The Cusp of Change

In this episode of Stories of Geelong, we travel back 190 years to read one of the earliest descriptions of the Geelong area. This topic chose itself. This podcast began its life as a talk to the Ocean Grove & Barwon Heads Rotary Club in February 2026. The events it describes took place exactly one hundred and ninety years ago that week, almost to the day, on the very place we had gathered.

That coincidence offered a moment of pause — a chance to look back and imagine this place as it stood then, on the edge of irreversible change. The account we follow was written in 1836 by Joseph Tice Gellibrand, and it remains one of the earliest surviving written records of the region. His words, and the journey they describe, form the backbone of this episode. You can read Gellibrand’s Diary here on our website.

But this isn’t just a historical reading. These events ask us to think about what it means to be Australian today. They remind us that the landscapes we move through, the names we use, and the histories we inherit all come from somewhere. We should be engaged and willing to know about them. And they ask us to consider the responsibilities we owe — to people whose connection to this country is ancient, and to the wider community that has grown here since.

It is reminder about the importance of understanding how we got here, and what that understanding might ask of us now.