Nathan_Nunes

Nathan Nunes: Sex, Money, and the Eastern Suburbs G’day. I’m Nathan. Born and bred in Randwick, right here in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. These days, I write about this patch of the world for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. But my real work—my life’s messy, fascinating work—has been in the trenches of human connection. Sexuality, relationships, the whole damn thing. I’ve studied it, lived it, and probably made every mistake you can make along the way.I was born at the Royal Hospital for Women, back when it was on Oxford Street, in the middle of a chilly June in 1979. They’ve since moved the hospital down to Barker Street, but the old spot is now a park. Kind of fitting, I think. A place built for bringing life into the world becomes a place for kids to just... be. My parents had a flat just off Frenchmans Road, near the racecourse. I can still remember the smell of the track on race days—that mix of damp grass, horses, and anticipation. It’s a smell that always meant Saturday to me.And what do I do now? I write. Specifically, I write about Randwick for the CamoWallet project. It’s a bit of a pivot, I guess. After years of decoding human behaviour in bedrooms and on dating apps, I’m now decoding the place that shaped me. I write about the light hitting the sandstone of the UNSW quad, the quiet desperation in a crowded bar on The Spot, the strange intimacy of a shared walk through Centennial. It’s still about connection, just with a neighbourhood instead of a person.Growing up here in the 80s and 90s... look, it was a specific kind of chaos. I was a scrawny kid, always getting into trouble at Coogee Beach, body surfing when I should have been in class. I went to Randwick Boys High on Barker Street—a brutalist masterpiece of a school, honestly. It was all concrete and pent-up teenage energy. I remember sneaking into the UNSW Roundhouse for gigs before I was old enough. Seeing bands like You Am I or even catching a random DJ set in one of the college bars. It felt like the whole world was just on my doorstep, but also impossibly far away. You'd cruise down Alison Road in a mate's beat-up Commodore, windows down, pretending you owned the place. We didn't, of course. We barely had two bucks to rub together. But the freedom... god, the freedom.I think my sympathy comes from the scars, you know? I’ve had my heart stomped on more times than I can count. I’ve also been the one doing the stomping, which is a harder thing to admit. I spent years thinking I could build a framework for love, a kind of logical system. I’d devour the research—Baumeister, Vohs on the economics of sex, Helen Fisher’s work on the brain in love—and try to apply it like a formula. It never worked. You can’t algorithm your way out of a broken heart while standing outside the Coogee Bay Hotel at 2am, watching the person you love walk away with someone else. That pain is real. It’s not theoretical. And it’s why, I think, people actually trusted me when I started doing this work. They knew I wasn’t some academic who’d never been lonely.My past? I fell into sexology almost by accident. After uni—I did a psych degree at UNSW, wandered those hallways near the library for years—I started working with a community health organisation, the Kirketon Road Centre in Kings Cross. It was raw, real-world education. HIV prevention, sexual health, working with sex workers and people struggling with addiction. It strips away all your polite, middle-class ideas about sex pretty damn fast. Then the apps hit. Tinder, then all the others. It was a gold rush of new behaviour. I started consulting, not for the big tech companies, but for smaller startups trying to understand how people actually *use* this stuff. The gap between what people say they want and what they actually swipe right on... it’s a canyon. I’ve seen fortunes made and hearts broken on that little screen. It all ties back to money, too. Always does. The economics of dating, the transactional nature of it, whether it’s a coffee or a five-star dinner at a place on Frenchmans Road. It’s all part of the same dance.This city is etched into me. I can’t separate myself from it. Every street has a memory. Belmore Road, where I’d buy used books and pretend I was smarter than I was. The stretch of Avoca Street that leads down to the Prince of Wales hospital, where I’ve visited friends for both the birth of their kids and their final days. The random bus stop on High Street where I had a conversation that completely changed my view on intimacy. It's not just a place on a map. It's a network of moments. You see the same faces, the same dogs, the same runners pounding the pavement no matter the weather. There's a comfort in that. A rhythm. When I write about Randwick for CamoWallet, I'm not just describing the cafes on The Spot or the grandeur of the racecourse. I'm trying to capture that rhythm. The way the light falls on the old terrace houses in the afternoon, the quiet hum of the place. It’s my home. It always has been.