Geelong is the city that gives Melbourne a coastline of its own: Victoria’s second city on Corio Bay, home to the only tertiary hospital in the state based outside Melbourne, with the Great Ocean Road starting at its edge. Here it is in nine numbers, then six things nobody tells you until you have moved.
A wool port that became a knowledge city
Around 270,000 people live across Greater Geelong, on Corio Bay about 75 kilometres south-west of Melbourne. It grew rich on wool in the nineteenth century — the reason for the grand civic architecture still standing in the centre — then on manufacturing through the twentieth: car assembly, an aluminium smelter and an oil refinery all operated here in turn. Within the last fifteen years all three closed, and the city rebuilt itself around health, education and the public sector instead. Two state government agencies moved their head offices to the waterfront, Deakin University expanded, and the local health service grew into Victoria’s largest regional provider.
For clinicians the proposition is specific. The region’s principal referral hospital is the only tertiary hospital in Victoria based outside metropolitan Melbourne, drawing a primary catchment of around 350,000 people and extending to roughly 500,000 for some specialist services. You get full tertiary breadth in a city of a quarter of a million, with Melbourne itself an hour up the road when you want it.
The costs: a specialist bench that, while real, is still smaller than a Melbourne teaching hospital’s; a summer that brings the whole of Melbourne to the local beaches; and a wind off the bay that takes some getting used to. This guide prices all three plainly.
- Ethicare is a healthcare recruitment company. This guide is free to read, asks nothing of you, and does not give visa advice.
- Geelong suits people who want real tertiary work and a coastline, without needing everything a capital offers. Where we think it is the wrong fit, we say so.
The city, in nine numbers
Six things you only learn once you are here
- Geelong sits on the land of the Wadawurrung people, one of the five nations of the Kulin alliance.
- Acknowledgement of Country opens meetings and events across the region, as it does across Victoria.
How to read this guide
Nine chapters, all about Geelong specifically. Anything true of Australia generally — Medicare, visas, Ahpra registration, tax, superannuation, schools — lives once in Moving to Australia, so you read it once and not nine times.
If you read nothing else, read Why Geelong for the case weighed up, and Healthcare in Geelong, because the tertiary role is the part most people underestimate.