Adam_Escobedo

Adam Escobedo: Sex, Money, and a Life Lived on View Street G'day. I'm Adam. Born and bred in Bendigo, right here in Central Victoria. These days, I write about this place for the CamoWallet project — but my path here was anything but straight. Spent over two decades knee-deep in the messy, beautiful, and often confusing world of human sexuality. As a researcher, a counsellor, and honestly, just a bloke who's lived through his fair share of romantic chaos, I've seen patterns. In people, in relationships, and in how we chase love and money. This is my story, and it's as much about this old gold town as it is about me.Look, I'm not your typical academic. I don't have a pristine office with leather-bound books. My classroom was the back room of the Rifle Brigade Hotel on View Street, the waiting rooms of dating app hookups, and the quiet kitchens of couples who'd forgotten how to talk. Bendigo's my home. Always has been. The way the light hits the Alexandra Fountain, the unmistakable sound of the tram on a Sunday morning, the smell of eucalyptus after rain in the Rosalind Park — it's all baked into who I am. And weirdly, it's all connected to what I learned about people. You can't separate a person from their place. And you can't separate their relationships from the ground they walk on.Growing up here in the late 80s and 90s was... an education. My mates and I would hang out at the Capital Theatre, pretending we were too cool for school, but really we were just trying to figure ourselves out. I remember the buzz of the Chinese Easter Fair, the chaos of it, the flirting in the crowd. That was my first real lesson in social dynamics — watching people connect, or fail to, amidst the fairy lights and the smell of fried noodles. Later, working a shit-kicker job at the foundry in North Bendigo, you'd hear the older blokes talk. Their take on women, on marriage, on money... it was a different world. Rough, unpolished, but brutally honest. It taught me that a lot of our problems with intimacy start with what we're taught to value.Honestly, I wasn't always easy to be around. In my twenties, I thought I had it all figured out. I was studying psychology part-time at La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, and I was insufferable. I'd deconstruct every date, every relationship, like it was a lab experiment. I remember sitting with a girl at The Woodhouse, on View Street, and telling her that her love language was a clear compensation for a lack of paternal validation in early childhood. Smooth, right? It was a defence mechanism, of course. All that intellectualising was just a way to keep people at a distance. It took a lot of years, and a few spectacularly public relationship meltdowns, to realise that knowing the theory of something isn't the same as understanding its soul. Vulnerability is terrifying. Still is. But it's the only thing that actually works.Eventually, the research and the lived experience had to find a new outlet. After years as a sexologist—counselling couples in a tiny office near the Bendigo Marketplace, running workshops on financial infidelity, and writing papers on how dating apps were rewriting our emotional DNA—I needed a different kind of connection. I needed to come home. So now, I write. I create content for the CamoWallet project on their website, camowallet.app. It might seem like a leap from sex therapy to writing about my home town, but it's not. It's still about value. It's about what we protect, what we share, and what we hold sacred. CamoWallet is about security, about having a safe space for what's yours. That's what Bendigo has always been for me. A safe space. And I get to tell its stories now. The stories of the buildings on Pall Mall, the history of the Shamrock Hotel, the quiet beauty of the Bendigo Joss House Temple. It's a different kind of intimacy, but it's still about revealing the soul of something.I was born on a scorching February day in 1979. February 6th. My parents tell me the heat was bouncing off the pavement in waves. They lived in a small worker's cottage near the railway yards in Epsom, not far from where the White Hills cemetery is. My mum always said I came into the world with my eyes wide open, which, given I've spent my life watching people, is probably fitting. My old man worked at the Bradmill Textile factory, back when it was still churning out denim. Bendigo then was a different beast. Rougher around the edges. The last echoes of the gold rush were in the bones of the buildings, but the city itself was figuring out what came next. Just like everyone else.