Coffs Coast photographer Rob Cleary

COFFS Coast photographer Rob Cleary has lived many lives across many postcodes.

Perth, Devonport, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Cygnet.

Then the Coffs Coast came calling.

Offered a Tourism Marketing Manager role with Coffs Harbour City Council, Rob finally put down roots.

The tourism career made sense.

He’d worked with Tourism Tasmania and Huon Valley Council, knew the industry well, and spent years commissioning photographers for projects.

Watching them work eventually became its own kind of education.

When his council contract ended in 2009, he made the move – hanging up his tourism hat and launching Seen Australia, his own photography business, stepping from the client side of the lens to behind it.

The camera had never really been put away.

He’d carried one through Tasmanian mountain ranges, across the Snowy Mountains, and through Croatia, France, Spain, Portugal and beyond.

The professional transition wasn’t so much a reinvention as a natural next step.

What followed is a career of genuine range.

He’s shot from open-door helicopters at 4,000 feet, stood alone in burned-out Bago State Forest at dusk – coming face to face with a Brumby stallion at 50 metres – and found himself ankle-deep at a Cairns breakwall before a radio call reminded him exactly whose territory he was standing in.

“A quick snap of my camera shutter, not a croc’s jaws,” he says, “then a hasty retreat to higher ground.”

He documented the Coffs Harbour Eastern Breakwall reconstruction across pre-dawn shifts, eventually producing 75 leather-bound hardback books of the project.

He has shot the World Rally Championship, the Wallabies, and women’s football at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

His images of the 2019-20 bushfire devastation for Forestry Corporation of NSW remain among his most significant work.

Assignments for the National Parks and Wildlife Service NSW have taken him further still – from South Solitary Island across the parks of the Mid North Coast and west to the Warrumbungles.

His images have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, The Australian, and across seven Pacific Highway billboards.

In 2025, his first competition entry – a portrait of a Sawtell local towelling off after an early morning swim – took bronze at the Australian Photography Mono Awards.

“Like any tradie,” he says, “I just use different tools depending on the assignment.”

By Kate PYE