European in Victoria occurred.
The next European visit to the area was by the explorers Hamilton Hume and William Hovell. They reached the northern edge of Corio Bay - the area of Port Phillip that Geelong now fronts - on 16 December 1824, and it was at this time they reported that the Aborigines called the area Corayo, the bay being called Jillong. Hume and Hovell had been contracted to travel overland from Sydney to Port Phillip, and having achieved this they stayed the night and begun their return journey two days later on 18 December.
The convict William Buckley escaped from the Sullivan Bay settlement in 1803, and lived among the Wathaurong people for 32 years on the Bellarine Peninsula. In 1835, John Batman used Indented Head as his base camp, leaving behind several employees whilst he returned to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) for more supplies and his family. In this same year, Buckley surrendered to the party led by John Helder Wedge and was later pardoned by Lieutenant-Governor Sir George Arthur, and subsequently given the position of interpreter to the natives.
In March 1826, three squatters, David Fisher, James Strachan and George Russell arrived on the Caledonia and settled the area. Geelong was first surveyed by Assistant Surveyor, W. H. Smythe three weeks after Melbourne, and was gazetted as a town on 10 October 1838. There was already a church, hotel, store and wool store, 82 houses, and the town population was 545. By 1841, the first wool had been sent to England and a regular steamer service was running between Geelong and Melbourne. Captain Foster Fyans was commissioned as the local Police Magistrate in 1837 and established himself on the Barwon River at the site of the area of present-day Fyansford. Fyans constructed a breakwater to improve the water supply to the city by preventing the salty lower reaches from mixing with fresh water and pooling water.
The Geelong Keys were discovered around 1845 by
