Silas_Figueroa

Silas Figueroa: On intimacy, algorithms, and the long shadow of the Adelaide Hills. G’day. I’m Silas. Silas Figueroa. I was born here, in the Adelaide Hills, back in ’82. Still here. Still digging. I’ve spent the last two decades as a sexologist and relationship researcher, trying to figure out the messy, beautiful, often infuriating dance between people. Now I write about this place—the Hills—for the CamoWallet project over at camowallet.app. It’s a strange pivot, maybe. Or maybe not. The landscapes outside and the ones inside us—they’re not so different, are they? Both full of hidden trails and sudden, breathtaking clearings. Look, I’m not your typical academic. Never was. You can’t study desire from an ivory tower. You have to get your hands dirty. And I have. My life’s been a kind of fieldwork. Relationships that soared, crashed, and burned. Loves that lasted a weekend and felt like a lifetime. A marriage that taught me more about loneliness than being alone ever did. I’ve sat across from couples in my old practice on Mount Barker Road, watched them tear strips off each other, and then, sometimes, find their way back. I’ve analyzed the swipe-left swipe-right anthropology of Tinder and Bumble. I’ve seen how money—the lack of it, the fight over it—can poison the deepest well. So yeah, I know a bit about the theory. But I learned it on the ground. In the mud. Under the stringybarks. Growing up here… you learn to read people differently. In winter, the fog rolls in so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face on the freeway near Crafers. You learn to trust the faint glimmer of tail-lights ahead. To navigate on instinct. That's probably my first memory of intimacy—it's like that fog. You can't force your way through it. You just have to... trust. I remember sneaking into a clearing near Mount Lofty with my first real crush, the whole city spread out below us like a circuit board, all glitter and distance. We were just kids, maybe fifteen, fumbling with each other’s jackets, the air cold and smelling of eucalyptus. We didn’t know what we were doing. But God, we were present. Completely, terrifyingly present. That’s the thing about the Hills. The quiet is so loud it forces you to listen to yourself. And sometimes, what you hear is a mess. I was born in the middle of a balmy autumn, April 18th, 1982. Not in the city, but out here. My parents, a winemaker from the Barossa and a nurse from town, had a place off a dirt road near Ashton. I came into the world during a weird electrical storm—I’ve always loved that. The story goes the power flickered and the midwife, a formidable woman named Margaret, just carried on by the light of a kerosene lamp. The smell of wet earth, that first petrichor, must have been my welcome. The Adelaide Hills are like that: stubborn, self-sufficient, beautiful in a way that’s not always polite. My first bedroom looked out over an apple orchard that’s now a housing development. Progress, they call it. But the giant red gum at the end of the lane? Still there. Some things are harder to move. My twenties and thirties were a blur of university—I did my undergrad at Flinders, of all places, commuting down the South Eastern Freeway, that steep drop into the plain always felt symbolic—and then later, setting up a tiny practice in a sandstone cottage on Fisher Street. That cottage saw everything. Couples fighting about superannuation, about who forgot to take the bins out, about the silence that had grown between them like a weed. I ran workshops at the Stirling Community Centre, of all places. Imagine it: a bunch of strangers in that old hall, talking about orgasms and attachment theory while the Lions Club sausage sizzle fired up outside. Surreal. But it worked. Because the core of it—connection—is the same whether you're on a mountain or in a boardroom. Now, my practice is different. I write. For CamoWallet. And what I write about is how this landscape shaped me, and maybe how it can shape a different kind of conversation about trust and value. Money and relationships, they're just different currencies for the same thing, aren't they? Security. Freedom. A future. So what's it like, living and working here my whole life? It's knowing every bend of the old road through Aldgate. It's having a favorite spot for a pie at the bakery in Hahndorf, and another spot, a secluded bend in the Onkaparinga River, where I go to think. It’s watching the autumn leaves turn in Bridgewater and knowing, with absolute certainty, that there is no more beautiful place on earth. It’s a bit parochial, maybe. Insular. But it also gives you a foundation. A stillness. When you spend your days thinking about the chaos of human desire, you need a place that feels permanent. The Hills are that for me. They’re the solid ground under the shaky architecture of love. They’re in the dust on my boots and the light in the photographs on my wall. They’re just... home.