Geelong Showgrounds Museum
The Geelong Showgrounds Museum (GSM)
The Vintage Machinery Group was attracting donations of many items from Geelong’s rural and industrial past that are suitable for displays about Geelong’s rural background and industrial development. With the onset of COVID-19, RGAPS wished to offer more attractions to visitors to the Showgrounds, so in 2020 the Society provided space to house this collection. The VMG set up the Geelong Showgrounds Museum (GSM) next door in the Max Gillett Pavilion.
Today the GSM collection includes farm memorabilia of all types from pig troughs and grinding wheels to harness and weighing machines, and items and information panels about local industries – foundries making farm machinery, early milk processing and delivery with horse drawn carts, and.
The Refrigeration Collection
Because pioneer newspaperman James Harrison invented refrigeration beside the Barwon River in 1854, established the first ice works in Australia in Geelong in 1859, and even attempted to be the first to export frozen meat to England in 1873, the GSM collected several refrigeration items, including ice boxes. When in 2021 the Geelong and Region National Trust (GRBNT) held an Exhibition about Harrison and his world-changing invention during Geelong’s UNESCO Design Week, GSM Committee member Ted Stephens invited GRBNT to bring its Timeline of Harrison’s life and some of the Exhibitions displays to the Museum for the 2021 Show and the January 2022 Rally – and it is still there, sitting comfortably with an expanding Museum refrigeration collection and providing a focus for the remarkable Harrison story to be told.
The refrigeration collection has a rare 1:10 model of Harrison’s 1857 commercial machine that could make 3 tons of ice a day, made for and loaned by the Australian Institute of Refrigeration, Airconditioning and Heating (AIRAH), and an operational Audiffren machine (for residential use, patented in 1894) on loan from RMIT. Rare 1930s domestic refrigerators made by Sir Edward Hallstrom and his Silent Knight company have been loaned or donated, along with an early GE refrigerator donated by the Queensland Museum.
Geelong Rotary and Harrison admirers from the 1960s to the 1990s worked unsuccessfully towards building a James Harrison Museum Inc. This Committee was chaired 1995 – 2012) by Graham Hobbs; he is now President of the GSM. They collected a huge Linde Machine, the only one of four saved from the scrap yard when these compressors were de-commissioned from Jackson’s Meat Works in 1967. It has been stored outdoors since 2012. The Showgrounds is about to become its home in a major outdoor installation by volunteers from the Vintage Machinery Group.
Along with a steam engine believed to have been used by James Harrison to power the pumps circulating volatile ether in his ice-making machine, the Linde addition will seal the Geelong Showgrounds Museum’s status as holding Australia’s foremost refrigeration collection.
In 2026, the GSM is open every First Sunday of the Month excepting January and October, 10 AM – 2 PM. Cost – Adults $10, Students aged 13 to 18 $5, Under 13 –Free.
This year, the GSM will celebrate UNESCO World Refrigeration Day (WRD) on Saturday June 27 and Sunday June 28, 10 AM – 3 PM.
The Museum is open without further charge to attendees at the Geelong Classic Truck and Machinery Show (January, Saturday 27 & Sunday 28) and Royal Geelong Show (October 16 – 19).
