A year ago, my wife and I underwent a hipster-to-bogan metamorphosis. Faced with the choice of (a) continuing to service a huge mortgage on a latte-belt two-bedder or (b) have a kid, the primal drive to propagate the species narrowly won out over the Sydneysider’s obsessive determination to hold on to primo real estate.
I was under the impression I was only inner-city wanker to have ever made the schlep of shame to the suburban fringe (I’m yet to meet another) but it appears not. Priced out of more fashionable suburbs, David Nichols, an urban planning academic, bought a house in the notoriously boganish Broadmeadows in 2004.
Of course, the danger of making this kind of move is you’ll go native and come to suspect the people you find yourself living among aren’t the uncivilised brutes of the popular imagination and that the community you left behind is not beyond criticism itself.
Nichols has just released The Bogan Delusion, a book that explores his cross-cultural odyssey and growing dismay with the self-righteous smugness of those who live within 10km of a GPO.
Writing off the denizens of the outer suburbs as subhuman is now pretty much the only kind of prejudice that Australians — especially educated, middle-class ones — can indulge in free of guilt, social censure or legal action. In the unlikely event a bogan-bagger is called upon to justify themselves, they’re likely to insist that it’s reasonable to hate on bogans because (1) Their selfish consumerism is hastening the ecopocalypse (2) Their racism is a terrible blight on the nation’s soul and (3) They keep voting, for the basest of reasons, for the likes of John Howard and Tony Abbott.
Nichols argues that the first two contentions are, at best, highly debatable. He doesn’t directly tackle the third, but I’ll get on to that one myself shortly.
Nichols, an expert in the field, points out people have an environmental impact wherever they live and that a case can be made that urban dwellers actually have a greater overall negative impact on the environment than suburbanites. Case in point: McMansions, built to adhere to modern environmental standards, don’t necessarily guzzle any more energy than 100-year-old terrace houses.
On the question of consumerism, inner-city sophisticates might be able to argue they have more refined tastes and more subtle ways of signalling status than those in the boondocks, but it’s a big call to argue they’re any less materialistic. (Despite the widespread belief that only bogans purchase big-screen TVs, I seem to recall seeing just as many of these in the lounge rooms of my former neighbours as I’ve discovered in the ‘media rooms’ of my new ones.)
And urban hipsters’ cherished belief that they’re paragons of tolerance ensconced in the throbbing heart of multicultural Australia has to be one of the more absurd delusions of the modern age. Ashamed as I now am to admit it, I wasn’t aware that African-Australians existed until I went west. I never saw them when I lived in the inner city, just like I hardly ever saw (unless they were serving me food) the other kinds of people who I now live next to: Pakistani Muslims, Indian Sikhs, first-generation immigrants from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Fiji and Tonga.
At least in my neck of the woods, all these people live happily side by side, so it seems bizarre that they’re constantly being slammed as xenophobes by those hermetically sealed in the most white-bread postcodes in the nation.
This isn’t to deny whipping up hysteria about boatpeople doesn’t play well for the Liberal Party in places such as western Sydney; unquestionably it does. But the reason can’t be racism, at least in any simple sense. After my move, I discovered it’s rather more challenging to be laidback about boatloads of uninvited guests adding to population pressures when, for instance, getting to your place of employment involves setting off in the pre-dawn darkness in the desperate hope that it will only take one hour to commute to work rather than two on some woefully inadequate motorway.
Once you’re conscious of having a foot in both camps, the never-ending hipster vs bogan culture war seems a little, well, stupid. If only because you come to realise that the large majority of Australians also have a foot in each camp and fail to conform neatly to either the bogan or hipster caricature.
Consider the following — inner-city elitist pin-ups Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating both lived in and represented the bogan badlands of Sydney’s south-west, while the battlers’ friend John Howard grew up in its now café-strewn inner west (before moving to its leafy north shore).
Whitlam, Keating and Howard all managed to dramatically transform Australia because, for a time, they enjoyed the support of the suburban heartland. Of the last six federal elections, the side of politics most willing to take the concerns of those living in that suburban heartland seriously has won four and drawn one.
The lesson for inner-city progressives?
They can either continue to laugh it up over bogans’ supposed fondness for Ed Hardy shirts, pre-mixed alcopops and naming their children after luxury car brands and remain politically impotent or attempt to get some their agenda implemented by doing what their opponents have been doing for the last 15 years — engaging respectfully with the kind of people who live in marginal seats.
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