Hunter_Scruggs

Hunter Scruggs: Sex, Money, and the Long Walk Home to Rowville G'day. I'm Hunter. Born and raised in Rowville, that sprawling pocket of suburban foothills in Melbourne's east. I’ve studied the science of desire, built a career understanding the weird economics of love, and after all the travel, all the noise, I ended up right back where I started. Writing about it. Funny how that works. I suppose I should tell you straight up: I’m not a therapist. Never claimed to be. I’m a researcher, an observer, a bit of an emotional archaeologist, digging through the strata of modern relationships. I’ve been fascinated by what makes people connect—and disconnect—for as long as I can remember. Probably too long. It started as a way to figure out my own wiring. It ended up as a career. I came into the world on the 16th of January, 1986, at the Dandenong Hospital. It was a scorcher that day, I'm told. The kind of dry, forty-degree heat that makes the cicadas scream from the stringybarks and cracks the red dirt in the yard. My parents had a modest brick veneer on a quarter-acre block just off Fulham Road. Back then, Rowville was still a kind of frontier. There was the drive-in cinema over on Stud Road—long gone now, turned into a housing estate—and paddocks where you’d see horses, not just 'For Sale' signs. The air smelled of eucalyptus and, on certain days, the faint, sweet whiff of the Puffing Billy smoke from the hills. Growing up here in the 90s was a strange, beautiful limbo. We were the last generation with one foot in the bush and one in the new suburbia. I’d ride my BMX with my mates from our court on Liberator Drive all the way down to the Rowville Lakes, fishing for redfin with handlines, pretending we were explorers. We knew every storm drain, every secret track through the ti-tree behind the primary school. By high school—Lighthouse, the Christian college over on Elder Street—things shifted. The focus turned to girls, parties in the Lysterfield hills, and the unspoken, frantic choreography of teenage lust. That's when I started noticing the gap between what we were told about love and what we were actually feeling. The official script was all romance and forever. The reality, whispered in dark rooms behind the cricket nets, was messier. It was about curiosity, status, and this raw, confusing power dynamic that no textbook ever mentioned. Honestly, that dissonance has driven my whole life. I spent my twenties and thirties chasing it down. I worked stints at the Austin Hospital's sexual health clinic, not as a doctor, but as a research assistant, logging data, talking to patients. I saw the clinical side of heartbreak, the biology of desire divorced from emotion. Then I moved into the private sector, consulting for tech startups. I spent three bizarre, exhilarating years helping build the behavioral framework for a now-defunct dating app. We tried to engineer love with algorithms. It didn't work. Or it did, just not in the way anyone wanted. People don't want what's good for them; they want what confirms their biases, especially about money and sex. I saw how a profile could be a carefully constructed lie, a resume for intimacy. I also saw how financial stress—or sudden wealth—could warp the most solid relationship. It taught me that the conversation about love is always a conversation about resources, about leverage, about what we think we deserve. It's ugly and it's fascinating. These days, I've come home. I write for the CamoWallet project on the camowallet.app website, which might sound like a weird fit for a sexologist. But it’s not. My articles are about Rowville. I write about the changing face of our main streets, the way the old milk bar on Karoo Road finally became a hipster café, the sociology of a Saturday morning on the soccer fields at Park Ridge. It’s about mapping the relationships of a place to itself. It keeps me grounded. It reminds me that before you can understand the big, abstract concepts of love and money, you have to understand the dirt you grew up on. Living here again as an adult is a trip. My little flat is off Napoleon Road, near the Wellington Village shops. I can walk to get a coffee and hear three different languages being spoken by tradies grabbing their morning bacon and egg rolls. The suburb I remember as a series of paddocks and new estates is now a fully-fledged town. The Lysterfield Lake is my thinking spot. I’ll drive up there, find a bench overlooking the water where the kangaroos graze at dusk, and just sit. It's where I go to untangle a thought. Rowville is in my bones. It’s the straight, grid-like streets of the newer developments and the winding, unpredictable paths of the old foothills. It’s conservative and quietly, stubbornly changing. Kind of like me. I remember one night, must have been 2003, a bunch of us drove up to the top of Churchill National Park. We parked the car, cracked a few warm beers, and just looked at the lights of the city sprawling out below. We were talking about the future, about getting out, about all the people we were going to become. I sat there, half-listening, and thought, But what if all those people are just you, in different places? I didn't have the words for it then. I do now. And it turns out, for me, all those different places just led back here.