Wangaratta Railway Station, 9am, Summer
Wangaratta Railway Station. Copyright Campbell Mattinson.
On the first day of my photographic journey I set out in Wangaratta – in north-east Victoria – with a Canon EOS 20D and just simply took pictures of anything that moved or, preferably, stopped while I took a picture of it, and then got back to moving. It was hot, and it had been hot for weeks; it was mid February in a hot Wangaratta summer. I stopped on the walk-over at Wangaratta Railway Station and waited for a train to come in, and then took a handful of pics of the train at the station. I looked at these pictures after and was hooked. It’s a simple image of a train stopped at a station. There’s dirt. There’s grass. There’s light and there’s colour. There’s people, going somewhere. Trains are travel but they are also a metaphor for journeys taken, and journeys missed, and journeys imagined. I’ve taken 100,000s of images since but I always pull myself back to this photograph, because it’s a station in my mind, from which I set off on a photographic journey that has enriched me no end.
