I grew up in the outer suburbs in a Mcmansion with upwardly mobile Howard-voting parents and garden view to ‘Fountain Lakes’ shopping centre. Boganism is in my gene pool.
A new blog called Things Bogans Like (inspired by Stuff White People Like) attempts to map out exactly what does and does not constitute Aussie Boganism.
The site is run by a group of young men who live in inner-Melbourne, go to music festivals and art galleries. Certainly, the fact many working-class people now have money and live in big houses has been making the intelligentsia uncomfortable for quite some time.
But the boys from the “things bogans like” list assure me they are not picking on the poor because “in many cases there’s little or no income disparity (between people who are and are not bogans). Indeed, a number of the things we’ve written about in the blog so far are premium-priced goods”.
It might be sign that taste rather than cash is becoming new indicator of class in Australia.
And I have to admit their list is often remarkably accurate.
So, in the context of this apparent important in making of fun people different from ourselves, I’ve put together my own list helping people understand their place in the world.
Ten Signs You’re an Inner-City Tosser
If you meet at least five of these criteria, you might be a tosser.
10. You go to Laneway Music Festivals
Nothing is more fun than hanging out in a over-crowded, stinking lane way full of a bunch of stony-faced intellectual indie types, right?
Letting go and having fun is certainly not why you go to Laneway Festivals.
This means no dancing for starters, but also try not to smile, laugh and generally try to make it look like life in general is actually just a bit of a chore.
* Bonus points if you’re someone who endlessly pontificates about styles and genres of music without ever having bothered to learn a musical instrument.
9. You really, really feel for the oppressed
Never mention a person’s sexuality, race or nationality. Don’t categorise people by gender, even if you want to sleep with them. You may even feel that despite your middle-class, white upbringing you might also be oppressed in some way.
8. You’re an uptight, Machiavellian Middle-Manager with ‘Raver-Style’ highlights in your hair
You like to remind people that despite your obsession with time sheets, performance appraisals and KPIs – underneath that bureaucratic façade your really fighting the power with your $270 subversive hairstylings.
So next time you’re talking about desk-chair audit and occupational health safety with those glistening pink highlights in your hair, you might want to add “wiggidy, wiggidy, whack maybe it’s time to sign that contract” or “you hoe, you cant take your RDO” to keep it genuinely “
7. You visit obscure countries and talk about how “cute” they are
Think Jordan, Guatemala, Trinidad and Ghana.
Apparently, despite all the poverty, despair and corruption you saw - all you can say is how amazing everything was.
6. You go to bars full of shithouse, retro, ugly furniture
Sure, I understand It takes a real artist to see beauty in the ugliness. But it takes a really smart entrepreneur to spend $2.50 on a Salvation Army couch and then charge you a packet to sit on it.
5. You look a bit like La Roux
See what I mean here.
4. You dress-up your love of TV as something intellectual or ironic
If you ticked “yes” to this, there’s a good chance you studied media or cultural studies at University. In which case you can probably talk about whether or not Bart Simpson fits the Nietzschean ideal.
3. You use unnecessarily large words
A really good wanker will find a use for obtuse, dichotomy, paradigmatic, Latin words, figurative and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in daily conversation.
2. You spend Saturday nights having deep, depressing conversations
And you’ve probably spent all day in an independent bookstore or reading the weekend newspaper to research your topic.
1. You decry bad taste, suburbanism, materialism, boganism, marriage and children or anything else which reminds you of where actually came from
Next thing you’ll start using the term “aspirational voter”. Then you’ll get annoyed with working-class people who have the audacity to earn more money than you and start calling them “cashed-up bogans”.
Well I don’t know about you, but I’d sooner hang out with a down-to-earth, drunken, badly dressed bogans in their “good room” any day of week than be subjected to yet another underground film festival or conversation about the nuances of identity politics on a Saturday night.
A bogan might have bad taste, but the space between their ears is their own.
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