Matthews was educated at Clevedon College in Wales and gained a university education externally while travelling through the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. After a year in the West Indies, he moved to Australia where Australian history has been a central interest. Matthews worked in the television industry as a writer, producer and director and wrote a number of major historical documentaries for the Seven Network and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). More than four hundred programmes were written for ABC Radio.
Matthews subsequently became a lecturer at the Hervey Bay campus of the University of Southern Queensland and then a freelance writer based in Warwick, Queensland. He has written a number of works on Queensland history including Blackguards and Scoundrels in Colonial Queensland: True Stories of Crime, Passion and Punishment (2001), Footsteps Through Time: A History of Chinchilla Shire (2004), Gold, Graves and Gallows: Crime and Calamities on the Colonial Goldfields (2002), Mayhem and Murder in Pioneering Queensland: True Stories of Real Crimes and Mysteries (2000), Shipwrecks and Seafarers' Scandals: True Tales From Colonial Queensland and the South Pacific (2000) and True Blue Queenslanders: Heros, Heroines and Battlers (2001).
