Nicholas_Spaulding

Nicholas Spaulding: Maps of Desire G'day. I'm Nicholas Spaulding. Born in Adelaide, live in Adelaide, and after decades of navigating the messy, beautiful, and often baffling world of human connection, I now write about it. Specifically, I write about how we find each other—and how money twists that whole dance—for the CamoWallet project. You can find my work on their site, camowallet.app. But that’s the now. The then... well, that’s a longer story, anchored right here on the Adelaide plains. Growing up meant watching the city change. I was that kid at Henley Beach, not just swimming but watching couples argue on the sand, then make up in the dunes. Obsessed, maybe. My mates were chasing waves; I was chasing the why. Why do we connect? Why do we hurt each other? By the time I was at Henley High, I’d devour any book on psychology I could find at the Civic Library on Rundle Street—before it got all renovated and shiny. I remember skipping school once to sit in the old Adelaide Arcade, just watching people filter through that beautiful, haunted space, wondering about their secrets. It felt more educational than maths. Probably was. My past is a scrapbook of odd jobs and intense study. I poured beers at the Exeter on Rundle Street, listening to more confessions than any therapist. I coded basic databases for a medical practice up on Melbourne Street, North Adelaide—saw how people's anxieties were logged in dry, clinical data. I even did a stint helping a researcher at Flinders Uni, down at Bedford Park, collating studies on relationship satisfaction. It was all fieldwork for the real degree, the one you don't get framed. Now, my days are different. I walk from my place near the parklands, grab a coffee from a spot on Hutt Street, and write. I dissect dating apps like a biologist dissects frogs—coldly, but with a sense of wonder. For CamoWallet, I try to untangle the knot of finance and flirtation. How a profile mentioning 'Henley Beach sunset walks' hits different if they're also into crypto. It’s all data, right? But it’s never just data. Look, I’m not some detached academic in an ivory tower. I’ve been the guy crying in his car outside a hotel on Glenelg after a spectacular breakup. I’ve been the guy who thought he’d found 'the one' over a bottle of cheap red from a McLaren Vale I helped pick grapes for one vintage. That competence you want? It comes from scars. It comes from understanding that the way my grandmother, a fierce woman who lived in a sandstone cottage in Unley, managed the family money was her own language of love and control. It’s all tangled. The emotional part isn't a section of my life; it’s the whole damn building. And I’ve lived in every room. The messy bedroom, the sterile living room, the kitchen where all the real conversations happen. That’s why I can write about it. Not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve asked all the wrong questions. Personally. Adelaide is my map. It’s not just a city; it’s a psychological landscape. You can’t understand connection here without understanding its geography. The snobbery of a Toorak Gardens address vs. the earthy creativity of a studio in the West End. The libertine whispers you still hear in the North Adelaide pubs, a legacy of the city's colonial 'purity' laws that inadvertently created all sorts of underground economies of desire. My life is scored to the sounds of the Place Caller at the trots at Globe Derby Park, the quiet hum of the State Library reading room, the roar of a Crows game at Adelaide Oval. My research is walking the River Torrens Linear Park, watching couples on picnic blankets, families with barking dogs, solitary runners—all of us just trying to connect, or escape connection, in our own way. This city, with its grid of light and its hidden hollows, it taught me everything I know about the spaces between people. I was born on the eleventh of September, 1991, at the Burnside War Memorial Hospital in the leafy eastern suburbs. It’s not there anymore, not in the same way—merged, rebranded, like so much of our history. But my mum still talks about the view from the window, looking out towards the hills, the autumn light coming through. Dad, a geologist who spent weeks at a time in the opal fields up at Coober Pedy, barely made it back in time. Classic. So my start was this strange mix of the clinical, sterile room and that vast, ancient Australian landscape he brought home on his boots. Adelaide in the early 90s was still a big country town in so many ways. The buzz was the new multimillion-dollar Adelaide Casino opening on North Terrace—a temple to money and risk. Maybe that’s fitting. My whole life’s been a study of those two things, and the risks we take with our hearts.