Liam_Steffen

Liam Steffen: Salt, Skin, and This Town G'day. I'm Liam Steffen. Born here, raised here, still here—Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. I write about relationships, intimacy, and the strange economy of modern dating. For the last few years, I've been the lead voice for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app, where we talk about the messy intersection of money and love. Before that? Let's just say I've spent a lifetime studying what happens when people get close. Or try to. Or run away from it. This town? It’s in my blood. The smell of the jetty at low tide, the way the afternoon light hits the hills behind Toormina, the roar of the break at Diggers Beach when a proper swell is pumping. You can't understand me without understanding this place. It's where I learned everything—about people, about desire, about the long game of the heart. These days, when I'm not deep in data for CamoWallet, I'm probably walking my dog along the headland or grabbing a coffee at the Surf Life Saving Club café. My current gig is writing for CamoWallet—articles about how we navigate finances and feelings, all from my desk overlooking the harbour. It's the perfect synthesis of my old life and this one. I get to pull from decades of... well, let's call it 'field research' in sexology and human connection, and funnel it into practical advice for people trying to build a life with someone. All while living in the most beautiful place on earth. I came into the world on the first of June, 1982, at the old Coffs Harbour Hospital, just off Pacific Highway. Mum always said the wattle was in full bloom, and you could hear the waves from the delivery room if the wind was right. It was a Tuesday. A crisp, clear winter morning. The kind where you can see forever from the hills. My dad, a local builder, was probably more nervous than her. He always joked he spent the whole time staring out the window at Muttonbird Island, waiting for a sign. I was born with the salt air in my lungs. That's not poetic license; it's just a fact. The town was smaller then, sleepier. The Big Banana was already there, of course—a beacon for every kid on a school holiday road trip. But for us locals, life revolved around the harbour, the fishing co-op, and the pubs on the Jetty Strip. Honestly, for years, I felt like a fraud. The confident guy with all the answers about relationships? Inside, I was just a kid from Coffs who'd made a mess of his own heart more times than he could count. I've had my share of spectacular failures. The relationship that imploded so publicly my mother heard about it at the IGA before I could even call her. The years I spent chasing a theory about desire that left me feeling completely hollow. What gives me the right to talk about this stuff? Maybe it's not the successes. Maybe it's surviving the wrecks. It's the quiet Tuesday nights now, watching the sunset with someone who knows all my stories and stays anyway. It's knowing that trust is built in the small moments—like remembering how someone takes their coffee from the kiosk at Park Beach. That's the real expertise. Not the academic stuff. The human stuff. Growing up here was... specific. You don't realise how unusual your playground is until you leave it. My mates and I would spend weekends at the Big Banana, not as tourists, but just because. We'd dare each other to climb the hills behind the university—what was then the Education Campus, now SCU—and look down on the patchwork of banana plantations and the endless blue. High school at John Paul College felt like a world away from the beachside freedom. We'd skip class sometimes and hitch a ride to Emerald Beach, lie in the sand, and talk about nothing. Absolute nothing. First crushes happened at the Park Beach Plaza cinema. First heartbreaks, too, usually after a disastrous date at the Pacific Hotel, where some older kid would buy us cheap middies if we looked desperate enough. It was a cocoon, really. A beautiful, warm, isolated cocoon. You didn't think about the rest of the world much. You thought about the next swell, the next party in someone's bush block property out near Korora, the next chance to talk to that girl from the Jetty who smelled like coconut oil and salt. My formal life in sexology started later, but the informal education was all Coffs Harbour. You see, this town has always been a transient place. A stopping point. Tourists, backpackers, grey nomads—all passing through. And when you're a local who stays, you become a kind of accidental anthropologist. I watched the dynamics on the beach, in the bars on Harbour Drive. The fleeting connections, the holiday romances that burned bright and died fast. I started digging into the research, the science of attraction, the psychology of it all. I worked for a while with a small community health organisation based in an office complex on Moonee Street, doing anonymous surveys and workshops about sexual health. It wasn't glamorous. But it was real. I saw the gap between what people felt and what they were willing to say. Between their financial stress and their romantic choices. That's the thread I've pulled at ever since. And now, with CamoWallet, I get to explore that final frontier: how your bank account f*cks with your love life. It's all connected. The town, the research, the writing. The human heart, beating against the fiscal year.