something I wrote for the sydney morning herald yonks ago

This is Bogan Delusion-era publicity, 6 June 2011. I found this file on my work computer. It may have been edited a little before it went to print, who knows, who indeed cares. 

I had 13 years as a Sydneysider. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I went to the western suburbs beyond Auburn – which in itself, to my mind, was far beyond the border of the ‘west’. In those days, I probably would have looked a little askance at Summer Hill. In the early nineties, returning from work in Darlinghurst or after classes at the University of Sydney, I might very occasionally stay on the train and go to Rockdale or perhaps even some distant berg like Blacktown, just to see what was there.

I now appreciate I was at the very beginning of escape from my middle-class illusions about the superiority of life at the centre. There was, and still is, an enigmatic, subconscious idea that, if you aren’t living in a street with a view of Centrepoint, you are somehow disconnected from the radiant beacon of city culture – the only culture worthy of the name in Australia. I did not hate ‘westies,’ as they might have been known, but I certainly feared and shunned them in any interaction where they did not recognize (for instance) Newtown as the Sun to their Pluto. Little challenges erupted occasionally: if you’re roughly my age, you might remember that Mental as Anything video set in a street in Sans Souci. A solid, funny, kitchen-sink drama song set in a solid, funny, neighbourly street where there was never a dull moment? I had to exercise my mind to appreciate that as a celebration of suburban life, not a satire on the dull absence of a pulse of the world 5 km beyond the GPO.
I was a snob, and my only defense is that I was a snob because the snobbery was, and I have to say largely remains, pervasive. Inner-city elitists in Australia continue to project views about large groups of otherwise diverse people simply on the basis of their geographic location.

In Australia’s inner cities now we (or should I say ‘they’: I’ll always be middle-class, but I am no longer inner-city, having relocated to a suburb 20 km from central Melbourne) have the bogans. The word has murky origins, possibly related to the region and the river in central NSW, then popularized by Kylie Mole and the Comedy Company to become a nationally understood synonym for what were known in Brisbane as bevens, Hobart as chiggers, and Perth as bogs. Whatever: to my mind, it’s code for ‘working class.’ I am reminded of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions in which a well-to-do couple have a secret code which allowed them to discuss African-Americans in front of their ‘coloured’ maid: they discussed the ‘reindeer problem’.  In a Sydney context, one might simply compare this with the derision daily suffered by the people of Mt Druitt, for instance, or Green Valley: the idea being that the residents of these areas are ‘bogans’ but because they are too primitive to realise it.

Bogans are, first and foremost, ‘just a joke’, in TV comedies such as Rebel Wilson’s Bogan Pride – in which, incidentally, many of the funniest characters weren’t bogans but ‘nerds’, or in retooled versions of the ‘Irish jokes’ we once told at school. When the joke isn’t funny anymore, bogans are cast as a ‘cultural’ not a ‘class’ issue. But when the distorting contradictions of this assumption are stripped away (using incisive questions like, ‘what’s the difference?’) the word ‘bogan’ is laid bare: it’s a new way to sustain class resentment, to pigeonhole people and places. So poorly defined is the term, it’s difficult to criticize its use in everyday life: it’s applied to Julian Assange and Julia Gillard, and then to violent criminals, if not by the same people at least in the media in the same week. Publicising my book The Bogan Delusion on talkback radio last week, many callers were of the opinion that bogans existed because they’d seen them: even listening to the multitude of differing definitions of this peculiar word did not seem to deter radio audiences from the firm belief that their prejudices affirmed their experience.

I’m just happy to see the conversation take place. I want to see Australians pull themselves out of this holding pattern of demonisation of ‘bogans’ who dwell ‘out there’ on the suburban fringe, so commonly described in anthropological terms as though there was some kind of sub-species hitherto undiscovered, and as though anti-social behaviour was irreparable because innate to a ‘species’ of uncultured poor, the victims who deserve their blame. I would also be quite happy if those who describe themselves as ‘bogan’ recognized that to self-identify as such is to demonstrate too much awareness to be truly a ‘bogan’ in most people’s minds. I would also be very happy to see an end to the assumptions that comedy and film – for instance, Angry Boys and Snowtown – are actual representations of truth, rather than dramas based on extreme amplification.

Is all of this ranting against the word ‘bogan’ a plea for political correctness? Possibly, but not the way ‘PC’ language is usually discussed. It’s a plea for precision: it’s about calling the disenfranchised, or marginalized, what they are – rather than a reindeer. Besides, if Assange, Gillard, Shane Warne and Eric Bana (yes, the charges have been laid, not just because he once played one on TV) are all bogans, who isn’t a bogan? Is it praise, blame or demonization? Some clarity in the argument might grease the wheels of the discussion, and who knows, we might just get somewhere.