Is NSW exclusively gorgeous mid century homes with kooky carpets and wallpapers? These photos have been so amazing. Do you know anything about NSE and why all the houses are like that? Was it founded in the 1960s or something?
Honestly a lot of these photos are exceptions to the rule. Trawling through Australian house listings can feel like panning for gold; whenever you come across something that's survived generations of government-sponsored house flipping into bland greige overpriced nothingness it can feel like a precious nugget (in a sea of arsenic). Aside from the culturally interesting aspects of some of these images, effectively what you're looking at is a peek into what the housing market used to be like under the postwar welfare state. When these houses were brought brand-new they were orders of magnitude cheaper than new, or even older and unrenovated houses today.
There are a specific series of visual codes and conventions that most Australian realtors seem to use, which have the same gentrifying effect on the spaces photographed as the white paint and grey lino used to alchemically elevate property values - high contrast, flat lighting, boringly precise angles, etc. When you find a listing by a real estate photographer who isn't bothered enough to follow these conventions, or an interior so outside of the zeitgeist that it repels them, that feels like it has some value as well. New South Wales is really the belly of the beast in this respect (I think Sydney is one of the best arguments against the YIMBY-ish notion that the one thing we need to focus on in this country to get house prices down is zoning regulations; in the past couple of decades, Sydney has had enormous, ugly and overpriced apartment blocks shooting up all over, and yet is by far the most expensive city in the country).
