Geelong’s CBD in 1905 was considerably easier to negotiate, traffic-wise, than today’s city centre – choked as it is by gridlocked vehicles, shrunken lanes, expensive vegetation, inadequate parking and traffic lights.
Broad generous streets easily accommodated the horse-drawn coaches and omnibuses, hansom cabs and bullock drays that constituted transport and freight cartage of the day.
Shank’s pony and the occasional bicycle or ageing velocipede were the real order of the day for the trim-looking townsfolk, smartly acquitted in their suits, hats, crinolines and parasols surveying well-stocked shopfronts – a far cry from the vacant, grubby stores and mall rats now confronting visitors.
Today, even the once-vibrant Market Square which rendered so many of those handsome old shops redundant is sinking into a retail relapse; victim of online sales, poor access, inadequate policing, a general lack of city ambience – and, ironically, competition from a bigger operator across Malop Street.
Photographer Robert Vere Scott captured the CBD back at a time when traffic lights stood in the centre of intersections, providing illumination rather than direction. When verandahs and balconies offered shade and refuge from the elements and an open-air, arcade-style retail therapy option. A time when bluestone gutters, cobblestone crossings, rotundas, fountains, statues, seating and multi-ribbed telegraph poles peppered the urban landscape.
Geelong waterfront 1905.
Scott’s elevated view of the Moorabool-Malop intersection, well worn and in the State Library of Victoria’s image collection, presents an overcast Geelong on a relatively quiet, autumn day with lengthy shadows cast by a low northern sun.
The SLV description describes the image as an “elevated view of street with horse drawn coaches and other vehicles; double storey corner building on left with shuttered windows on upper floor, the name Victoria Hotel in stone between floors, possibly a double storey hotel with wrought iron upper verandah on far left, shops and porches over footpath on right”.
Corio Bay in the moonlight.
Murray Street, Colac.
Scott’s Lake Colac.
Princes Bridge, Geelong.
Melbourne CBD.
Rowing club, Bendigo.
The photographer turned his lens to Geelong and district various times, capturing silhouettes of the waterfront’s tall shipping timber, a glistening night harbour, utilitarian wharves, sheds, sailing craft and smoky new-fangled steamers.
He captured similar moody shots at Barwon Heads and Colac featuring boats, jetties and bridges and moonlit cloudy skies. Street scenes he catalogued at Colac present a very Australian fin de siècle era of carriages, suited and hatted cyclists, handsome classical architecture and roadside horse ordure.
Born in Brisbane in 1877 to a Scottish storekeeper father and an Australian mother, Scott lived in Broken Hill and Port Pirie before venturing into Victoria between 1903 and 1906 then later to WA and eventually moving to San Francisco in the US.
He created large panoramic shots working across Geelong, Bendigo, Melbourne, Sydney, Kalgoorlie, Brisbane, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in New Zealand, and in San Francisco.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 24 March 2025.
