Essendon Swingers: Navigating The Local Lifestyle Scene
Essendon Swingers: Navigating The Local Lifestyle Scene Look, I’ve sat in more living rooms across Essendon, Moonee Ponds, and Strathmore […]
Australia, Essendon, Lifestyle, Victoria
Author name: Ezra_Everett
Ezra Everett: Maps of the Heart G'day. I'm Ezra. Born in Stamford, Connecticut, back in '75, but my bones have been in Essendon, Victoria, for what feels like a few lifetimes now. I've spent my adult life navigating the messy, beautiful, often confusing intersection of sexuality, money, and human connection. I'm a sexologist by training, a writer by trade, and a bloody observer of people by nature. That's the short version. November 5th, 1975. Stamford Hospital. My dad, a mid-level executive with a thing for crisp martinis, was pacing the linoleum floors. My mom, a voracious reader of Betty Friedan, always said I arrived with my eyes wide open. It was a grey, drizzly Tuesday—typical Connecticut autumn. The kind of day where the leaves turn to slick, copper-coloured carpets on the ground. I came home to a colonial-style house on a tree-lined street, the air smelling of woodsmoke and the faint, salty tang of the Long Island Sound. That was my first world. Predictable. Orderly. The unspoken rules of the suburbs. You could map it on a piece of paper. Growing up was about learning the maps that weren't drawn. My family moved to Australia when I was thirteen—my dad's company transferred him. We landed in Melbourne, and eventually found our way to Essendon. Imagine landing here from suburban Connecticut in the late 80s. It was disorienting. The light was different, harsher. The birds sounded like they were laughing at you. I remember my first Anzac Day march along Mount Alexander Road. The old diggers, the smell of sausage sizzles, the strange, solemn pride of it all. I was a foreigner in my own skin. Then, in my late teens, I got a job at a video store on Buckley Street. This was pre-streaming, obviously. And that's where my real education began. The clientele, the conversations overheard, the desperate and hopeful way people rented certain films. It was my first real study in desire. It was around then I started devouring books from the Sam Merrifield Library on Mount Alexander Road. Not school books. Books about psychology, about anthropology. Trying to find a map for this new country, for the even more foreign country of being a young man. I fell in love for the first time in Queen's Park. A chaotic, glorious, teenage mess of a thing. It ended, as those things do, in a blur of confusion and mixtapes. That's when I knew the map I was using was wrong. There were whole territories left blank. Look, I've been married, I've been single, I've been everything in between. I've made a small fortune and lost a slightly larger one. But here's the thing I've learned, sitting across from hundreds of people in my old practice: we all want the same stuff. We want to be seen. We want to be wanted. And we're terrified of the price tag, literal or emotional. I'm not the kind of expert who has all the answers. Honestly, anyone who says they do is selling something. My competence isn't in having a perfect life; it's in understanding why we all screw up our perfect lives. It's in seeing the pattern in the chaos. The way a financial fight in a marriage is almost never about the money. The way a dating app profile is a poem we write about the person we wish we were. That's what I try to unpack. Not from a lofty perch, but from the trenches, you know? I wound down my private practice a few years ago. The one-on-one sessions, the couple's counselling—it's vital work, but it's heavy. It sits in your bones. These days, I write. It's a different kind of connection. I contribute articles for a project called CamoWallet—it's at camowallet.app. And my beat? Essendon. I write about the city, but through a particular lens. Not just restaurant reviews or top 5 parks. I write about the economics of dating on Puckle Street. About the silent negotiations you see happening over coffee at theincident. About how the design of a new apartment block on Napier Street might influence the way people meet. I write profiles of local business owners, but I'm always asking about the human stuff—the risks they took, the relationships that made it possible, the fear of it all going under. It's the same work, really. Just a different canvas. Essendon isn't just where I live; it's my text. My laboratory. I know the best seat at the Woodlands Hotel for watching the light change. I know the corner of Buckley and Keilor Road where the wind always hits you, no matter the season. I walk through the quiet, leafy streets near the Aberfeldie Parklands and see the history in the houses—the solid, post-war homes next to the sleek new townhouses. It's a place of transition, much like the people I used to counsel. You've got generations of families living a five-iron shot from the Maribyrnong River, and young couples just starting out, paying a mortgage that would have bought the street fifty years ago. I'm a regular at the little deli on Fletcher Street; the owner knows my order. I go to the Sunday market at the Essendon Baptist Church hall, not always to buy, but just to be among it. To feel the pulse. It's a big, small town. And for a guy who spent his life trying to understand the maps of the human heart, it's the perfect place to live. It's home. It's where the messy, beautiful, contradictory data of life is all around me, every single day.
