The Photographic Journeys of Charles Page (1964-1999)

Origins
For a long time I didn't talk to people about this aspect of my work. I didn't want people to think I was a train enthusiast who stood on the end of platforms taking down numbers of trains and such like. Over the years, I have continued to work on other projects, such as commissions for the Red Cross to document aspects of life in war zones, or Journeys North (a Bicentennial project with the Queensland Art Gallery, looking at life in Queensland) and never spoke about this work. My interest in photographing steam trains had never been a conscious decision to produce work for a particular project or exhibition. Then about two years ago, I realized that these images were really a body of work.

Where I lived as a child, in Newport, Melbourne, there was a railway line behind our house. So I think my interest in trains grew fairly subconsciously from an early age. A few years ago I was in Sydney and I saw the David Moore exhibition. He had photographed Sydney Harbour over many years, and I thought how fortunate he was to have something that he kept working on. It didn't strike me at the time that that's exactly what I've been doing with trains. I've since realized that this is a project I've had for over thirty years, and it's still continuing.

I've never been able to clearly define what the appeal is about trains. I'm not obsessed with trains as such, it's not important to me if a train's got three bolts or two in the tender. But I suppose trains are a fascinating piece of machinery in terms of their history. They were the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and they both created and destroyed a lot of communities.

Perhaps it's a bit like collecting, you go out and find a piece of history that's about to disappear. And photography is very much about that. There's an investigative aspect to it which is what I particularly like about photographing trains.

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Extracted from an interview with Charles Page by Clare Williamson, Curator of Special Exhibitions at the State Library of Victoria