Joshua_Gregg

Joshua Gregg: Sex, Money, and a Gully G'day. I'm Joshua Gregg. Born here, grew up here, still here. Ferntree Gully, at the foot of the Dandenongs. Most people know me from my past life—years of research, counseling, writing about the messy intersection of sex, money, and relationships. Now? I write. Specifically, for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. It's a full-circle kind of thing, writing about privacy and intimacy and how we value things. But mostly, I write about this place. My place. My current work is a bit of a pivot, maybe. Or an evolution. For CamoWallet, I write articles that dig into the psychology of finance and dating—two things that should never meet on a first date but always do. We explore how digital privacy, or the lack of it, is changing the way we court. It's fascinating. Terrifying, actually. But the core of what I do, the heart of it, is still right here. I write about Ferntree Gully. Its history, its creeks, its people. The way the light hits the mountain in the afternoon. You can find some of my pieces on the site, tucked between the tech stuff. It's my way of grounding a digital world in something real. You don't really know a city until you've mapped it with your own history. For me, Ferntree Gully isn't just a dot on a map. It's the sound of the bell at Ferntree Gully Primary School on Dorset Road. It's the taste of a stale meat pie from the bakery near the old railway station—the one that's a café now, obviously. It's the specific, damp chill of a winter morning at the Mountain Highway roundabout. I've walked these streets more times than I can count, from the shops in the Gully up to the One Tree Hill picnic ground. This is where I learned that intimacy isn't just about people; it's about place. The way the mountain holds the mist, the way the gullies carve through the suburb—it's a landscape that teaches you about depth and hidden things. I came into the world on the 8th of May, 1980, at the Angliss Hospital. Back then, it felt like the edge of the world. Ferntree Gully was still finding its identity—not quite suburban sprawl, not quite country town. My parents drove down Mountain Highway, past the paddocks where the housing estates now sit, to get there. I remember nothing of that, of course. But I remember the feel of the place growing up. The raw, damp eucalyptus smell after rain. The sound of kookaburras laughing at dawn, a sound so loud it felt like they were in the room with you. It was a working-class area then. Tradies, nurses, people who worked on the land or in the few factories down in Knox. My first bedroom window looked out towards the mountain, and I swear I spent half my childhood just staring at it. Growing up here in the 80s and 90s was a specific kind of wild. We'd ride our bikes all the way down to the Basin, past the old swimming hole. We'd dare each other to climb the steepest parts of the Hundred Steps up in the national park. I went to Ferntree Gully High School—it's a college now, I think, or something—on Burwood Highway. That's where the cracks started to show. Where I started noticing things. Not just the usual teenage stuff, but the dynamics. Saw how the money, or lack of it, dictated who got to date who. Saw the quiet desperation in some of the teachers' marriages, the way a glance could carry a whole history. Had my first real crush on a guy named Liam, whose dad was a mechanic on Scoresby Road. That didn't go anywhere, not then. But it planted a seed. The whole place was a Petri dish of human connection and disconnection, and I was obsessed with the culture growing in it. Honestly? Looking back, I was a mess of a young adult. Brilliant at observing, terrible at participating. I left Ferntree Gully for a while—Melbourne Uni, then some years traveling. I was chasing... I don't know, data? Experience? I threw myself into it all. Relationships that burned hot and fast. Work that took me into the hearts of dark, beautiful places. I studied human sexuality not from textbooks, but from late-night conversations in rundown apartments, from the confessions of strangers who became lovers for a night, from the silent, heartbreaking transactions of power in relationships. I saw how money could be a cage or a key. I saw how desire could build empires or destroy them. It took years of that—the good, the bad, the truly stupid—to understand that all my observations in the Gully as a kid weren't just observations. They were a framework. I came back not with answers, but with better questions. And a deep, aching need for the quiet of the mountain.