Is this your house? Corley photographic collection of Queensland houses needs your help – ABC News

2813 Ipswich Road inDarra is not officially an address anymore just a patch of grass beside the busy Ipswich Motorwayin Brisbane's south-west.

But delve into the State Library of Queensland's (SLQ) Corley Explorer website and you'll discover that in the 1960sit was the site of a cherished family home, built after work and on weekends by English immigrant George Brownfor his wife Margaret and their daughters.

Mr Brown made the bricks, built the walls, the floorsand did all the carpentry, electrical and plumbing work.

It isjust one of the stories sparked by a single black-and-white picture, taken by the late photographic duo Frank and Eunice Corley more than 50 years ago.

More than 60,000 of their images of Queensland homes are featured online, with the originals held in climate-controlled storage at the State Library.

But SLQ program officer Chenoa Pettrup said10,000 properties are yet to be identifiedand they are encouraging members of the public to add locations and their memories to the collection.

"You can really jump in and have a look on the platform and find your own home we're looking for stories behind the homes as well," Ms Pettrup said.

She describes the Corleys as an entrepreneurial couple who ran a number of businesses, one of which was the Pan American Home Photographic Company.

"Frank would drive the streets in his Cadillac and basically drive around and hang out the window and take a photo of every house in the street.

"His wife Eunice would park a mobile developing unit [in a Bedford delivery van]nearby and she'd develop the photographs and then they'd get a salesman to try to sell the photos back to the home owners.

"Cameras weren't really in the homes as much at that particular time, so it was quite a novelty to get a photograph of your house and a nostalgic thing for that they could share with their families," Ms Pettrup said.

The Corleys charged 50 cents for a print and 99 cents for a calendar or greeting card and it has beenestimated they took around 250,000 photos of houses from Bundaberg to Beenleigh in southern Queensland.

The SLQ has all the images the couple had not sold.

The pictures are a snapshot in time featuring older-style weatherboard cottages with wire mesh fences to more modern double-level homes with breeze block feature walls.

"They give us a sense of the time and place that they were taken and I think that continuing to add photos gives us more of an insight into how that place has evolved over time," Ms Pettrup said.

Michael Stone found a 1970s image of his Greenslopes housein the online collectionand managed to connect with the descendants of the Norwegian family who built itin 1915.

"We got to understand that it had a pretty good history that we wanted to capture when we did our renovation," Mr Stone said.

"The original house is pretty much intact we've done a lot of building around it certainly some of the cornices and pressed metal ceilings are all in place.

"We've got photos now that have them sitting in the same dining room where we sit and watch TV."

The Corleys'photographs were donated to the SLQ in 1995, before Mr Corley's death in October of that year.

His wife Eunice had died some time earlier.

Doug Spowart and his partner Victoria Cooper made initial contact with the SLQ after Mr Corley invited them into his Annerley home and showed them boxes of the prints.

"I saw this as history an amazing resource," Dr Spowart said.

"How could you pass up on a record of Queensland like this? It would have just been lost."

The couple befriended Mr Corley in the early 1990s, while Dr Spowart worked in a South Brisbane photographic gallery.

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Dr Spowart even got to take a look inside the Bedford van where Mrs Corley had processed the film.

"It was a tight squeeze I have enormous respect for what Eunice did," Dr Spowart said.

As for Frank Corley, Dr Spowart and Dr Cooper agreedhe was one of a kind.

"He had this lovely glint in his eye everything had a story," Dr Cooper said.

Dr Spowart said Frank Corley also took photos in the Northern Territory and South Australia.

"I called him the man who photographed every house in Australia the original Google Street View,"Dr Spowart said.

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Is this your house? Corley photographic collection of Queensland houses needs your help - ABC News