Above: The Prince of Wales Hotel.
What to do in Geelong a century and more back? How was a soul to keep themselves appropriately entertained, occupied, clothed or recreated?
Maintaining body and soul in a reasonable constitution was as considered a matter then as today.
And just as now, no shortage of wheelers and dealers were on hand to offer, furnish or purvey a multitude of essential elements to sate those consumer demands.
Health, travel, dining, physical, sporting endeavours, boozing – all were more than adequately catered for by Geelong’s mercantile fraternity. And promoted in no uncertain fashion: in your face, with effusive, grandiose, hyperbolic and exuberant claims; or more gently, with solicitous, sometimes even gently admonishing, invitations.
Place was as silly about cycling back then as it is now. A “favourite resort for cyclists”, as the Geelong and District Illustrated Guide of 1905 tells us, offering no less than 16 treadly routes across the peninsula, out to Gnarwarre, Anakie, and further afield to Inverleigh and Winchelsea, Anglesea, Aireys, Lorne.
The Albert Coffee Place and Mack’s Hotel.
Little competing motor traffic and no devilish Challambra Crescent or Queens Park hill routes. Riders are even urged to dismount going downhill to Batesford, unless they’re experts.
This encyclopaedic parochial guide provides seaside coach fares from five to 14 shillings to Clifton Springs, Torquay, Barwon Heads, Ocean Grove, Anglesea and Aireys Inlet. ’Busses, viz omnibuses, cost a regulation threepence while hansom cabs are anything up to a quid and a half for a 12-hour engagement.
Dickson’s photography and Western Beach.
No time for a beach trip? Try the Western Sea Baths, “replete with every requisite to make sea bathing enjoyable and invigorating”. Easy access from “all the principal hotels, coffee palaces, and private boarding houses”. Just fourpence or three bob a dozen with fresh water, showers and towels thrown in.
Over at Eastern Beach, you had hot and cold, with an electric light at night. “Highly recommended” by the medical faculty, too.
Just up the hill, places like the redoubtable Bay View Hotel offered hot and cold baths and electric lights, too.
Gheringhap St, Geelong Sea Bathing.
The Prince of Wales, similarly equipped, was catnip for out-of-towner woolbuyers, merchants, sportsmen and squatters. You might suspect especially squatters. Likewise, Mack’s with its 46 bedrooms, nine bathrooms and a fernery.
Spoiled for choice, for sure. Anything needed carrying about, you could grab Blakiston & Co to book the best steamers to all parts of the world, take care of all luggage, deliver parcels and goods, remove, store or pack stuff, insure pianos, furniture and the likes. Even had a cheap parcel service to the Old Dart.
Coffee places weren’t just about coffee. The Albert, at the Malop-Yarra corner, offered “splendid accommodation”, hot/cold baths, sitting rooms, reading, smoking and billiard rooms, and the leading daily papers.
R.N. Messervy & Co’s motor launch Victoria proffered the “largest and fastest motor on the bay” with summer trips to Avalon, North Shore and Clifton Springs. And “fishing, shooting and picnic parties catered for”.
T.A. Dickson had the latest and greatest in cameras for tourists, along with plates, films and papers. Develop, print and enlarge for you, too. Lockwood’s would “grasp the shadow”, whatever that is, and snap your baby, your portrait or your wedding pics for you, reflecting “art in every detail”.
So, no aversion to diversions among the captains of commerce, it’s fair to say. And certainly not within the retail therapy theatre of fashion.
Geelong’s “busiest draper”, Malop Street’s The Colosseum, was “the grandest sight in Geelong”, with “the largest variety in Victoria” and the “best value in the Commonwealth”. Sam Jacobs, around the corner on Moorabool, boasted a similarly “enormous stock”.
Not to be deterred, nearby Weddell & Ritches vowed “no baits” or “subterfuge in advertising” and the biggest Manchester variety in town. Likewise ready-to-wear blouses, skirts and costumes, biggest stock of dress goods, laces, ribbons, hosiery and gloves and, of course, the lowest prices.
More of the same at Bright & Hitchcocks’ Emporium of Fashion, at Fitzgerald & Meakin, Brown & Bossence and Hindell & Tweeddale.
Yep, didn’t need to fuss so much about victuals, accommodations or tearing about. Fashion, that armour required to survive the reality of everyday life, was just the ticket. Then as now.
And if that doesn’t keep body and soul together, what does?
This story appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 23 March 2026
