Trent Mitchell’s Australian Lustre series evokes nostalgia and fun of our national life
Trent Mitchell has criss-crossed the country capturing images of the oddities of Australian life, and conjuring memories for all of us.
If you’re looking at these images from photographer Trent Mitchell’s book Australian Lustre and experiencing a warm glow of nostalgia, good: that’s exactly the emotional connection he wants you to feel. He feels it too. The book’s 300 images, all shot on film in the past dozen years, are inspired by the memories of road trips in his own youth – memories of hot cars and Big Things and quirky/humdrum Australiana. “We would end up in all sorts of offbeat places,” he says.
It started when he was growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches; every holiday his adventurous parents would pack him and his sister into their Holden sedan and drive up the coast to the caravan park at Budgewoi, or all the way to Queensland, or all the way to Victoria. And in his early twenties, Mitchell, a keen surfer, criss-crossed the country in search of good waves and good times. Australian Lustre (he chose that word for the title because “it describes how light behaves on the surface of things, and how things fade over time”), is, he says, an attempt “to recreate a road-trip diary that I never made when I was young”. It has struck a chord with people, evidently: the book sold out within weeks of its release in December, and is now being reprinted for a second run.
Mitchell, a 45-year-old father of two, lives on the Gold Coast these days and makes a living shooting advertising (clients include outdoor brand Patagonia and Coopers brewery) and editorial. He captured the images for his book during various work assignments, surfing expeditions and family trips. Perhaps you recognise some of the things pictured here from your own journeys – the outside of Vic Hislop’s Shark Show (long since closed) in Hervey Bay, say, or the dugouts of Coober Pedy, or the model whale at the Nullarbor servo.
Mitchell will be sure to photograph that whale again when he and his young family embark on a road trip across the Nullarbor – and back – this winter. Why are they doing that? “Just for the hell of it!”
Australian Lustre is now on pre-order,https://www.trentmitchell.com/
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