Author name: Charles_Rooney

Charles Rooney: Salt, Sex, and Sand I’m Charles. Charlie to most. Born and bred in Bunbury, Western Australia—yeah, the one down south, two hours from Perth. And yeah, I still live here. Always have. I write about this city now, about its moods and its backstreets, for a project called CamoWallet. But my real life’s work? That was, well, messier. It was about people. About why we want who we want, and what money does to that wanting. I’m a sexologist. Or I was. Once you see the undercurrents, you never really stop being one.Look, you want credentials? Fine. I’ve got the framed paper from Curtin University to prove I studied it. But the real education? That came from sitting in a booth at the Rose Hotel on Victoria Street, listening to a farmer’s wife explain why she paid for a male escort with the wool cheque. Or mediating a fight between two tech bros from Sydney, here on holiday, who’d swiped right on the same girl from Dalyellup Beach. My competency isn’t in textbooks. It’s in knowing that the conversation you have at 2 a.m., when the South West pub rock has faded and you’re just two humans watching the moon over the Leschenault Inlet—that’s where the truth lives.Growing up here in the 80s and 90s was… specific. Bunbury was smaller then, tougher. We’d get the train from the Bunbury station into Perth for a “big night out” at 16. My first real heartbreak wasn’t in some anonymous city; it was on the back dune of Back Beach, sand in everything, listening to a mixtape I’d made her on a dying Walkman. We’d sneak into the drive-ins in Picton, not for the movie, but for the steam on the windows. My first real job wasn't even a job—it was stacking shelves at the old Action supermarket on Blair Street, just to have cash to take a girl to the Hobbs Arcade for fish and chips. You learn about value early. A packet of chips bought with your own money tastes different. It’s heavier. It comes with expectations.Bunbury isn't just where I live; it's the map I use to navigate everything. When I talk about relationships, I think of the Marlston Hill lookout—how some people are just a breathtaking, panoramic view, and others are the solid ground beneath your feet. When I write about dating apps for CamoWallet, I’m picturing someone sitting alone on a bench near the Koombana Bay playground, refreshing their feed, waiting for a dolphin to pop up—the real ones or the digital kind. This city is my constant. The way the light hits the water at the Point, the smell of the paperbark trees after rain, the quiet hum of the titanium dioxide plant on the outskirts. It’s industry and idyll. It’s where I learned that everything—love, money, desire—is a negotiation between the raw and the refined.April 4th, 1977. St Joseph’s Hospital, Bunbury. My mother always said the first sound I heard wasn't a lullaby, but the foghorn from the harbour. A deep, mournful blast cutting through the autumn air. The wattle was in bloom, my dad used to tell me—splashes of yellow gold against the grey-green of the tuart trees. We lived in a little fibro house on Wittenoom Street then, the kind with a Hills Hoist in the backyard and the smell of the salt breeze mixing with someone’s burning off. Bunbury was a port town, first and foremost. It was working class. It smelled of sawmills and the sea. And I was born into that—a town built on shipping wool and mineral sands, oblivious to the fact that its newest resident would spend his life shipping something else entirely: understanding the messy, human cargo of desire.My past is a pretty chaotic filing cabinet. I’ve been a barman at the Prince of Wales Hotel, watching tourists from Perth spend a week’s wages on a fling. I’ve been a counselor for Relationships Australia, based out of an office on Stephen Street, where the walls were thin and the stories were thick. That’s where the sexology degree got practical. The sex part was easy; it was the money, the power, the boredom that were hard. These days, I’ve traded the clinic for a keyboard. I write for CamoWallet, an app, yeah, but don't hold that against me. I write pieces about Bunbury—where to take a date that won’t break the bank, the best quiet spots in the CBD for a first conversation, the economics of dating in a regional city. It’s the same damn thing, really. Just a different kind of transaction.

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