Gabriel_Pappas

Gabriel Pappas: Cars, Curiosity, and the Long Road Back Home Kia ora. I’m Gabriel. Born and bred in the bottom of the South Island, Invercargill—a place that shapes you, whether you like it or not. These days, I split my time between writing about the city I know like the back of my hand for the theautosDating project on theautosight.com, and... well, thinking about the messier parts of being human. I used to be a sexologist. Yeah, I know—the jump from that to car culture seems odd. But honestly? It’s the same damn thing. It’s all about connection. What fires up. What breaks down. What needs a little tuning. I’ve spent over a decade studying the mechanics of desire and another two decades inhaling petrol fumes. You learn things. You learn that people are just cars with heartbeats—some are built for speed, others for comfort, and some just need a good mechanic who actually listens. That’s what I try to bring to the table. A bit of grease under the fingernails and a PhD in what makes us tick. Or tock. I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does. But I’ve been around the block. A few times. Growing up here in the ’90s and early 2000s was... specific. Invercargill wasn’t exactly a hive of nightlife. So you made your own fun. For me, that meant my uncle’s garage on Spey Street. He was rebuilding a tired 1978 Ford Falcon. I was maybe twelve. He’d let me hold the flashlight, then eventually pass me the spanner. There was this one night, must have been 2004, freezing cold—the kind of cold that settles in your bones—and we were trying to get the timing right on that old straight-six. He was frustrated, cussing under his breath. And then he just stopped. Lit a cigarette. Looked at the engine. “It’s not just metal, Gabe,” he said. “It’s got a rhythm. You gotta find its rhythm.” That moment... it clicked. Everything has a rhythm. Engines. Cities. People. I carried that with me through high school at Southland Boys’ High School, through those awkward teenage years where you’re trying to figure out your own rhythm, your own timing. Invercargill is a city that demands you pay attention. It’s not like Auckland or Wellington, where everything is screaming for your notice. Here, you have to look. You have to drive down Dee Street and feel the history in the old brick buildings. You have to sit in Queens Park, the largest inner-city park in New Zealand, and just... be. I’ve lived away. Melbourne. London. Even a stint in Berlin. But I always came back. There’s something about the way the light hits the water in the Oreti River, the way the wind whips across the plains—it’s grounding. It’s home. I live in a little place now, not far from the Turnbull Thompson Park. I can walk to the city center, grab a coffee from a spot on Esk Street. It’s a small city, maybe 50,000 people, but it’s got layers. You just have to be willing to peel them back. I was born in July of ’92. At the old Southland Hospital on Kew Road. I’ve been told it was a bleak day, even by Invercargill standards. The kind of winter morning where the frost is so thick it looks like snow. My mum always joked I came out squinting, like the world was just a bit too bright and a bit too cold. My old man was a mechanic, of course. Worked at a shop out near the Tiwai Point aluminum smelter. He was late to the hospital because his van wouldn’t start—classic. That story, it’s always been my origin myth. Arriving into a world of frost and stubborn engines that refuse to turn over. It set the tone, I guess. My career as a sexologist started in a funny place—here. After uni—I did a stint at the University of Otago, but came back, did some post-grad work through a few programs that had ties to the local health board—I started working at a small community clinic on Tay Street. It was a drop-in center, the kind of place where people came with problems they couldn’t talk about anywhere else. Young couples terrified they weren’t “normal.” Older folks trying to reignite something that had gone cold. I spent six years there, listening. It taught me that our anxieties around intimacy are universal, but the way we talk about them? It’s all about the local dialect. I eventually branched out, did some research on sexual behaviors in rural and semi-rural communities. Fascinating stuff. The drive to connect is just so... primal. But the path to it is often paved with shame. I wrote papers. I gave talks. But the work that mattered was always the one-on-one stuff, the conversations in small rooms where the real truth came out. Now, I channel all that into my writing for theautosDating. It sounds like a niche project, but it’s not. It’s about how people meet, how they vibe. The car is just the vessel. The drive is the metaphor. We’re exploring how the car culture here—the clubs, the weekend cruises down to Bluff for a blue cod—shapes relationships. It’s a different kind of clinic, but the goal is the same: helping people find their rhythm.