World Refrigeration Day at the Geelong Showgrounds Museum

What – World Refrigeration Day 2025 Cool Skills Exhibition, 

When – June 26 and 28, 10 am to 3 pm (last entry 2 pm)

Where – At the Geelong Showgrounds Museum, entry at 79 Breakwater Rd (Gate 2) and turn left

Bookings https://www.trybooking.com/DBXUP

Bring the family – only $25 for 2 adults and 2 children under 15.

Above – Geelong Showgrounds Museum, Royal Geelong Show, October 2022; James Harrison’s portrait (by courtesy of Geelong Gallery) overlooks the Geelong showgrounds Museum’s refrigeration installation; Janine Wood, Ted Stephens, and Warwick Bryce, engineer, with his working model of Harrison’s 1857 ice-making machine.

Above – Warwick Bryce with Mark Harrison, great grandson of James Harrison, Geelong’s inventor of refrigeration in 1854; the 1910 compressor made by Humble’s Foundry is behind Warwick’s model.

Geelong and Refrigeration 

Refrigeration is still a developing industry requiring design, chemical and electrical engineering skills – and logistics for refrigerated transport by air, sea and land. There are plenty of great careers possible.

Geelong has a special relationship with the industry. Find out about local hero James Harrison, founding Editor of the Geelong Advertiser in 1840, who is known world-wide as the Father of Refrigeration. He was the first to invent, in 1854, how to make artificial ice in commercial quantities – here in Geelong – which has over time transformed our way of life. Every hour on the hour, guides will give a short introductory talk to this history.  

Harrison’s ice-making system used steam pressure to pump volatile chemicals through a closed coil in a tank of brine; as they evaporated they chilled the brine which then froze water. The same principal is used today in all refrigerators, air conditioners and heat pumps, so – Thanks James for creating technology that has improved food security, enabled temperature-controlled science experiments and manufactures and helped world-wide human health and comfort for the last 171 years!

His makeshift machine was quite risky; in case the volatile chemicals exploded he experimented in a cave at Rocky Point on the Barwon River – a plaque marks the site. Because the Advertiser was very successful, Harrison was able to travel in 1856 to London, taking his patented design to Siebe’s precision engineers to be perfected. He returned in 1858 with a machine that could make 3 tons of ice a day, and set up Australia’s first ice works here.

The Exhibition tells of Harrison’s many achievements, his disappointments, and his resilience through family and financial misfortunes. The Museum also has a growing collection of interesting early compressors including one made in Humble’s Foundry, Ryrie St, in 1910, and domestic ice boxes. Its early household refrigerators date from the 1930s.

If you are interested in Geelong’s social and industrial history, design, machinery or engineering, this Exhibition is for you; as well as refrigeration the GSM has many exhibits showing the role of the Royal Geelong Agricultural Society, famous family businesses such as hardware store Fagg’s, farm-based enterprises such as milk distribution, and famous people who originated in Geelong and surrounds. You are welcome to browse.