Author name: Ezra_Corbett

tags and the sections in the required order. Ezra Corbett: On growing up in Palmerston North, the messy reality of desire, and why this city still holds my secrets. I’m Ezra. Born here, raised here, still here. Palmerston North. The mighty Manawatu. I’ve spent my life trying to understand one thing: why we want who we want, and what money does to that want. I’ve been a researcher, a counsellor, a bit of a romantic, and a bit of a cynic. These days, I write about my city for the CamoWallet project — trying to capture the feel of these streets, the wind in The Square, the quiet corners where life actually happens. But that’s just the latest chapter. You spend decades listening to people talk about their sex lives, their secret longings, their financial fights in the bedroom, and you realise something. Competence isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about being comfortable with the questions. The ones that don’t have easy answers. The ones that hang in the air long after someone’s left your office. I’ve sat across from couples on Victoria Avenue, in a stuffy room above a real estate agency, where the silence was louder than their accusations. I’ve seen a man cry because he felt his desire was a burden, and a woman furious because hers was ignored. You don’t forget that stuff. It teaches you a kind of humility. An intelligence that’s felt, not quoted. Look, Palmerston North isn’t just a dot on the map for me. It’s a place I’ve tested every theory I ever had. The wind here — the Manawatu Gorge wind — it gets inside you. It’s restless. And maybe that’s why this city works for someone like me. It’s a place of transit, of students arriving and leaving, of farmers coming in from the Feilding side for the day. Constant flux. But with deep, deep roots. I know the best coffee spot isn't on Church Street anymore, it's that hole-in-the-wall near the library on George Street. I know the exact bench in the Esplanade where the light hits the rose garden just right in late autumn. I know the walk along the river, from the suspension bridge out to the speedway, better than I know my own pulse. This city is in my bones. It's the constant backdrop to every conversation, every relationship, every insight I've ever had. It’s not just where I live. It's the lens I see through. Growing up here in the 80s and 90s... it was a specific kind of strange. You'd get your taste of the wider world through grainy VHS tapes at the video store on The Square, but the reality was all around you. Sneaking smokes behind the Regent Theatre. Trying to buy beer at the Hokowhitu Tavern with fake ID that fooled no one. First clumsy, desperate kisses in the dodgy car park by the old火车站. There was this tension, you know? The safety of a provincial city, with these huge, unspoken hormonal undercurrents. I remember a friend getting caught with a copy of Penthouse behind the school gym at Palmerston North Boys' High. The scandal! But it was that same hidden curiosity that probably pushed me, years later, to actually study this stuff. To try and understand why we were all so obsessed with something we were terrified to talk about. The city was my laboratory, even then. The gossip at the Polytechnic, the whispered stories at house parties in Terrace End — it was all data. My past work? It took me from those whispered conversations to actual research. I did a stint with the old Manawatu Sexual Health Service, back when they were based near the hospital. That was an education. You learn more about human nature in a clinic waiting room than in any textbook. Then counselling, privately. Couples, individuals. A lot of it, honestly, came back to money. Even when they came in talking about sex, we'd end up talking about his overtime, her credit card debt, the power imbalance baked into their joint account. That's where the real intimacy — or lack of it — lives. So I started consulting, writing. Now? Now I write about Palmerston North for CamoWallet. It sounds like a shift, I know. From the bedroom to the boulevard. But it's not. I'm still observing. Still documenting the landscape. The city is just the setting, but the story is always the same: how we connect, what we value, where we spend our time and our money. And for me, there's no richer setting than this. I was born in the middle of winter, 1975. July 15th. Palmerston North Hospital, which back then felt like the centre of the universe for about a week. My parents had a modest house off Featherston Street, in Roslyn. I remember the fog. Thick as blankets, rolling in off the river, deadening all sound. The world felt small, contained. My dad worked at the freezing works, my mom part-time at the department store that used to be on The Square before it became another chain. Birth here then meant the sound of tractors on the main road, the smell of dairy farms on the breeze if the wind was wrong, and a fierce, unspoken pride in being from a place that wasn't Auckland or Wellington. A place that was just... ours. They say you can't go home again. But I never really left.

Scroll to Top