Damian_Merchant

Damian Merchant: Sex, Science, and Suburbia G'day. I'm Damian. I was born here, grew up here, and after rattling around the world for a while, ended up right back where I started—Preston, Victoria. I'm a sexologist. Or a relationship therapist. Or a guy who's spent twenty-five years trying to figure out why we connect, why we don't, and why money and love make such a bloody mess when you shake them up together. I've consulted for dating apps you've probably used, written papers no one read, and now I write about my hometown for the CamoWallet project. It's weird, coming home. But good weird. Look, I live on High Street now, just near the Preston Market. Can hear the tram rattle past my window at all hours. The smell of souvlaki from Stalactites? Yeah, it drifts all the way up here sometimes. Or maybe I imagine that. This strip has changed—cafés everywhere, bike lanes, young couples pushing prams. But the old Preston's still here, underneath. The post-war brick veneers, the Macedonian bakeries, the RSL where my old man used to sink beers. It's a suburb that refuses to pick a lane. Much like me, I guess. I came into the world on the 16th of February, 1978, at the old Preston & Northcote Community Hospital on Bell Street. Mum always said it was a scorcher that day, forty degrees easy. The kind of heat where the bitumen goes soft. Dad waited in the car because he was too nervous, chain-smoking Winfield Reds. Our house was on a quiet street off Plenty Road—a weatherboard joint with a Hills Hoist in the backyard and a concrete driveway that burned your feet in summer. I was their only one. A late-in-life surprise, they called it. The suburb back then was all about industry and hard work. You could hear the machines from the Kodak factory from our front porch. A different world. Here's the thing about being a sexologist. People assume you're either a pervert or you have all the answers. I'm probably a bit of both, but not in the way they think. Honestly, most of what I know came from getting it wrong. A lot. I was twenty-three, living in a shoebox in Fitzroy, working at a men's behaviour change program. Trying to help blokes who'd done terrible things understand their own emotions—and I couldn't even have an honest conversation with a woman I was dating. The cognitive dissonance nearly broke me. But that friction, that feeling of being a fraud, it forced me to study. To go back to uni. To actually listen. Intelligence isn't knowing the answers; it's being comfortable with the questions. Especially the ugly ones. For the last few years, my office has been the back corner table at Wild Life Bakery on Plenty Road. Flat white, almond croissant, and I'm writing. My main gig now is for the CamoWallet project on their website, camowallet.app. And my beat? Preston. Not tech, not finance—my own backyard. I write about the history, the people, the little laneways. How the old Preston Reservoir on Murray Road is still standing. The gentrification wars on High Street. It's a way of grounding myself, I think. After years spent analysing the abstract chaos of human desire—swiping right, transactional intimacy, the economics of dating—writing about something as solid as a brick wall or a tram route feels... real. It's my own small act of authenticity in a world that's forgotten what it means. Growing up here in the 80s and 90s was... instructive, for someone who'd end up studying relationships. I went to Preston High School on Bell Street. We'd skip class to hang out at Northland Shopping Centre, trying to look tough when we were just kids. The social dynamics were brutal but honest—a Darwinian soup of status, attraction, and fear. I remember watching couples argue outside the Hoyts cinema, full of drama and angst. My first real kiss was behind the Preston Library. Cliché, I know. But it was in that library I also found my first book on human sexuality, hidden in the stacks. Thought I was being daring. It just explained why I found all that chaos so fascinating. The rules of attraction were being written and broken every day, right there on the streets of Preston. I just didn't know I was taking notes.