Michael_McKee

Streets I've Walked, People I've Known: An Autobiography by Michael McKee G’day. I'm Michael McKee. Born here, raised here, still here. Camberwell, Victoria. It’s my home. I write, I research, I think a lot about sex, money, and the strange spaces between people. Used to be a sexologist, worked with couples, did some academic grunt work. Now? Now I write for the CamoWallet project, telling stories about this suburb for their site, camowallet.app. It’s a different kind of intimacy, you know? Mapping the familiar. Growing up here, you think you know a place. The Burke Road shops, the smell of the donut van on a Friday night. But Camberwell has layers. Like a person. You peel one back and there's always something else. My life’s been a bit like that. A lot of peeling back layers. Some of it I wrote about, some of it I lived. I got my start at Swinburne, studying psychology, then did a Masters in Sexology at the University of Sydney. Came back. Always came back. I worked at a clinic on Cookson Street for a while. Saw a lot. Learned more. About desire, about the stories we tell ourselves to keep the spark alive, or to justify letting it die. It’s messy, human stuff. I remember, must have been 2008, I was fifteen. A group of us used to hang out near the Camberwell Junction after school, grabbing shitty pizza from that place that's now a vegan cafe. We’d dare each other to talk to girls, to boys. The awkwardness was a physical thing, you could taste it. I had this massive crush on a guy named Liam who worked at the old video store on Burke Road. The one with the faded posters for films no one ever rented. I’d go in just to ask him for recommendations. He recommended 'Blue Velvet' once. I was not ready for that. At all. But that crush, that confusing, electric feeling of wanting someone you're not supposed to, or you think you're not supposed to, it was my first real lesson in the gap between public identity and private desire. That gap is basically been my whole career. Honestly, I’m not sure I'm that competent. I just listen. And I remember. The thing about being a sexologist, or writing about this stuff, is you realize everyone is making it up as they go along. The confident ones are often the most lost. I've sat in rooms with people whose marriages were hanging by a thread over a $50 debt, and others who were genuinely bewildered by their own joy. It's taught me that trust isn't built on having all the answers. It's built on showing up, being a bit of a mess yourself, and not running away when someone else is. That's what I try to bring to my writing about Camberwell, too. It's not a perfect place. It’s got its contradictions. And that’s what makes it real. I was born in the old Epworth Hospital on February 8th, 1993. Dad always said it was a scorcher that day, the kind of dry heat that cracks the gum trees and makes the cicadas scream. We lived in a small flat just off Riversdale Road then, near the train line. I can still picture the red rattler trains shuddering past, the whole place shaking a little. Mum would walk me down to the Camberwell Market on Sundays, through the throngs of people hunting for junk and treasures. Even then, I was fascinated by the objects, the stories they held. A chipped tea cup, a worn-out leather book. Someone’s past, up for sale. I think that's where I first started to wonder about the hidden narratives in ordinary things. And in ordinary people. Living in Camberwell my whole life, it’s like I have a geological map of my own history here. There’s the bench in Canterbury Gardens where I had my heart properly broken for the first time when I was nineteen. The library on Camberwell Road where I wrote my first thesis, surrounded by the smell of old paper and floor polish. The pub on the corner of Burke and Camberwell where I celebrated getting that first research grant, the one that let me study the economic dynamics of modern dating. Money and intimacy. They’re the same conversation here, you just don’t always see it. You see it in the anxious glances at a restaurant bill, in the quiet negotiations of a mortgage. I walk down Prospect Hill Road and I see the ghosts of conversations, of people I’ve known, versions of myself I’ve left behind. It's my city. Every crack in the pavement, every overgrown garden on a quiet street like Cookson or Stanhope Grove, it’s all part of the same story. My story. And I'm just trying to tell it, one article at a time.