Geelong Waterfront: The Revitalised Heart of the City

The Geelong waterfront, the 3-kilometre esplanade from the Cunningham Pier and the Carousel precinct at the north through the Eastern Beach to the Rippleside Park and the boat ramp precincts to the south, has been transformed over the three decades since the Geelong City Council and the State Government began the sustained investment in the public domain improvements, the restaurant and event facilities, the public art installations including the famous carousel and the bay figures, and the landscaping that has converted the post-industrial waterfront from the working port and industrial harbour edge into the public amenity and the entertainment destination that defines the Geelong resident's relationship to the bay and that the visitor uses as the primary public space experience of the city. The waterfront's transformation, sustained by the successive investment programs that the Waterfront Geelong masterplan has guided, is held up as one of the most successful examples of regional waterfront revitalisation in Australia.

The Eastern Beach, the swimming beach and the ocean pool complex at the centre of the Geelong waterfront that the Art Deco pool buildings from the 1930s and the contemporary landscaping of the beach surrounds create as the summer swimming destination for the Geelong community, provides the public bathing facility that the bay's protected water makes accessible for the recreational swimmer who wants the tidal sea pool or the bay swimming in the calm water that the enclosed bay provides without the ocean surf exposure that the Surf Coast beaches require. The Art Deco pool buildings, heritage-listed and recently restored, provide the architectural character that connects the contemporary waterfront to the early twentieth century investment in the civic bathing facilities that the Geelong City Council made for the working-class population whose access to the healthy outdoor bathing the pool was created to provide.

The Cunningham Pier, the restored heritage pier that extends into the bay at the northern end of the waterfront and that the Pier restaurant and the event venue have occupied as the premium waterfront dining and event destination, provides the hospitality anchor that the northern waterfront precinct uses to sustain the evening economy and the event market that the Geelong waterfront supports for the corporate function, the wedding, and the public event that the pier's water setting and the heritage building create as the premium Geelong event venue. The pier's position extending into the bay creates the 360-degree water view that the land-based venues cannot replicate and that sustains the Cunningham Pier's premium status as the most distinctive event venue in the Geelong hospitality market.

The public art of the Geelong waterfront, including the distinctive bay figures of Jan Mitchell's sculpture series that populate the foreshore with the historical and the whimsical characters of the Geelong story, and the carousel at the southern waterfront that the children and the families use as the amusement that the heritage carousel has sustained across the decades since the 1892 original carousel was installed and that the refurbished carousel maintains as the signature attraction of the family waterfront experience, create the public art layer that makes the Geelong waterfront a cultural destination as well as the recreational and the dining destination that the cafes and the restaurants sustain. The bay figures' storytelling, weaving the history of the Geelong settlement and the maritime and the industrial heritage into the sculptural programme that the waterfront presents, creates the outdoor museum of the Geelong story that the visitor encounters in the walk along the foreshore.

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