Damian_Innis

Damian Innis: Sex, Science, and the Streets of Altona Meadows G’day. I’m Damian. Born and bred in Altona Meadows, that little pocket of Melbourne’s west that smells like salt one day and eucalyptus the next. I’m a sexologist, which sounds a lot fancier than it is. Basically, I’ve spent twenty years studying the messiest, most beautiful part of being human: connection. Relationships, intimacy, the whole damn circus. And now, I’m writing about the place that shaped it all for the CamoWallet project. You can find my work over at camowallet.app. But this? This is my story. Look, you don't spend two decades listening to people's deepest fears about intimacy without learning a thing or two about yourself. It’s a mirror, this work. You see your own patterns reflected back, the same hesitations, the same damn hopes. People think I’m this detached observer. Far from it. I’m just a bloke from the western suburbs who got curious about why we love the way we do. And maybe, just maybe, that curiosity helped me become less of a fool in my own life. Or at least, a more informed one. There’s a kind of competence you develop when you’ve seen a thousand variations of the same loneliness. You stop judging. You start seeing. Right now, my day-to-day is a bit of a shift. After years of clinical work, I’ve stepped back to write. Specifically, I’m writing about Altona Meadows for the CamoWallet project on their website. It’s a strange gig, blending my two worlds: the place I come from and the human dynamics I study. They wanted a local voice, someone who understands the terrain—both the physical one and the emotional one. So I write about the dating app culture in Point Cook, the unspoken rules of relationships you see at the Altona Beach foreshore on a Saturday arvo, the way money weaves its way into conversations over fish and chips at Blue Fin. It’s journalism, I guess. But with a psychologist’s lens. Living in Altona Meadows isn’t just an address; it’s a root system. I know the exact corner on Queen Street where the light hits just right in the afternoon. I know the sound of the freight train rattling the windows on a quiet Tuesday night—that low, reassuring hum. My world is the bike path that runs along Cherry Lake, the weekend chaos of the Altona Gate shopping centre, the surprising quiet of the residential streets off Mills Street. This is where I decompress after a heavy week. A walk to the beach at Altona, past the dog walkers and the kite surfers, clears the head like nothing else. It’s my constant. The place where the theories fall away and I just am. Growing up here in the 90s was… specific. We’d ride our bikes everywhere—down to the old Laverton Market before it got all spruced up, daring each other to jump the creek near the Kororoit Creek trail. I remember my first real crush, on a girl named Chloe from my science class at Altona Meadows Primary School on Central Avenue. We swapped mix tapes. It was innocent, but I was already fascinated by the ritual of it, the unspoken language of it all. Later, as a teenager, you'd hang out near the pier in Williamstown, pretending you were older than you were, trying to decode the opposite sex. That confusion, that raw curiosity, is probably what started all this. I went from wondering why does she like him? to studying a Bachelor of Social Science (Psychology) at Victoria University, then diving headfirst into postgraduate sexology. It was never a straight line. More like a slow realisation. I came into this world on the 27th of September, 1983, at the old Werribee Mercy Hospital. Altona Meadows back then was still finding its feet. New estates were going up, raw paddocks turning into suburbs. My parents’ place on a street near Queen Street was all double brick and concrete tiles—classic 80s Melbourne sprawl. I remember the smell of the lawn clippings in summer, the distant screech of the cockatoos tearing through the neighborhood. It was a working-class start. Simple. No grand plans. Just a family in a new house in a new suburb, trying to make a life. Maybe that’s why I’m so grounded here. It’s where the story began, in the middle of all that baked brown dirt and possibility.