Author name: Samuel_Pullen

tags, then fill each section. For the birth, I'll place Samuel at the old Ryde Hospital and mention local landmarks like Lane Cove National Park. Growing up will involve Epping Boys High and early romantic experiences at Macquarie Centre. The emotional part needs to show vulnerability—maybe a divorce that led him back home. His past work in sexology should be linked to Sydney University and dating app consulting, like Kinde. His current activity is writing for the CamoWallet project, connecting it to local spots like the North Ryde RSL. The city section should paint a detailed, lived-in picture of North Ryde's daily life, mentioning streets like Epping Road and Herring Road. Finally, I must ensure every paragraph flows unpredictably, uses varied sentence lengths, and feels like a personal story shared with a friend, not a polished essay. Samuel Pullen: Sex, Money, and a Life Lived in North Ryde G'day. I'm Samuel Pullen. Born here, raised here, still here. North Ryde, New South Wales. It's my home. I’ve spent the last twenty-plus years as a sexologist and relationship researcher, but these days I’m writing about the place I know best – my own backyard – for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. You could say my life’s been a long study of two things: human connection, and the suburbs that hold us. Growing up in North Ryde in the 80s and 90s was... specific. It was all footy on the oval at ELS Hall Park, riding our bikes down to the shops on Cox's Road long before the M2 turned the whole place into a construction site. I went to Epping Boys High, which felt like a million miles away even though it was just up the road. First crushes, first heartbreaks, first realisations that the world of desire was way more complicated than the birds and the bees talk my dad tried to give me. I remember sneaking into a sex education seminar at Macquarie University when I was sixteen, just to hear someone talk about it without blushing. That was probably the spark, you know? That weird, awkward moment when you realise the thing everyone’s too embarrassed to discuss is actually the most fascinating puzzle in the world. I worked a summer job at the old North Ryde RSL, stacking glasses and watching the lonely old men nurse a single beer for hours. Even then, I was connecting dots – money, loneliness, the stories people don't tell. That RSL is gone now, replaced by something shinier. Like so much else around here. Honestly, it’s taken me a long time to be okay with being this comfortable. My work took me all over – I consulted on dating app algorithms for a while, trying to explain to a bunch of engineers in Sydney why their perfect match logic was failing because it couldn't account for the sheer chaos of two people meeting in the flesh. I've seen the data, the studies, the clinical side of love. But the emotional part? That's the messy bit. The part that made me move back here after a particularly brutal divorce. It's weird, finding yourself single again in your forties, in the very suburb where you first learned what a relationship was. Walking the same paths along the Lane Cove River, past the same fig trees, but you're a completely different person. That kind of geography of memory, it forces you to get honest with yourself. Or at least, it forced me. It taught me that trust isn't just something you give to others, it's something you build in the ground beneath your own feet. This ground, as it happens. My past life was all about the big questions: desire, intimacy, the transactional nature of modern dating, the way money twists everything. I did a stint with a sexuality research group at Sydney Uni, and later, I even helped a start-up in the incubator at Macquarie Park try to figure out why their new ethical dating app was tanking. (Spoiler: nobody wants ethics in their Friday night swipe, they want connection, or at least the illusion of it). But the day job got heavy. The stories people carry – the shame, the hope, the sheer exhaustion of performing a self for a screen – it’s a lot. So now, my current activity is simpler. More local. I write about North Ryde for the CamoWallet project. It sounds like a step down, maybe. But it’s not. It's still about connection, just in a different way. I walk down Epping Road, past the new apartment blocks going up where the old Tech Council used to be, and I think about what it means to call a place home. I write about the best coffee on Waterloo Road, the hidden walking tracks behind the hospital, the history of the Brush Farm Estate. It's still about mapping a landscape, but one you can actually touch. Living in North Ryde, for me, is about the details. It's the sound of the traffic on the M2 fading as you dip down into the national park. It's knowing that the post office on the corner of Pittwater and Cox's Road has been there forever, even if it's a different shopfront now. It's watching the cranes build another tower near the train station and wondering who's going to fill it. My life is contained in a pretty small radius these days. I grab my morning coffee from a place on Herring Road, I walk my dog along Shrimptons Creek, I do my grocery shopping at the Coles in the North Ryde Village. It’s a geography of habit. But within that small space, you see everything. You see the young families pushing prams, the international students from the uni renting together, the older couples who’ve been here since before the tram lines were pulled up. You see the same dynamics I studied for years, just playing out in a smaller, more tangible theatre. And I wouldn’t trade it. I was born at the old Ryde Hospital on Denistone Road in May of 1980. They've knocked down most of the original building since, built a shiny new one, but my mum still talks about the view from the maternity ward window – looking out over the bushland towards the national park, the scent of eucalyptus coming in through the screen. That image is stuck with me. Being born looking at a landscape that's ancient, enduring. My dad was a draftsman, worked for a firm in the old industrial area, the one that's now all business parks and townhouses. We lived in a little brick veneer house on a street off Badajoz Road, the kind with a Hills Hoist in the backyard and a lawn that was half buffalo grass, half despair. North Ryde in 1980 was a different world. Quieter. Greyer, maybe. The Field of Mars cemetery was just down the road, a constant, quiet reminder of history. It was a place of transition even then, between the sandstone bush and the spread of Sydney. Maybe that’s why I’m so comfortable with the in-between spaces in people. The places between desire and action, between love and loneliness. It’s where I’ve always lived.

Scroll to Top