Free Exhibition7 December 2018 – 14 July 2019slq Gallery, level 2State Library of Queensland
Interact with the collection and uncover the unique features of Queensland housing. Search for your own house amongst the photographs and if you find it, share your story.
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There’s no place like home. And there’s no sense of nostalgia quite like the one we feel when we see a photograph of a home — our house, the house of someone close to us, the house where we spent our formative years.
Home: a suburban obsession exposes the social and emotional power of house and home, and the myriad connections between where we live and who we are.
Home explores the social and emotional foundations of our houses through the incredible legacy of Frank and Eunice Corley.
From the 1960s to the 1970s, this entrepreneurial couple drove the suburban streets of Queensland in their pink Cadillac, taking photographs of houses and selling them to homeowners as calendar inserts, Christmas cards or standalone images.
Frank and Eunice are thought to have taken over a quarter of a million photographs of houses throughout South East Queensland and as far north as Bundaberg.
Around two-thirds of the photographs were sold to householders, and the remaining 61,000 unsold images were donated to State Library in 1995.
State Library has worked with the Annerley Stephens History Group and the University of Queensland's Architecture Theory Criticism History Research Centre to weave together notable stories involving houses and homes featured in the Corley collection. Together, these stories disrupt our conceptions of a uniform suburban experience.
The Corley collection tells complex and varied stories about houses in Queensland suburbs and how their occupants chose to transform those houses into homes.
