Such is Life series 2024

The word ‘bogan’ quickly evokes a stereotype we all know from social commentary and popular culture. Who doesn’t love The Castle, Kath & Kim, and Housos, and associate things like Ugg boots, tinnies of VB, winnie blues and flannies with bogan culture.

Can we actually definitively pin down what exactly constitutes a bogan though? Bogan interests cross over with multiple Australian subcultures and share common features of our national identity. Enjoy a perceived underdog status? Too right mate! A love of beer? Fuck’n oath! What even are the defining facets of the Australian identity and culture; what do we collectively find virtuous and what’s unworthy? Uh oh, I feel an identity crisis coming on… When ridiculed by progressives, the worst aspects of the Aussie bogan could be stigmatised as personifying racism, homophobia, ignorance, machoism, and/or misogyny. Unhelpful stereotype much? Problematic to say the least. I’m an Australian, but not that kind of Australian!

Are we all just bandying about a term that has no validity? Cultural critics and academics argue that stigmatic associations of the stereotypical bogan anti-hero have less to do with who it’s directed at, and more to do with the opinions, and tastes, of the person levelling it; a label used to both celebrate and mock notions of Australian-ness used by individuals to distance themselves from facets of their own culture which they perceive as tasteless or undesirable. Is bogan in the eye of the beholder?

So, if bogan culture is just behaviours and elements that we’re embarrassed by and don’t value as our own, let’s talk about class. Social and political perceptions of the bogan oscillate between defending conservative ‘working-class battlers’, to attacking an ‘unrespectable’ displaced working class. A moral middle-class disdain for the unrespectable working class reveals a tendency to disparage poor people. In terms of social justice, now more than ever as class inequalities are widening in Australia, it’s not exactly helpful to stigmatise the disadvantaged.

From my perspective as a first generation Australian, a borderline outsider, I’m curious about the entanglement of bogan culture with national identity. My family come from Germany, a country with a seriously uncomfortable collective relationship with nationalism, where showing outward signs of nationalistic pride evokes huge red flags… (pun intended.) My migrant parents, now both citizens, “flew here, I grew here” (actually, they arrived by ship), however they both have the fervour of ‘born again’ Australians. Mama ardently supports the Tillies, sings in her heavy German accent not just one but two verses of the national anthem, and on Australia Day proudly wears Aussie flag temporary tattoos on her cheeks. At Papa’s naturalisation ceremony he decked himself out head to toe in R.M Williams, as if it was the uniform of the Aussie country bloke, a club of which he aspires to be a member. And no worries mate, Papa can sink tinnies of XXXX with the best of them. Are my immigrant parents bogan and proud?

So, it turns out the notion of the bogan in our social and cultural imagination is actually pretty ambiguous, an enigma dodging simple categorisation, like a Torana at full throttle in the outer suburbs evading the cops. There’s really no need to be scared of the big bad bogan. Choose your own adventure, I recommend approaching with tongue-in-cheek and a side of pride.