Henry_Springfield

Henry Springfield: A Life in Questions, Bodies, and Berwick G’day. I’m Henry Springfield. Born here, raised here, and for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I’ve chosen to stay here. Berwick, Victoria. I’m a sexologist, or at least I was, before the clinical work took a back seat. Now? I write. I research the messy intersection of money, desire, and the digital landscapes we navigate for love. I run the Berwick Beat column for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. It’s a gig that lets me look at how we value things — and people — in a town that’s seen its own currency change over the decades.Growing up here in the late 80s and early 90s was... well, it was paddocks and new estates. My mates and I would spend weekends getting into trouble on the construction sites of the new housing developments popping up near the old racecourse. I remember the dust. Everything was dust and the smell of eucalyptus. One summer, we dared each other to sneak into the Berwick Springs Hotel after dark. We got caught by the caretaker, a grizzled old bloke who didn't even call our parents. Just made us pick up rubbish for a month. That was the kind of justice that taught you something. By the mid-90s, I was hanging out at the Fountain Gate shopping centre, not long after it opened. It felt impossibly big, a concrete monument to a future we couldn't quite imagine. We'd save up our money from part-time jobs at the old Berwick Village deli to buy CDs at the now-gone gasometer record store on High Street. It’s a Pizza Hut now. Of course it is.For the last few years, my world has narrowed and expanded all at once. I spend my days researching and writing articles for the CamoWallet website. They're not just financial guides. They’re about the psychology of spending, the emotional weight of a shared bank account, how a dating app profile can feel like a transaction. My column focuses on Berwick — I interview local business owners, look at the new developments along the Princes Highway, talk to people in cafes on Lyall Road about how they manage money and relationships. It’s anthropology, really. I’ll sit at a table outside Cafe on High, watching the weekend foot traffic, and I’ll write about the unspoken contract of a first date coffee. Who pays? What does it mean? Does it still mean anything? My own past gives me, I think, a lens to see the scripts people are following — the ones they don’t even know they’ve memorised.Honestly, if I've learned anything, it's that competence isn't about having all the answers. It's about being comfortable with the questions. The really uncomfortable ones. After decades of sitting with people in rooms, listening to their most private anxieties about intimacy and connection, you start to see patterns. You see the fear behind the anger. The longing behind the indifference. I’m not sure I’m more intelligent than anyone else. But I’m probably harder to shock. And that, in this line of work, is the whole game. You create a space where someone can say anything, and you don't flinch. You just nod and say, Tell me more about that. That skill — the not flinching — it’s served me well. In clinics. In relationships. And definitely while trying to parse the logic of a Tinder bio.I came into this world on the 5th of May, 1976, at the old Berwick Hospital, which is long gone now. Replaced by a housing estate near the golf course, I think. My parents had a modest weatherboard house on a street off Clyde Road, back when Clyde Road was still a two-lane country road you could cross without risking your life. My father worked at the nearby Pakenham butter factory, and my mother was a nurse at the same hospital where I was born. The town then was a sleepy outpost, a place with a main street, a couple of pubs, and more farmland than people. I reckon the smell of freshly turned soil and cow manure is hardwired into my earliest memories. It wasn't a bad start. It was quiet. Maybe too quiet. It made you curious about the louder, messier world of people.Living in Berwick my whole life... people find that strange. You're a sexologist who's lived in the same suburb for nearly fifty years? They expect you to be in Fitzroy or Brunswick. But this place is my laboratory. I've watched it transform from a rural town to a sprawling outer suburb. I know the backstreets, the hidden walking trails along the Casey Fields, the view from the Wilson Botanic Park that still makes you forget the sprawl for a second. I studied at the Chisholm Institute's Berwick campus, and I even did some early community counselling work out of a small office near the Berry Street intersection. This city holds my entire history — the football games at Edwin Flack Park, the failed relationships dissected over long walks through the old cemetery, the quiet mornings writing at the Berwick Library on Scott Street. It's not just a place on a map. It's the archive of everything I've learned about how people build lives, and sometimes, how they tear them down. It's home. And that’s a very specific, complicated kind of feeling.