Real Estate Novelist

I’m a writer. I’m a novelist. I’m a photographer.
The Real Estate Novelist series combines all three. It’s where I take portrait photographs of houses and buildings, in their landscape, as they are.

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THEY BULLDOZED my childhood. They knocked down my primary school, my secondary school, the houses in my street, the trees I climbed. What they didn’t knock down, they sub-divided and suffocated. I live within a kilometre of the hospital where I was born, and rent my childhood home as an office. Every day I walk the streets that I have walked for the entirety of my life – I’m 58 – and every day I look for the markers of home, and every day I can’t find them. Everything was scrapped. Everything was changed. Everything was knocked over and done again. I live in a townhouse development that was built on land that was once a caravan park. This caravan park was home, mostly, to permanent rentals. They turfed these residents out to pack in more people like me. The cost of poverty is, explicitly, that your history has no value. The richest schools are added to but are never razed. The richest suburbs would never have their tree-lined streets uprooted. The trees in my street were knocked over without so much as a letter. The schools I went to were razed and re-named as if their history had never existed. The story of modern Australia is the story of people being priced out of the places they call home. The story of modern Australia is a story of refugees from without, and refugees from within. The story of modern Australia is one of people whose lives are being overwritten.

I take this sensibility – this respect for home – and apply it, photographically. I’m a portrait photographer. I developed my skills taking portraits of people. I still do – but I now take portraits of buildings and houses. For the love of them. For the dignity of them. Out, basically, of respect.

I took a photo of a house in Altona and, within a couple of weeks, it was demolished. I’ve looked at this photo a lot since. The house was old and overgrown, but I’ve developed an affection for it, even though it’s now gone. It feels as though it was a privilege to capture it, sitting there in the sun, on what turned out to be its death bed.

The only time houses are deliberately photographed, in general, is when they’re For Sale, or if a builder or architect wants to document their work

I also saw, around where I live, a great number of houses being demolished. With some of these houses then it was a “last chance to see” moment. I’d see a house standing in beautiful light and think, If I don’t capture it now, I might never get the chance again.

I took

When I first started taking pictures of houses, I was often frustrated when cars (or people) were in the way of the shot.

I slowly realised that cars weren’t in fact marring the shot; they were making it.

I often now deliberately include cars in these portraits of houses and buildings. It seems natural to include people too, if they walk into frame.

This is how the Real Estate Novelist photographic series came to be. Real Estate Novelist is a portrait series of houses, cars and people in their landscape, taken by a writer and novelist. I made this series for the love of it. I find these buildings and cars, these lines, these colours and these textures, exquisite.

The corner of Rosshire & Basil

Every morning of my primary school years I walked past this house. It was on the corner; its side fence faced west, and copped the late sun. Until recently this house was rented by a young family. The front yard was always strewn with toys, balls, trucks, spades and plastic cars. I knew they’d moved out when the toys on the lawn disappeared. I noticed then, too, that all the curtains were open. I stopped and stared at the from door of the house. I’ve admired that door, the little detail, for decades.

A few days later the services to the house were cut; the water, the electricity, the gas. Wire barricades went up. Shortly after, the bulldozers got to work.

Campbell Mattinson 13/10/24 Campbell Mattinson 13/10/24

Effingham Street Electrician, Newport

Photo of the Hosking & Son Electrician building in Effingham Street, Newport. This Newport building would make an excellent film or photography location.