rnor Charles La Trobe on Corio Bay. They were embedded in the stone in such a way that he believed that they had been there for 100�150 years, possibly dropped by Portuguese explorers. In 1849, Fyans was nominated as the inaugural Mayor of the Geelong Town Council. An early settler of Geelong, Alexander Thomson, for which the area of Thomson in East Geelong is named, settled on the Barwon River, and was Mayor of Geelong on five occasions from 1850�1858.
1850s: Gold rush
Gold was discovered in nearby Ballarat in 1851, causing the Geelong population to grow to 23,000 people by the mid 1850s. To counter this, a false map was issued by Melbourne interests to new arrivals, showing the quickest road to the goldfields as being via Melbourne. The first issue of the Geelong Advertiser newspaper was published in 1840 by James Harrison, who also built the world's first Ether Vapour Compression Cycle ice making and refrigeration machine in 1844, later being commissioned by a brewery in 1856 to build a machine that cooled beer.
The Geelong Hospital was opened in 1852, and construction on the Geelong Town Hall commenced in 1855. Development of the Port of Geelong began with the creation of the first shipping channel in Corio Bay in 1853. The Geelong to Melbourne railway was built by the Geelong and Melbourne Railway Company in 1857 Rabbits were introduced to Australia in 1859 by Thomas Austin, who imported them from England for hunting purposes at his Barwon Park property near Winchelsea. One of Geelong's best known department stores, Bright and Hitchcocks, was opened in 1861, and the HM Prison Geelong built using convict labour, was opened in 1864.
In 1866 Graham Berry started a newspaper, the Geelong Register, as a rival to the established Geelong Advertiser. When this proved unsuccessful, he bought the Advertiser and made himself editor of the now merged papers. Using the paper as a platform, he was elected for West Geelong in 1869. In
