Promoting Geelong

from w
What were the graphic designers or City Hall really thinking when they designed the 2011 calendar with old photographs of days gone by and the promotion poster of Eastern Beach in the 1920s? Okay history is interesting but not very pictureque - okay it is to commemorate the 100th anniverary of the proclamation of Geelong as a city, but the photos are dull. Maybe used as cameos with colourful present-day photos of the same sites might be better. Actually the vibrancy of the city as opposed to 'history' or 'streets and buildings' is in the people - the children playing sports, a grandfather watching a grandchild at ease with a computer, the Deakin and Gordon students in their super new libraries, the men and women doing volunteer work such as Rotary DIK, lovers barely tasting the food in a restaurant as they look at one another, families strolling in the Botanical Gardens, children at one of the splendid swimming pools or a seniors group water-exercising, tourists touching a bollard or two, the kindness to the elderly in some nursing homes, the interaction between nurse and patient. Pictures of people going about their work or recreation. These are aspects of the good life in Geelong, not cement, not buildings, not shops.

And then again, the picture being used to promote Geelong is one of those old railway posters of the 1920s - Eastern Beach without the current swimming pools. Why? It's a pretty picture but I don't think this does justice to what our city is about. Of course focussing on the centre of Geelong is only part of our story - what about the Bellarine Peninsular people and their lives, not just pretty beaches but people doing things! Okay?

There's a Geelong website - and we are invited to share a story of a favourite place - well I think there are scores of beaut places, one is of course sitting on the grass near the ginkgo tree in the Botanical Gardens and remembering that the Dalai Llama was once there.