilled to be opening the new Chincogan and thinks that ‘It’s terrific’ that the run is starting again after all these years.

There will be a limit of 500 entries to the run, including both the adults’ and children’s runs. It will start, as it almost always has, from the Mullumbimby Swimming Pool and return to the finish line at the post office.

Organisers would like to remind everyone that the run takes place across private property and that it will only be open for the run on Saturday September 16. The route is not open to the public at any other time.