Geelong, or Sleepy Hollow

I have a feeling this Geelong trip will be the last of my journeys to Victorian country towns. After Bendigo and Ballarat I've had continuously diminishing returns. I've seen the supposed best of the state and felt no desire to remain in those places for more than a day. Well, no one would pretend that Geelong was an exciting city. It's chief attraction, surely, is its close proximity to Melbourne. Still, the city has an attractive foreshore and a decent art gallery, which is where I spent the early afternoon. The Geelong Art Gallery had an exhibition of works by Nicholas Chevalier, a Swiss born artist who travelled to Australia in the 1860s and painted landscapes, and it was this that I came to see. At first Chevalier reproduced European landscapes in an Australian setting, but after some years he began to portray Australia, its particular light, flora and land formations, in a more accurate, authentic manner. It was Chevalier who first popularised the Australian landscape in art, a subject previously ignored by European-born artists, many of whom appeared to have ceaselessly pined for their homelands.

When I arrived at the gallery I stood in a line behind some old people who were unable to decide exactly which novelties and souvenirs they wanted to purchase. After they were done I approached the counter, where a young woman gave me a puzzled look and asked – rather cautiously I thought – why I was standing there. I told her I wanted a ticket to the Nicholas Chevalier exhibition. She replied that there was no need to line up, no tickets, and that entry was by gold coin donation. I felt slightly stupid to have stood there for so long.

The exhibition itself was a pleasant diversion, but after a while it began to bore me. I think European art galleries have ruined the Australian experience for me. Anyway, I soon left the gallery and walked around the streets of Geelong almost at random. The streets are wide, and lined with innumerable 19^th century buildings, a handful a Edwardian remains, and even a couple of brutalist government offices. The poor public transport means the city is choked with cars; walking seemed the best option. I visited the foreshore and had lunch and a beer, then, unsure of what to do, I took the train back to Melbourne. Once on the train I began a conversation with a young Somali woman who had moved to Australia to be with her husband, a man she had met in Kenya. She was on an excursion to Geelong with some fellow English language students from a local private college. Learning English, she told me, was exciting for her because she had only been at school for two years in her childhood, before war made formalised learning impossible. Later we talked about the vast nature of the Australian continent. She asked if Geelong was still in the state of Victoria, and whether Adelaide was much further down the train line. About another 13 hours, I told her. She was, she said, born in Mogadishu, but had grown up in relatively peaceful Kenya. She told me the best thing about Australia was not having to be afraid all the time – especially not having to be afraid of the police. It took her a few months, she said, to get used to the idea that a policeman was someone you could trust to help you. In Kenya, she said, when you saw the police you ran away as quickly as you could.