Above: Barwon Grange, Geelong
Capturing Geelong’s built environment in image form has been the precinct of various artists, dating back to the 1840s and the earliest days of European settlement.
Heritage oils, water colours, pencil sketches, drafting plans and elevations have captured the region’s high-end and vernacular architecture in great, often exquisite, detail.
Geelong Gallery hosts a fine collection including works by Walter Withers, Eugene Von Guerard, William Tibbits, Wilbraham Liardet, Lillie Berthon, Alexander Webb, Samuel Mossman, Alex Gaul and William Duke.
These artists documented streets, landscapes, bay and coastal sites, indigenous encampments; creating a valuable repository of the city and its surrounds predating the arrival of photography to the far-flung Antipodean outpost of the British empire.
As the advent of the camera took root, artistic records were superseded in quantity and accuracy, if not always in quality.
With today’s AI creating new benchmarks, if not always in accuracy either, it is refreshing to look back at artistic efforts that have since shared popularity with photography, and video footage too.
Kardinia House, Geelong; steam flour mill, Portarlington
The Rigby publishing house’s treasure trove of sketchbooks from the 1960 and ’70s captured heritage structures around the country, several of them posting Geelong and southwest region heritage properties in simple but engaging black and white pencil, pen and wash.
Barwon bridge, Winchelsea; Pacific Hotel, Lorne
Among them you’ll find the National Trust’s Barwon Grange with its pretty dormer windows along the Barwon River, its Austin dynasty Winchelsea pile, Barwon Park, and Portarlington’s four-storey steam flour mill – along with the trust’s first landscape preservation victory and ownership, Camperdown’s Mount Sugarloaf.
Geelong jewels include the old Telegraph office, Customs House, Christ Church and St Mary’s, the old Stony Pier, Lunan House, the Fyansford paper mill, Kardinia House, Osborne House and Corio Villa, along with more recent fixtures such as Eastern Beach, Geelong Gallery, the Johnstone Park bandstand and The Gordon.
Purrumbete, Camperdown; Cape Otway lighthouse
Further afield, Rigby captures homesteads such as Coragulac, Ingleby and Purrumbete, hotels, lighthouses, schools, churches, stone bridges and more.
Mount Sugarloaf, Camperdown
The Geelong Sketchbook, Western District Sketchbook and National Trust Victoria Sketchbook are just three of 175 titles Rigby produced between 1967 and 1982. Second-hand bookstores and online sales platforms occasionally have copies for sale.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 13 July 2026.
