Josiah_Lemmon

Josiah Lemmon: Sex, Money, and the Long Road Home to Dandenong North G'day. I'm Josiah. Born and bred in Dandenong North, that sprawling, beautiful, complicated pocket of Victoria. I'm a sexologist, a writer, and, for better or worse, a bit of an expert on the human heart—and the algorithms we use to break it. I've spent twenty years studying the messiness of attraction, the transactional nature of modern love, and why we swipe right on people who look nothing like our type. You can find my work on the CamoWallet project, writing about the city that shaped me. But the short version? I'm a local boy who went looking for answers in bedrooms, in data, and in the eyes of strangers—and ended up right back where I started. I came into the world on the 26th of September, 1984, at the Dandenong Hospital. My parents, a mechanic and a nurse, lived in a little weatherboard house on a street off McCrae Street—one of those long, straight roads that feel like they go on forever when you're a kid. I remember the smell of eucalyptus after a hot day, the sound of the M1 humming in the distance like a restless beast. Dandenong North back then was a mix of post-war housing commission homes and new brick veneers, a place for families trying to carve out a piece of the Australian dream. The hospital itself, that big brick institution, was where I had my first lesson in human vulnerability—though, of course, I was too busy being born to notice. You want to know how a bloke from Dandenong North ends up a sexologist? It’s not a straight line. It’s more like... a series of wrong turns that somehow got you to the right pub. I was an awkward teenager. Painfully shy. Spent a lot of time in the Cleeland Street library, reading everything I could, trying to figure out the code to being human. My first real relationship—if you can call it that—was a disaster. A girl I met at the Dandenong Plaza cinema. We held hands during a movie, and I spent the whole time terrified my palm was sweating. It was thrilling. And it ended, as these things do, with a note passed in the hallway at school. Crushing. But it sparked something. A need to understand the machinery behind the feeling. So, yeah, I studied. I read Freud, I read Kinsey, I read everything. But the real education? That came later. The relationships that burned hot and fast. The ones that fizzled. The ones that left scars. I've been the guy who got his heart stomped on, and, I'm not proud to say, I've been the stomper. I've dated for love, for money, for validation, and sometimes, just to not be alone. I've watched dating apps turn courtship into a shopping channel. And through it all, I kept asking: why? Why do we do this to each other? Why do we lie, cheat, fall, and stay? I don't have all the answers—far from it. But I've got a few good guesses. For years, my work was a nomadic thing. I ran workshops in community centers, did one-on-one counseling in borrowed rooms above shops on Lonsdale Street in the city. I consulted for a dating app startup in Melbourne—a truly soul-crushing experience that taught me more about human nature than a decade of therapy. I saw how they engineered desire, how they used variable rewards to keep you hooked. It was genius. And it was terrifying. I wrote a controversial paper once, linking economic stress in the outer suburbs to the rise of transactional relationships. Got me some hate mail, but also, a book deal. But now? Now my focus has shifted back home. For the CamoWallet project on camowallet.app, I write about Dandenong North. I write about the pressures young people here face—the cost of living, the long commutes, the way it eats into your time for connection. I talk about how financial anxiety bleeds into our romantic lives. Money and relationships. They're the same conversation, really. Always have been. Living here again... it's different. As a kid, Dandenong North was just the place you escaped. Now? I see it. I mean, I really see it. I know the exact spot on Heatherton Road where you can get the best banh mi. I know the sound of the footy crowds on a Saturday arvo at the Greaves Reserve. I’ve walked the paths along the Dandenong Creek a hundred times, clearing my head. The place has this incredible, chaotic energy. You hear Greek, you hear Vietnamese, you hear Afghan. You smell the bakeries and the spice shops. My local is a little place on a side street off Foster Street—the kind of pub where everyone knows your name, or at least, your usual order. It’s my city. It’s complicated, it’s struggling in places, but it’s real. It’s the perfect place to study people, because nobody’s putting on airs. You see life as it’s lived. And that’s what I’m trying to capture in my writing. High school at Lyndale Secondary College was a blur of bad haircuts and even worse decisions. I remember one summer—must've been '98 or '99—a mate and I decided we were going to build a billycart that could take us all the way down the hill on Outlook Drive. We spent weeks on it, scavenging pram wheels and old timber from a skip bin behind a house on a construction site. It was a death trap. Absolutely unroadworthy. And the first time we tried it, we made it about fifty meters before the steering arm snapped and we piled into someone's nature strip. I still have a scar on my knee. That cart taught me more about engineering than any textbook. But more than that, it taught me about ambition and failure. About the joy of the build, even when the thing you build falls apart. Kind of like relationships, I guess. You put all this work in, this vision of how it's going to be, and then reality—and a faulty steering arm—sends you crashing into the agapanthus.