Bogans

The Hill is dead. Gone is Burnout Boulevard. Gone are the smoking car husks. Gone are the flaming toilet rolls. In their place? Coffee carts, dodgem cars and young families.

The Hill, for non-members of the V8 sub-culture, is the imaginative name for the top of Mount Panorama, home of the annual Bathurst 1000 race.

For years the Hill was an almost mythical place; a lawless oasis where men were free to be men, if your definition of being a man includes drinking to the point of vomiting, yelling “show us ya tits” a lot and burning stuff.

Continue reading "Boozy Bathurst boganism ain’t what it used to be" »

Yesterday’s $1.025 billion NRL TV rights deal represents a seismic shift in the battle for football code supremacy. For all the AFL development officers converting the heathens in Western Sydney, rugby league is still officially the dominant code in two of Australia’s three most populous states.

Channel Nine must now totally revamp its TV coverage to ensure it does its bit to keep the game popular.

There was a solid blowup yesterday by Nine boss David Gyngell over complaints that Nine will delay telecasts of some of its three weekly games under the new deal, as it does now. That was a sideshow, and Gyngell was right to defend his commercial turf. But that doesn’t mean Nine can sit back and change nothing. In fact, they pretty much need to change everything.

Continue reading "A billion reasons for Nine to overhaul its league coverage" »

We come into this world naked and squalling. Red in the neck, uncouth. Unsophisticated. Obsessed with boobs, loud, annoying, a bit farty.  Not much interest in literature.

We are all born bogans, and life is just a matter of accreting varying levels of sophistication.

Today, as we bathe in The Voice winner Karise Eden’s victory proclamation of “I love youse all”, we can also joyfully splash about in the fact that the word ‘bogan’ has finally made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Continue reading "Bogans all let us rejoice" »

He’s a self-confessed “cashed-up bogan” earning $800 a day or more than $208,000 a year in Western Australia’s booming mining industry.

Since dropping out of Mandurah Catholic College in year 10, James “Jimmy” Dinnison, 25, has earned more than a million dollars, bought a house at aged 18, but sees no problem in splurging most of his hard-earned on boy’s toys.

Jimmy works extremely hard in tough, hot and dangerous conditions as a fly-in, fly-out driller working 12-hour shifts in the WA’s north-west, but he has also sparked fierce debate about the fall of the American economy, thanks to an intriguing profile in that country’s highest circulating newspaper, the influential Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading "He drills. He earns. He spends. He doesn’t apologise" »

Boganomics: Why Bogans Like The Things They Do is another not-quite-scientific look at bogans from the same bastards who brought you Things Bogans Like. This excerpt is brought to you by the sometimes bogan Punch Team.

Taking a journey into the bogan mind can be a bewildering experience. The sheer volume of mental tricks and short cuts that the bogan has devised is so daunting that many psychologists prefer to deny that bogan psychology even exists, rather than acknowledge it and delve in.

While this denial has no doubt made their lives more comfortable, this book sets out to answer the questions that Ivory Tower Academic Latte Intellectual Arsehole Nobodies (or ITALIANs, for short) are ill equipped to tackle. Let’s begin.

Continue reading "Why bogans like Harvey Norman and other mysteries" »

I love living in the Territory. I enjoy our laid-back way of life, our sense of community and relaxed attitude toward blinkers and pyrotechnics. I’ve even grown quite fond of the crocs.

But some of the comments I’ve heard recently regarding asylum seekers are a whole other type of croc. A crock of shit.

Seeking asylum is not illegal. There is no queue. And yes, your taxpayer money is being wasted - by offshore processing and mandatory detention.

Continue reading "“Stop the boats” is a pathetic bogan slogan" »

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.

Continue reading "Boganville and Hipstertown aren’t so far apart" »

Surely Aussie fans can come up with something better than Oi Oi Oi to lift the spirits of our cricketers?

It’s bad enough that this Ashes series is being televised, but many Australians have made the terrible mistake of paying good money to go and watch the matches live.

I was among their number on days one and four of the Adelaide Test and had intended to go to the Sydney Test, too, but will now be doing something more entertaining, like scraping my fingernails along a blackboard or watching an Andre Rieu DVD.

Continue reading "Aussie Aussie Aussie? No! No! No!" »

The third cricket Test starts today. But whether Australia recovers, England continues to stomp its foot on our throat, or a huge meteorite crashes into the WACA, there’s really only one sports story in town.

It’s a story which has spilled well beyond the sports pages, and it shoots off in an exciting new direction each week, enlivening an otherwise flat sporting summer.

The story is of course Shane Warne.

Continue reading "Summer of Shane" »

Come Christmas Day, many members of the book-reading class are likely to wake up to find a copy of Things Bogans Like (TBL) in their stocking. The book was released in late October but its publicist, Nicola Pitt, is “expecting a spike in sales just before Christmas as people buy the book to give to friends and family. It’s one of those gifts that result in lively Christmas lunch conversation”.

Needless to say, those having lively conversations about Things Bogans Like, which has spun off the wildly popular website of the same name, are not themselves likely to be bogans and any bogan who does stumble upon the book is unlikely to find much to laugh about.

In contrast to Kath & Kim’s Jane Turner and Gina Riley, the six young men (who’ve opted to remain anonymous) behind TBL satirise what they perceive as the pretension, racism, ignorance, unabashed self-interest, clumsy social climbing, sheepish conformism, hyper consumerism and reactionary politics of Australia’s rapidly gentrifying lower orders without the tiniest sliver of empathy or affection for their targets. The vicious humour of the book is irradiated with class condescension of the let’s snigger about what those people watch (trashy current affairs programs), buy (Buddhist-themed home furnishings) and name their children (Chanel or Armani) variety.

Continue reading "I, for one, welcome our new bogan overlords" »

Adelaide is no longer the city of churches or the arts capital of Australia. It’s not even Yass with poofs, as famously dubbed by Doug Mulray shortly before he was mercifully removed from national television by Kerry Packer.

According to the people who run the Sydney Fish Markets, Adelaide is now the mullet capital of Australia, a bogan backwater which is ripe for ridicule by the pony-tailed pseuds who run Sydney’s advertising industry.

The Fish Market’s new marketing slogan - “More Mullets Than Adelaide” - says more about Sydney smugness than Adelaide’s earthiness.

Continue reading "Get a dog up ya Sydney" »

As we head towards yet another Australia Day, a lot is being raised and debated about how we see ourselves as a nation, as a people, and as a part of a global community. Tensions have arisen of late regarding topics of border security and the safety of foreigners on our shores.

But perhaps, most intriguingly, as an aside to these debates, there has been a strong suggestion that the Bogan identity, which has plagued Australians for decades, is no longer being worn as a badge of honour, but rather, and rightfully, as one of shame.

Could we finally be seeing the end to our redneck wonderland? Are Australians favouring intellect over yobbism, manners over crassness, compassion over blind patriotism? When articulated in these straightforward binaries, one can only wonder - why it has taken so long?

Continue reading "Alas poor bogan I knew him well" »

World Vision is a signed-up member of the ever-growing ‘I Love Frankston’ fan club, applauding the generosity and compassion of local residents whose good deeds often go unnoticed by the media.

Results from a recent World Vision survey into child sponsorship found that the so-called ‘bogans’ of Australia often beat out the bourgeoisie and blue-bloods when it comes to making a difference in the fight against global poverty.
 
According to the survey findings, Frankston residents are among Australia’s biggest givers to children living in poverty, regardless of a weekly median income of $880, which is significantly lower than the national median household income of $1,139. Despite child sponsors accounting for less than two per cent of the total population of Victoria, more than 1,000 Frankston residents currently sponsor a child through World Vision.

Continue reading "Bogans are the most generous givers" »

The people of Frankston, Victoria, deserve full marks for enterprise. But they’ve damaged their bogan credentials by becoming the latest mulletted suburb to jump on the I-Heart-New York-style merchandising bandwagon, with the suburb’s GDP ballooning to several thousand dollars with the sale of I Love Frankston t-shirts, stubbie holders and prophylactics.

The Herald-Sun chronicled the marketing push last week, with residents of “Franga”, “Franghanistan” and “Funky Town” as Frankston is also known hailing the move as a sign their city was on the improve.

It’s the kind of upwardy-mobile stuff which appalls committed westies such as bricklayer Todd Farrawell, from St Marys in Sydney’s West, who went public last month to bemoan the aspirationists who were getting all giggly about the “new buzz” out west.

Continue reading "Frankston not in the hunt for Australia’s top bogan suburb" »

It may seem a little odd to some but I am a snob when it comes describing those who are generally referred to as bogans – where I’m from the correct term is booner. So being from Canberra it will always be booner and I rarely make allowances those who may not know what I’m talking about.

This may seem ridiculous but it does makes sense: calling someone a bogan (or booner) is after-all an inherently snobbish exercise in differentiating from others you consider yourself to be better than in some way, so you may as well do it properly. 

Another reason for objecting to the term is its ubiquitous use in Australia at the moment is slowly strangling other regionalisms that at least gave a certain colour and flair to our condescension.

Continue reading "The lost tribes of bogan: booners, westies and bevans" »

Will the Bogans in the House please show up?

Yesterday, John Cobb extended the meaning of ‘bogan’ to include ‘not showing up’.

I met with his constituents, the Bogan Shire Council, yesterday and listened to their case for a $6 million heated swimming pool.

Continue reading "Marrickville mauler hits back at bogan Nationals" »

It was a meeting last week with a fired up General Manager of the Bogan Shire Council, Mike Brady, and the Deputy Mayor Jim Hemstead over the town’s swimming pool which really got me thinking about bogans.

The news was full of chk-chk-boom bogans, and to top it off I even had 30 kids from Bogan Shire’s St Josephs School come into the Parliamentary office whilst on an excursion to Canberra.

After a moment of quiet reflection I am now convinced there is a bit of bogan in every Australian. I realise the statement may shock and dismay some of our nation’s more refined citizens.

Continue reading "On the origins of the bogan as a species" »