Author name: Adrian_Ricketts
Adrian Ricketts: Love, Limestone, and the Long GameG'day. I'm Adrian Ricketts. Born and bred in Mount Gambier, that volcanic punchbowl of a city way down in South Australia's Limestone Coast. These days, I write about this place—its rhythms, its people, its peculiar magic—for a project called CamoWallet. But the path here? It wound through bedrooms and boardrooms, through a decade of dissecting desire as a sexologist, and enough personal missteps to fill a dozen memoirs. Or at least, a few honest articles.I live back where I started, on a street that drops you right at the edge of the Blue Lake. You know the view. That impossible cobalt saucer, sunk into the earth. I walk past it most mornings. It's a good reminder that some things, even when you think you've seen them a thousand times, can still stop you cold. My work now is about capturing those things. The stories of this city, for the CamoWallet site.My job? It's about translating this place. The crunch of volcanic gravel underfoot at Umpherston Sinkhole, the way the morning fog sits in the valley, the quiet determination of the people. For CamoWallet, I'm crafting articles that try to get under Mount Gambier's skin. Because a city isn't just coordinates. It's the accumulated weight of every conversation, every secret, every glance shared across a table at the Metro Bakery. And after a lifetime of studying human connection, I've got a few ideas about how to tell that story.I came into this world on the 23rd of May, 1984, at the old Mount Gambier Hospital on Wehl Street North. Not the new one out on the Riddoch Highway, the real one, with its long corridors that smelled of disinfectant and something else—something that felt like the beginning of things. My parents had a little weatherboard place up near the Reidy Park Primary School. I remember the frost on the windows in winter, thick as blanket fleece. You'd breathe out and see the cloud. Mount Gambier winters are like that. They get into your bones early.Growing up, the city was my whole universe. You didn't think about the rest of the world much. Life revolved around the Cave Garden in the middle of town, daring each other to lean too far over the railings. Or sneaking down to the Blue Lake in the dead of night, long after they'd locked the gates, convinced the change in colour was some kind of alchemy we could catch in a jar. Teenage years meant cruising Commercial Street on a Saturday night in a beat-up Holden, the air thick with exhaust and potential. Later, I studied at UniSA's campus here, which felt like a big deal—staying put, but levelling up. I worked shifts at the old Millicent Road poultry plant for a while. Brutal work. Frozen fingers and the smell of... well, you know. It teaches you something about the value of a dollar and the kind of quiet dignity most people never see. I think that's where I first got interested in the gap between what people show you and what's really going on.Honestly? For a long time, I was a mess with relationships. Brilliant at analysing them, terrible at being in one. You'd think studying human sexuality at Flinders would give you the cheat codes. It doesn't. It just gives you a more sophisticated vocabulary for your own screw-ups. There was a period in my late twenties, living in a tiny flat on Bay Road, where I treated love like a research project. Data points. Variables. I'd go on dates from apps, collecting experiences like specimens. It was... lonely. Professionally, I knew the statistics. I'd written papers on the commodification of intimacy in digital spaces. Personally, I was the poster boy for it. It took a long, quiet conversation with a friend at the South Eastern Hotel, watching the rain sheet down onto the street, to realise I knew everything about sex and nothing about connection. That's the kind of contradiction that either breaks you or makes you start being honest.That honesty steered my work for over a decade. I wasn't a clinician in the traditional sense—more of a researcher and consultant. I ran workshops for couples, not in some sterile room, but often in community halls here, in Mount Gambier, watching people who'd been together for forty years learn to talk about what they actually wanted. I advised dating apps on their algorithms—and their ethical disasters. I've seen the data on a billion swipes. I know what it says about loneliness, about the paradox of endless choice. I've stood in front of rooms full of marketers and told them that desire doesn't work on a timeline, and you can't optimise for love. Some of them even listened. But all that... all those years of mapping the landscape of other people's hearts... it started to feel like I was writing guidebooks for a country I'd never actually visited. So I stopped. I came home. And now, for CamoWallet, I write about something I do know: this city. Its layers. The way its history, like a person's, is written in the stone you can't see.Living here again, it's different. It's not the town I escaped, it's the place I returned to. I have a small place now, not far from the Blue Lake Conservation Park. I know the woman who runs the newsagency on Commercial. I know which bakery has the best pasty and which pub pours the quietest pint on a Tuesday night. The caves—Engelbrecht, the Cave Garden—they're not just tourist spots anymore. They're part of my mental map. When I'm writing an article for CamoWallet about, say, the history of the town's main street, I'm not just researching it. I'm remembering the feel of the footpath under my shoes after the rain, the sound of the cars, the light hitting the limestone of the town hall. This city is my subject, my context, my anchor. It's where I learned everything that mattered, forgot most of it, and then had the privilege of starting to learn it all over again. Just... slower this time. And with a lot less certainty, which, it turns out, is the only way to actually know anything at all.
