Geelong sits on Corio Bay, the western pocket of Port Phillip, about 75 kilometres south-west of Melbourne. On a clear day you can see Melbourne's towers shimmering across the water from the higher streets. Europeans surveyed the site in 1838, just three weeks after Melbourne itself. The town's fortunes turned in 1851, when gold was found at Ballarat inland. Suddenly Geelong was the nearest port to one of the richest goldfields on Earth, and prospectors poured through it — its population leaping from a few thousand to more than 20,000 in a handful of years. The gold built fine streets and grand buildings, but it also moved on. As Ballarat and Bendigo swelled, Melbourne's critics sniffed that Geelong had become a 'Sleepy Hollow,' a port that had missed its moment.

Geelong answered by building. Through the late 19th and 20th centuries it became one of Australia's great manufacturing centres: wool scoured and spun here, paper milled at Fyansford, ships loaded at the docks. In 1925 Ford established its Australian engine works in the city, and for decades the rhythm of shift whistles set the rhythm of Geelong life. The National Wool Museum, housed in a handsome 1872 bluestone store, still tells that story — the lanolin smell of the fleece, the clatter of the looms, the fortunes made on the backs of sheep. But manufacturing in Australia could not hold. Ford ended engine production, and by 2017 every car plant in the country had closed, taking thousands of Geelong jobs with them.

What came next surprised the doubters. Geelong turned to its bay. The Eastern Beach foreshore, restored from its 1930s heyday, became the heart of a reborn waterfront, complete with a carousel and a promenade of cheerful bollards painted as the figures of the city's past. Deakin University planted a campus on the water; healthcare and education replaced the assembly lines. In 2017 UNESCO named Geelong a City of Design, recognising a long local tradition of making and shaping. Today it is one of Australia's fastest-growing cities, its gentrified inner suburbs and rising apartment towers a long way from Sleepy Hollow.

No account of Geelong survives contact with a local without mention of the football. The Geelong Football Club, the Cats, was founded in 1859, making it the second-oldest club in the Australian Football League and one of the oldest football clubs anywhere in the world. On match days at Kardinia Park, more than 20,000 fill the stands — extraordinary loyalty for a city of this size. Beyond the footy, Geelong nurtures a serious arts life, from the renowned Back to Back Theatre, an internationally acclaimed company of performers with disability, to the festivals that fill Pako Festa each February. The city is also the launch point for two of Victoria's great escapes: the Bellarine Peninsula's beaches and wineries to the east, and the Great Ocean Road unspooling to the west.