And in each place he settled with his family, he lived in a typical suburban house, what he describes as “a standard sort of fairly mundane brick house - nothing exotic”.

Nowadays, he spends his days driving around and capturing examples of the very ordinary childhood he once had. He photographs houses, lawns, cars, shops, lounge rooms, in a bid to catch and hold onto something that’s disappearing.

“I like the faded weatherness of houses, and I like to see the passing of time,” he says.

“It’s the way that weather and time creates a patina and a beauty in buildings … It’s the past, but it’s in the present, so it's straddling decades because it's stuck in time. It's a time warp.”

From the dingy Chinese takeaway, the quirkily clipped hedges and formica tables, to the cluttered speciality stores and faded weatherboard, Kirk’s photographs are so vivid you can practically smell the fried food, lawn clippings and motel-room mustiness wafting off the page.

There are people in there, too, with a similar patina on their faces - captured with an implicit sense of respect for what they represent. Kirk says he often has to explain to a subject how important their life is, to him and to the people consuming his images.

“I’m chatting to them, meeting them in their front gardens, getting to know them, and explaining to them what I'm on about, what I'm doing, documenting the past, and that they live actually in a time machine, which a lot of people don't really think about,” he says.

In the process, as he documents and archives and posts his images online, Kirk has developed a following of people who, he figures, are either as fascinated by suburbia as he is, or bewildered that he would think to elevate anything as mundane as a blossom tree, or a side table covered in family photos, or a 50s-style formica kitchen.

Given that he’s become online-famous for his work, and that he’s just published his second book of images, it’s easy to see that many people think Kirk is onto something. But he has always wondered whether there’s some deeper meaning to what he’s doing.

“A shrink, I'm sure, would have an absolute delight, pulling apart why I do what I do,” he says.

“But on one level, I think it's probably just an illusory belief that life was better back then. I certainly like the level of innocence that I think existed in the world then, and pursue the simplicity.”

His new book, Suburbia: the Familiar and Forgotten, is a paradoxically lush production for something that’s so filled with the shabby, the battered, the faded and forgotten. It’s the kind of book you’d never see in the lace-curtained living rooms he’s photographed, nor in the wood-panelled barber shops or grubby milk-bars.

And yet, for all the hopelessness and genteel kind of poverty on display, there’s beauty, humanity, and dignity in seeing how so many people have retained the accoutrements of the past, even as the world is changing outside the windows.

“It's normalness that I've tried to capture, and there is a beauty to it when you look at it with different eyes,” he says.

“I'm not necessarily creating beautiful photos; what I'm doing is actually just photographing something that is beautiful. And then going hey, look at what I saw, isn't this beautiful?”

It’s a preoccupation that has been a lifetime in the making, although it wasn’t until 10 years ago that he decided to devote himself full-time to photographing the everyday. He was getting towards the end of a career in the film industry, and realised there was plenty he wanted to achieve in his spare time - namely driving around suburbs and towns, and photographing beautiful, unstaged vignettes.

This was in the 90s, at the beginning of digital photography, a format that made it much easier for him to revisit the work he’d done in previous decades, and shoot in colour. He decided life was too short to relegate his passion to his spare time.

“I don't have a day job anymore - this is it,” he says.

“I'm basically wearing away a nest egg. It's just me and my dog. For the last 10 years, I've done it 99 per cent of the time every day. If I'm not taking photos, I'm driving around looking for photos, and in the evenings most times I'm doing the really boring stuff, which is making sure I'm filing it everywhere so I can find it, editing down, getting rid of the rubbish, just keeping the good stuff.

There's a whole librarian side to it which you don't realise when you start. But I've got over 40,000 digital images, so you've got to keep on top of that as well.”

He has long since realised that what he’s doing resonates beyond his own daily obsession - his archive is precious social history of Australian suburbia, and has seemingly developed a life of its own - but he says he would do it no matter what people thought of it.

“It's now got a life of its own via Flickr and via the books, which is a good thing,” he says.

“But if it all fell over tomorrow, and this book bombed and I never got another book deal, well, I'd still keep doing it, because it's what I do. It's what I'm compelled to do.

I'm also just a nosy bugger, I just love looking and checking things out.”

He has plans to go back to some of the work he did while travelling through rural areas and small towns in NSW and Queensland, but for the moment, he’s curious to see how his latest book is received.

The accepted wisdom, at least until recently, was that photography books didn’t sell in Australia, unless they involved tourist-friendly images of Uluru and wildlife. But with publishers like Scribe coming onboard, and more and more people cottoning on to what he’s doing online, the taste for nostalgia, and for the everyday, is growing.

Kirk is driven mainly by nostalgia, for his own childhood, and for a life but he also loves the idea of showing people beauty in unexpected places.

“People can pass things a million times and not really take any notice of it, but they see a photo of it, and because it's an edited process, where I'm getting rid of all the extraneous and just showing that, people say, ‘Oh yes - isn't that beautiful?’”

Suburbia: The Familar and the Forgotten, by Warren Kirk, is published by Scribe.