Victoria's second city and the gateway to the Great Ocean Road — where Geelong sits at the head of Corio Bay and the 85 hand-painted individually characterised bollards along the 2 km Waterfront promenade (each representing a real person from Geelong's local history — goldrush wharfies, colonial-era pilots, Indigenous figures, football heroes) make it one of the most personalised public spaces in Australia, Eastern Beach (Geelong's city beach — an enclosed tidal swimming area with a 1930s Art Deco rotunda and a waterslide that has operated since 1931) is 10 minutes' walk from the central station, the Great Ocean Road begins 30 km south at Torquay (the surf capital of Victoria) with the Twelve Apostles 3 hours further southwest, and Geelong's GMHBA Stadium — Australia's largest regional AFL stadium — is home to the Geelong Cats, winners of the 2022 AFL premiership by the largest margin in grand final history
Geelong (280,000 city; 300,000 greater area) is Victoria's second-largest city and the second-largest urban area in Australia outside a state capital — a port city on the western shore of Port Phillip Bay, 75 km southwest of Melbourne. Geelong's wool and grain trade in the colonial era made it temporarily larger than Melbourne in 1856; today it is a post-industrial city reinventing itself around tourism (Great Ocean Road gateway), a growing health and education sector, and the Deakin University presence.
Geelong's name comes from the Wadawurrung people's 'Jillong' — often translated as 'land' or 'cliffs.' The bay's rich fish, shellfish, and coastal grassland resources sustained the Wadawurrung people for tens of thousands of years before European contact. John Batman's infamous 1835 land deal — in which he claimed to have purchased 600,000 acres from Kulin nation elders at Corio Bay for blankets, axes, and mirrors — was immediately voided by Governor Bourke as having no legal standing, establishing instead the doctrine that only the Crown could extinguish indigenous title. Geelong briefly sur…