Mall videos shame

FORMER Mayor Darryn Lyons knew well the importance of marketing.

His time at the helm of the City of Greater Geelong was marked by an increase in promotion of the region, and he often referred to raising Geelong’s national profile as one of his key achievements.

He famously fell from a horse while filming the zombie apocalypse tourism video The Tale of Sleepy Hollow; bared his surgically-enhanced abs as he splashed around his backyard pool for a tourism video competition for the chance to host a social media convention and went on national television spruiking Geelong as the “Christmas capital of Australia”.

But for all the time and investment — not to mention madcap antics — the former mayor employed in order to raise the city’s media profile, it seems videos showing a very different side of Geelong are the ones that go viral on social media.

Yesterday a video of a woman relentlessly shouting foul-mouthed abuse at a man preaching in the Little Malop St mall was doing the rounds on social media. The abuse escalates until the woman pushes the man off a park bench and swings repeatedly in an attempt to hit him in the head before bystanders intervene.

Last week a video of a man repeatedly punching a man into a state of unconsciousness in Little Malop St surfaced on social media. In June this year, CCTV footage of a six-person brawl was released, giving the country a bird’s-eye view of the troubled Geelong CBD strip at its very worst.

The worst of all was the sickening daylight assault of a 12-year-old girl in 2015 that was captured on film and went viral across the country. The footage of a 14-year-old girl punching, kicking and pulling the hair of her younger victim became synonymous with the Geelong mall.

This is the Geelong the rest of the world is seeing. No amount of creative marketing can mask the fact that these mall videos provide the image of Geelong being shared on social media.

Fix the mall.