John_Rowling

John Rowling: A Life in Questions, Close to Home G'day. I'm John Rowling. Born here, raised here, still here. South Grafton, on the banks of the Clarence. These days, I write about this place — its streets, its people, its particular rhythm — for the CamoWallet project. But for most of my life? I was a sexologist. A therapist. A researcher. A guy who spent decades listening to people talk about the one thing we all do but rarely discuss honestly: navigate love, lust, and money. It’s a strange path, isn’t it? From the dusty oval at McKittrick Park to a cramped office in Sydney, listening to couples tear strips off each other. Now I’m back where I started, looking at it all with different eyes. I came into the world on the 15th of May, 1981, at the old Grafton Base Hospital. The jacarandas weren't quite in bloom yet, but you could feel it in the air — that thick, syrupy promise of summer. My parents had a little weatherboard place on Ryan Street, just down from the South Grafton Ex-Servicemen's Club. I can still hear the thwack of a tennis ball against the club's back wall on a quiet afternoon. Back then, the big flood of '74 was still the talk of the town, the high-water mark painted on pub walls a silent warning. My dad worked on the railway line, and my mum cleaned rooms at the old Grafton Hotel. It was a working-class start, simple and solid. The world outside, with its big hair and even bigger music, felt a million miles away from the sound of the cane trains rumbling through town at night. Honestly? I wasn't an easy kid to love. Too curious, probably. Too many questions. My first real heartbreak wasn't a girl — it was a friendship. Tim Barlow. We were inseparable, building billycarts to race down the hill near the South Grafton Pool, spending our pocket money on mixed lollies at the shop on the corner of Through and Bent Street. And then, one day in high school, it just... stopped. He'd decided being friends with me wasn't cool anymore. The silence from him was louder than any argument. It was my first, brutal lesson in the fragility of human connection. That feeling of being on the outside, of trying to decode someone else's unspoken rules — it's what hooked me, I think. What makes people click? What makes them break? I spent the next thirty years trying to find out. I studied at the University of New England, Armidale, then did my clinical training in Sydney. I ran workshops, wrote academic papers no one read, and sat in a thousand rooms where the only thing more present than the couples was the quiet, screaming loneliness between them. It taught me that desire is rarely about sex. It's about being seen. Being chosen. And far too often, it gets tangled up with money. Security. The terrifying math of what can you do for me? And through all of it, this town was the anchor. South Grafton. It's not the pretty, heritage-listed side of the river, you know? It's the working side. The real side. I know the exact spot on the road from Grafton where, if you look across the railway line, you see the whole town laid out under that immense sky. I know the smell of the river flats after rain. The way the light hits the hills behind the golf course in the late afternoon. My life is etched into these streets: the footpath on Ryan Street where I learned to ride a bike, the fish and chip shop near the roundabout that's been there forever, the view from the Bluff. It's where I learned to talk to people. Where I first saw, in the pubs and clubs, the complex dance of money and romance — a bloke buying a round to impress, a couple fighting over the pokies. It’s all here. All the raw material. Growing up here in the 80s and 90s was a specific kind of education. My first fumbling experiments with sexuality weren't in some anonymous city nightclub, but in the back of a mate's ute down by the river, under a bridge on the Gwydir Highway. My ideas about relationships were formed watching the farmers at the South Grafton markets drive a hard bargain for a heifer, then go have a counter lunch with their wives. It was all transactional and deeply romantic at the same time. I remember the chaos of the Jacaranda Festival, the float parade, the desperate hope of catching a glimpse of a girl from the other side of the river. It felt like a world of its own. And maybe that's why I ended up studying relationships. Because in a place this size, you see the whole arc of them. The passionate starts at the drive-in (long gone now). The young marriages, the quick divorces. The quiet, enduring partnerships of couples who've been farming together for fifty years and can finish each other's sentences. It was all a clinic, long before I had a degree. Now, my work is different. Instead of a clinical practice, I write. For CamoWallet, I get to tell stories about South Grafton — the history, the characters, the hidden corners. It's a project about connecting people to place, digitally. And in a way, it's the same thing I've always done. I'm still trying to understand connection. Only now, I'm looking at how we connect to where we live, how money flows through a town, how a place shapes who we become. I write about the old cinemas, the forgotten factories, the families who've been here for generations. It’s a slower kind of research, but it feels right. It feels like coming home. And maybe, in a world obsessed with dating apps and swiping right, there's something to be said for a guy who just wants to tell you why a particular street in an ordinary town is worth your time. Because if you can understand that, you're a long way to understanding anything.