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.

a year ago today: publicity for the bogan delusion

Hot on the publicity trail for my book. This is actually the second book with my name on it in the last six months, but it is so much of a different ball game it might as well not be a book but a… saucepan. The previous book Community which I co-edited and co-wrote much of, is a broad and deep account of the establishment, creation, form, style and fate of community buildings in Australia since the beginning of the last century. It is huge and I am very proud of it. The current one, The Bogan Delusion is a ‘ranty tract’ (I described it as such in most drafts of the book itself, and perhaps that description has sustained, I don’t remember).

Yesterday morning I had 15 mins on RRR and it was really fun, I felt very comfortable. Last night in a related (but unacknowledged – I don’t think the book came up at all) event I was on a panel talking about music journalism, at the Tote as part of the Emerging Writers Festival. This morning I was on Life Matters with Richard Adey.

This radio coverage is all still a bit novel to me so I don’t quite know how well I do. Like a dufus this morning I had to ring first my wife then my mother immediately after the show to make sure I hadn’t fucked it up! They were very nice about it (but maybe they have to be?) I think they would have told me in nice ways if I screwed something up.

It didn’t help that left to my own devices for the first 10 minutes of the hour I was flipping through the book and found that I had made a huge error about the location of one of the estates planned by the Griffins in early 20^th century Melbourne. This would have been annoying enough, except that I am the author of a journal article about huge errors made about the location of estates planned by the Griffins! (I got the names ‘Avondale Heights’ and ‘Ascot Vale’ mixed up, as I continually do in real life). Oh well, I covered myself in that article by saying everyone makes mistakes… so it’s just sort of proving my own point isn’t it. Maybe I could even pass it off as an ironic reference (get real).

Anyway, Adey was interesting. I had been prepped in a minor way about where the i/v might go, in a discussion with his producer who is very nice and very engaged (so was Richard Adey). So there was nothing out of the blue, though the producer had not pumped me for what my answers might be. The set up at the beginning was that my premise was that the bogan ‘didn’t exist’, which is a good hook (indeed, the whole ‘bogan delusion’ idea is a hook really – if the book was called Society Should Be Inclusive it might not be so hot this June) and that there were so many definitions of the bogan that it rendered the notion unusable. Then there were about 8 or 9 callers who proceeded to explain why the bogan did exist and give it various different definitions, many of which contradicted each other. I then was able to conclude by saying all this diversity of opinion really proved my point, and I felt good about that. I did notice about myself (and I will have to keep this in check from now on) that my voice went up in pitch as I became more exasperated about putting this conclusion across, and there was a bit of triumphalism about that, in a manner of speaking, which possibly didn’t do the showbiz aspect to Life Matters any favours. I also feel that, in a way, there is a danger that this is the diametric opposite of preaching to the converted, with a negative effect i.e RN listeners are exactly the sort of people who don’t want to hear what I have to say, and may not buy a book about it. On the other hand the only reason I care about whether they buy a book about it is that I don’t want the publisher to lose money, because I certainly don’t stand to gain from it, and wouldn’t really get much from it even if I hadn’t agreed to take a royalty of nothing so as to keep the price down.

As I was doing Life Matters I kept notes in case anything came up that I needed to refer to, though in fact ultimately I think I did only refer specifically back to one caller, because I was interested in his comment ‘I’m not racist’ and his discussion of ‘trailer trash’. Another caller who I really wanted to discuss, but didn’t get a chance, was the one who spoke about identifying bogans by their ‘sudden body movements’, which I think is one of the strangest things anyone could say about anyone. But I had to let it go as I was being guided by RA.

All in all, I feel fairly positive about the whole thing, and I reckon I can handle this media train. The downside will be in a couple of weeks when I’m going to be fatigued and lacking in interest about the whole schtick (there are already, it has to be said, signs of that happening and it’s hard to be new, over and over again, about something I am already very well acquainted with).