Perhaps because I was a middle class kid going to a largely working class high school, or maybe because I joined the ALP as a uni student in 1986 when presenting as working class still accorded political status, I’ve always been very interested in class and culture.
Intriguingly, this seems to be something that’s very topical. We’ve seen two books specifically addressing how class disdain is expressed through cultural contempt published recently, Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class in the UK, and here in Australia, David Nichols’ The Bogan Delusion.
The topicality of Jones’ work is starkly evident from the way that the denizens of areas which experienced rioting recently have been characterised as if they’re some sort of savage and de-civilised beings, part of a Tory backlash which is also heavily racialised.
[Jones reflects on the riots here.]
In Australia, things have been slightly different, as we’ve seen white working class people employed as political weapons since the days of Pauline Hanson. One of the ways neo-conservatism has worked as a screen for neo-liberalism has been the celebration of the supposed nativist authenticity of outer suburban culture, a celebration orchestrated by latte sipping Liberal voting middle aged white people, the chattering fraction of the bourgeoisie.
This then produces its mirror, a self-identification by progressives which looks a lot like the ‘inner city’ stereotype. It proceeds in train with the decline of class politics, the de-unionisation and fragmentation of working class jobs, and the dis-organisation of politics in favour of cultural identities.
The paradox here is that the space of the political narrows to a debate between different groupings of inner urban highly educated progressives; and actual poverty, inequality and, well, class are screened out in the ultimate social exclusion.
But the repressed returns: in malicious humour. At Left Flank, Liz_beths takes a look at how this works, in what I think is compulsory reading, through twitter memes such as #boganmovies and #tightsarenotpants, and websites like Things Bogans Like.
In doing so, she has put her finger on something very important indeed about how politics now works in Australia, and how politics and class collapse into cultural distinction. Politics, and economic interest, are distorted and dissolved by a cultural imaginary.
Oh yes, this is why I have loathed almost everything produced as “comedy” in this country since about 1996. The punchlines came in three flavours, sexist shaming of Britney, sexist shaming of Paris and classist shaming of “bogans”. I remember watching one newby comedienne who I’ve since seen on a couple of panel style comedies and her routine was just one long sneer; Newcastle, tracky dacks, single mothers, fags. I can’t watch Chris Lilley, even for a moment, because I feel ashamed for him.
Well said. I despair at the casual ‘classism’ expressed by many who seem quite happy to define (and judge) complete strangers by postcode/ accent/ t-shirt.
@1 – I can’t watch Lilley either.
Thanks Mark, that was an interesting read. I think denigrating jokes about people who we think ourselves at least morally superior (by accident of birth), tend to reveal more about the personal inadequacies of the teller. A vicarious way of making yourself appear ‘higher’ simply by demonising those you deem ‘lesser’. Unfortunately many seem too stupid to understand that in the long run this isn’t going to have the desired effect of somehow elevating you.
The gradual dissolution of class structure in Australia makes for an interesting society but doesn’t seem to be able to withstand too much honesty without a fair amount of agonised self-consciousness. There is an element in the Australian psyche that is bullish and ignorant, intolerant of difference and fearful and scornful of eccentricities, it can be very rich or very poor, but always it is way under-educated.
Education has to be the key. We must never become like the UK & Europe and blindly accepting of class distinctions and their inherent limitations.
Having said that . . . Kath & Kim:
“but Mum we are effluent”
totally cracked me up.
Governments seem less and less concerned that citizens have a well rounded education.
(I blame John Howard.)
Yes, there’s in an innate superiority, a glib smugness associated with too much Australian comedy these days. Something like the Gruen Transfer seeks to enlighten the hapless consumers of pap with non-enlightening witticisms or contrived controversy
Or maybe I’m losing my sense of humour. Bring back Roy and HG I say!
What joyless rubbish. If you exclude jokes about people from humour you’re pretty much left with puns. And if you exclude jokes from responses to irritating behaviour you’re pretty much left with stress, pompous sermonising or violence. I intend to go right on chuckling at bogans – how else can I cope with them?
I have the opposite experience to you Mark, in that I grew up in a working class family and went to a very middle class school. So yes, I have had first hand experience of the cultural snobbery that masks snobbery about class.
I enjoy mocking my sister and her bogan family, because they are bogans. And because I don’t think they’re so weak and clueless that they can’t take it.
It’s a fine line. Choosing to make some groups beyond mockery is also its own way of saying you think they’re inferior.
We need:
http://www.myjoke.gov.au
All quips, one-liners, put-downs and stereotypes can be aired and assessed in an open, democratic and non-discriminatory manner. Only education will prevent us from failing to be positively humourous.
And this website should be administered by Peter Garrett. (No joke.)
Humour is so complex. liz_beth points out that he laughs at the ‘rissole’ jokes in ‘The Castle’ because they’re very close to home for her. Whats the line between wit and the sneer?
I don’t find ‘Angry Boys’ funny, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny. Neither do I find it glib, or hateful towards its characters. I think there’s way too much empathy going on for that. It’s painful to watch and I think that’s because of Lilley’s empathy with characters such as Gran. OTOH, I think S’mouse was a disaster because Lilley has no real knowledge about that character. He’s working him from the outside.
I find there’s sometimes empty-headed denigration of working class people at LP. It’s done in the sneering guise of disgust at white, bogan tradies who voted for Howard and are only interested in buying McMansions and getting a tax break. It happens repeatedly in the relevant threads. I find that quite painful to read because of the unexamined classist assumptions. Sometimes it’s also done as humour. I rarely see anyone being called out on it.
I find the examination of class fascinating too. I come from a working class background marked by a family who left school the day they turned fifteen, worked in blue-collar jobs, were hard core Labor and lived in a suburb that full of factories and wharves. But, we earned as much as people who worked in white-collar jobs, so complicating the idea of class. We also had shelves full of books by ‘literary’ authors, especially political ones like Orwell, Steinbeck and Zola. Yes, the working class read, and not junk either.
I was the first family member who finished high school, much less went to uni. I was lucky enough to go to a selective high school. The culture clash there was enormous. It was full of girls from the leafy suburbs, who had holidays houses down the coast, ski lodges, subscriptions to the opera. My mother, in particular, was very daunted by it all. There were girls there who bullied me because of my accent, because I came from a ‘dirty’ suburb and my father wore a blue-collar. Those of us who were working class were pathetically grateful to be given this educational opportunity. But we also had to put up with our old friends who thought we were ‘snobs’. Then, when I went to uni I suddenly had kudos for being genuinely working-class.
My brothers are all tradies. They earn far more than me. But, they still can’t afford to live in the old ‘dirty’ suburb, which is now one of the most expensive in Melbourne. O, the irony. I’m the little sister who works in the arts, which is a little weird but okay.
My dad, after fifty years of working on building sites and always being tremendously vigorous, is now dying from mesothelioma. That’s what happens to bogan tradies. But, he can joke about that too.
Just to clarify, I’m not myself setting out to posit any propositions about humour as such, still less to engage in a critique thereof. I think it is a very relevant datum how people feel about being made fun about, and why certain forms of humour divide people up in certain ways, but I’m seeing this as a symptom of a displacement of politics into culture, and a change in how class works.
In other words, I think there’s something important to think about here, to which “what joyless rubbish” is not a response.
Hence the commentary in the post, which as always, I urge people to actually read.
Mark, you’re quite correct about the usefulness of humour as social datum.
However, before you can make good your “displacement” thesis, you need to define what, if anything, is being displaced.
I’m not aware of a very strong tradition of discriminatory classist humour in Australia. I have done some research into British humour in the era 1850-1914. That humour is heavily laden with class, leavened with a healthy dollop of anti-Irish, Paddy humour. Australian humour, or at least that which was published, did not mimic British classist humour, though the Irish, and Jews, did come in for a bit of stick.
The Sentimental Bloke, Ginger Meggs, Dad and Dave, while embedded in class, looked at the world through the imagined spectacles of the underdog.
Sorry, to clarify further, Katz, I’m arguing that class politics is being displaced into a distinction based or expressed through popular culture references. Thus, instead of a politics organised around relatively conscious middle and working class identities, we have a disorganised politics where differences of class still signify, but signify as culture, not as the basis for political interest.
Perhaps I should have made this a tad clearer!
If there’s not a strong tradition of discriminatory class humour in Australia, that’s of interest to me, because I’m posing a question about why it’s so ubiquitous today (among other things I’m trying to tease out).
I’d be interested to see you tease out what you mean by “disorganised” in that snippet. What are the hallmarks of “organised”?
An interesting parallel is to be found in the post-bellum South where there arose a plethora of cultural stereotypes around blackness: Uncle Tom, Zip Coon, the Jigaboo, Aunt Jemima. These stereotypes mapped and mocked behaviour. Black share croppers and white share croppers shared an economic interest against the landlord. But the politics of race, expressed through culture, helped to keep them divided.
Was this process “disorganised”?
Onya Fine!
Mark Bahnisch @ 10
Apology and clarification: my comment (which I stand by) was my response to the Liz_beth article not Mark’s blog.
@15 – Ok, Jenny, if you want to address a comment to Liz_beth, it would probably be best to do so on her own thread.
… where social bases of support for political parties are stable and largely predictable, and where those are based on class differences, and political conflict fairly openly expresses that difference.
That’s in the Australian context – you could certainly have such an organised politics around other sorts of cleavages – ie ‘religion’ in Northern Ireland, race in the American South. The key cleavage in those two instances would be expressed primarily in terms of status.
The thinking draws on Weber’s class/status/party trio.
I think you might be flirting with historicism there, Mark.
To a large extent, especially, after 1916, Australian popular politics was driven by sectarianism and concomitantly, ethnic identity. I understand that religion and ethnic identity map to some extent on to class.
However, after 1917, and especially after 1921, there existed in the ALP an underlying tension between Catholics and secular leftists that festered until the great split in 1954. Here we see a powerful and persistent cultural cleavage within the labor movement that had little to do with class.
Australian publications were mostly too polite to reproduce in full the nasty humour that was driven by that cleavage. But no one over the age of 60 who grew up in Australia can forget the jibes and insults generated by that intra-class divide.
The quips about present day bogans are extraordinarily polite in comparison.
I was drunk last night and nearly left a rant on here about the real “working class” on one of those riot threads. I deleted it tho and right now I wish I hadn’t.
“…the celebration of the supposed nativist authenticity of outer suburban culture, a celebration orchestrated by latte sipping Liberal voting middle aged white people, the chattering fraction of the bourgeoisie.”
Thats why the term bogan came back into fashion isn’t it? As a reaction to the right ring bullshit coming out of the suburbs. I am a bogan, well I was in the 80s, after I moved to Melbourne and grew up hanging around in Oak Park, Broady and then Footscray/Ascot Vale, before it was gentrified. Fine’s right about a few things. (Here’s to your dad too Fine.)
Then again there is no point romanticising either. It was a fight first ask questions later culture, some people were incredibly sexist, anti intellectual and racist. (But at least they were open about it so you could punch them if they shat you.) But they weren’t nasty and closed hearted. There is a real nasty streak these days, a kind of brutal dislike of people, and a weird sense of authoritarianism that I really don’t like the look of.
we have a disorganised politics where differences of class still signify, but signify as culture, not as the basis for political interest.
Is that to some extent consequent of the success of organized labour during the 20th century. Whatever snobberies still exist it’s doubtful one could ge away with the following infamous bit og rhetoric:
There’s also the problem that the ALP, whatever school its members may have attended, whatever jobs their parents may have held, is not composed of ‘working class’ people. Gillard might ‘identify’ as working class but she she ceased to be such the minute she graduated from law school.
Katz, to some degree it’s a question of interpretation, but I think it’s true to say that class was a *more powerful* predictor of voting than ethnicity/denomination in the period we’re talking about. That held true even after the DLP split, though it began or reflected a process where class lost its primacy.
There’s a parallel phenomenon where politics ceased to be obviously about either distributive questions as between well defined classes or differing visions of society attributable to class identity.
Well, that’s true if you take an objectivist rather than subjectivist view of class, Adrien.
Also, Julia Gillard is not the ALP. The ALP consists of individual members and affiliated unions, most of which are composed primarily of working class people. Indeed, the union movement is by definition, the working class organised. That this doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it once did is precisely my point.
Mark, it is the case that Liberal voters are, on average, slightly better off than ALP voters, who are, in turn better off than National Party voters. But do you want to guess which political party has the most financially well-off voters?
Mark: I think your central idea about the politicisation of culture subsequent to the disorganisation of (class) politics is acute.
I have always reacted badly to the term ‘bogan’ because I always called such people mates, not bogans, coming as I do from the dock suburbs of Newcastle. It’s a strange business because you can have the deep shits with the politics of people who are rellos and cultural comanions and at the same time experience a gut level loathing of ‘Little Britain’ and ‘Kath and Kim’ because of the middle class sneer that they depend on. I still spill my gutz laughing at early Billy Connolly and love Pink because she’s a class act who’se well and truly transcended any class limitations by being utterly herself.
@24, Terry, what’s your point here? I assume from the way you pose the question the answer is ALP, though I’d very much appreciate a link to any data.
The whole argument of the post was that:
(a) Politics is no longer as organised around class lines and identifiable economic interest;
)
(b) One consequence of this is a displacement of class into culture (and a weird reversal where class is invoked against the left);
(c) But a hell of a lot of ‘progressives’ are also caught up in this, and are as guilty of ignoring actual economic and social inequality as people with very similar cultural dispositions and lifestyles on the right side of the fence. (You have to picture that fence as being in New Farm
@25 –
One other thing that intrigues me, akn, is when ‘Bogan’ became a nationwide word. It was unknown in Brisbane in the 80s, or rather known to be a ‘Mexican’ word for what was called around here – a ‘Bevan’. But that term didn’t apply to a whole class of folks. It’s a bit hard to recapture exactly what it did mean, but something different, and I don’t really think the vocabulary was there to make the sort of distinctions that started coming in the 90s signify.
Of course, that’s a comment on Queensland in the 1980s, perhaps not on other places. We do have much more of a national culture (at least in the capital cities) than we did up until very recently.
Owen Jones’ hypothesis was that demonizing the working class made it much easier to blame them for their worsening conditions. I think there was a similar reaction to the sbs doco, some people seemed to miss the demonstration that racist beliefs could be changed, and preferred to concentrate on what seemed to them to be the far more important message that lower class people are really horrible and christen their children with funny sounding names.
And this attitude is absolutely affecting how people behave towards others. At my son’s former high school, all of the teaching staff sent their own children to private schools, with a few honourable exceptions they treated parents, particularly single parents with undisguised contempt. This vast social distinction between the professional class and the rest was simply not around in the seventies, and not surprisingly you’ll find that the wage gap was not as large as it is now either.
The really interesting thing is that political satire, or a satire that contains any kind of critique of power, has almost disappeared, in favour of “satirising” the lower classes.
Mark, its actually The Greens, by quite a wide margin. Which is why I think – unless Craig Thomson can find whoever was using that union credit card to pay for brothel servcies very quickly – we can kiss goodbye to the current govenrment, and with that to the carbon tax. The contradictions that such a policy was based upon were ultimately far too great, once the consensus with the Libs under Turnbull disappeared.
Oh, ok, interesting, Terry. That again makes sense in terms of my argument, as the Greens are a post-class party with an implicit rather than explicit class base.
I’d still be interested in a link.
Could we please take discussion of Craig Thomson and the carbon tax to the open thread, though? It’s not really on topic for this one.
@28 –
Su, yep.
I can’t remember who did the research (I think it may have been some demographers and economists at ANU) now but there was a study a few years back which showed that in the 70s, income differentials between suburbs were much flatter (just as the difference between top management and lowest paid was flatter within organisations). Income differentials within suburbs were less flat.
In other words, we’re living more closely with others in similar economic circumstances, and the gap between those cohorts is greater.
It may go a long way to explaining the ‘spatialisation’ of these cultural distinctions (after all, ‘Bogans’ are not from Spring Hill or other formerly working class in part but now gentrified suburbs, but from specifically co-located outer burbs). It may also go a long way towards explaining the sharpening of the sorts of complete failures to understand and empathise Liz_beths was talking about, which you’re talking about too.
How very true. Oh wait there’s Clarke and Dawe. 3 minutes a week, what more do you want.
It’s interesting also that it exists in other comparable countries.
Yep – political satire seemed to disappear around the time of John Howard’s advent.
‘The Chaser’, I think, aren’t really political satire. They’re satire that’s entirely tied into the news cycle and about personalities. Hence now they pop up on The Drum being political commentators.
Craig Thomson for another day. Its a topic that’s not disappearing.
On the voter demographics issue:
Goot, Murray and Watson, Ian (2007) ‘Explaining Howard’s Success: Social Structure, Issue Agendas and Party Support, 1993-2004′, Australian Journal of Political Science, 42: 2, 253 — 276.
A SOCIO-SPATIALANALYSIS OF VOTING FOR POLITICAL PARTIES AT THE 2007 FEDERAL ELECTION
Robert J. Stimson and Tung-Kai Shyy, People and Place, Vol. 17 No. 1 (2009)
Empathy is a two-way street.
The question is whether one side of the alleged barrier suffers more than the other from the lack of empathy.
The unspoken assumption in this thread is that the latte set loses more than the bogans in this alleged mutual disregard.
Should this assumption be examined?
Oh for farks sake.Shakespeare made fun of bogans. And latte-sippers. And po-faced neo-conservatives. And most everyone who couldn’t take a joke.
My teaching colleauges and I all teach Jaime and Jonah. They’re not fictional. Chris Lilley is a caricaturist. As in, that guy at the school fete who can draw a goofy cartoon of your dad on a surfboard in two minutes flat for 10 bucks. He’s very very good at what he does, but what he does really isn’t that significant.
The humour is affectionate, not malicious.
I was a middle-class kid at a middle-class public school. The biggest worry in schooling systems is how the middle-class manage to use schooling as a sorting-and-sifting mechanism to shut the working class out of opportunities and social mobility.
But if you’re looking to blame Chris Lilley, Kath ‘n Kim and The Chaser, you’re looking in the wrong place. Look in the staff rooms and you’ll find the culprits.
I’ve always thought Crocodile Dundee marked/created a turning point in Australian culture. (I wasn’t ever tempted to watch it.) It turned the bogan into an ‘icon’. Bogans became proud of their strand of our national character.
Su wrote: “This vast social distinction between the professional class and the rest was simply not around in the seventies”
The real professional class in the 70s was still was small: lawyers, engineers, bank managers and so on. There was always a vast social distinction between those people and the rest. The tertiary education explosion of the 70s was one of the factors which blurred the professional/class divide.
Up ’till the 70s the working class tried to imitate the style of the upper class, as best they could. There were no bogans – bogans need the confidence to go off and do their own tasteless and vulgar thing. One of the reasons we laugh at bogan jokes is that they ridicule the pretention or fo0lishness of the bogan who thinks they have made themselves look really good, when in fact they look ridiculous.
But is taste just subjective? I don’t think so. Does anyone else here get sent those “People of Walmart” emails? Everyone laughed at Princess Beatrice’s taste in hats and it wasn’t because she was low class – it was because it was foolish or pretentious or tasteless to wear that hat!
“Everyone laughed at Princess Beatrice’s taste in hats and it wasn’t because she was low class – it was because it was foolish or pretentious or tasteless to wear that hat!”
Way to miss the point. The hat was a deliberate fuck you to the Queen.
Terry @34
The article from People and Place doesn’t in fact tell you that Greens voters are richer. Rather, it tells you that their vote is concentrated in polling booth areas that are better off. This is a function of the unusual concentration of the Greens vote in inner-urban areas, but it tells you little about the incomes of Greens voters compared with the voters around them in those areas.
I’ll take a look at the Goot & Watson article in a minute.
Thank you to everyone who has read my post and commented on it. I really appreciated hearing people’s experiences, as so often such experiences are not given decent space or representation. I thought ‘Fine’s comment, as follows, highlighted something important:
It speaks directly to some people’s outrage that I/Mark might suggest the ‘humour’ of ridiculing on the basis of class is not only good humoured. There is a difference between working class people having humour in life, and joking about their own experiences, and on the other hand ridicule, ‘othering’ and hatred.
To exclaim ‘what joyless rubbish’ is to, AGAIN, marginalise. But to be honest, my main issue with @6 (Jenny’s) comment is her saying: ‘I intend to go right on chuckling at bogans – how else can I cope with them?’. What a wonderful example of just such ‘othering’. A bunch of people say they find it offensive, and your first thought is to again treat them like outsiders (‘cope with them’) and again shame them.
It would of course assist meaningful discussion, especially for comments such as @36, if people read the actual post. Nowhere does it say Chris Lilley, Kath ‘n Kim and The Chaser are to blame for anything. In fact none of those were mentioned in the post. And further, the main pop culture reference mentioned was the movie The Castle, which I thought I explained in some detail that I did find both funny and problematic. Nor did Mark’s original post mention these shows.
Mark, as I said privately earlier, I thought your post in particular (meaning the response to my post) was really insightful. The back and forth on that question with a number of people has given me much to think about.
Sorry Joseph Carey, obviously I don’t know Princess Beatrice’s mind as you do. Please substitute Camilla, or any other aristocrat who has been ridiculed for their (unsuccessful) attempts to ‘look good’.
Terry @34 again
The Goot & Watson piece seems to point out simply that the Greens do better among white collar workers and professionals than blue collar workers. When I was a member one of the key weaknesses was the party’s (in)ability to relate to blue collar workers. They have also been weak at attracting non-white voters (and even more so members), despite having their vote concentrated in multicultural polling booth areas!
It is certainly true that the Greens have the voters with the highest incomes on average, but this statistic has to be understood in context of being a niche party with support concentrated in certain areas. By and large they don’t proportionately attract many voters with very high incomes. When you control for educational level, Greens voters come out behind Liberal and Labor voters on income (this is according to work Ben Spies-Butcher has done with the Australian Election Study dataset).
Mercurius, I will Fark! in response. Chris Lilley is a Barker boy. He is capable of producing the kind of charicatures that people with that kind of ingrained privilege are inclined to. I will respectfully disagree with Fine’s assessment of this kind of charicature as to me it is as far, far removed from empathy as Barker is from my primary and high school. It is vulgar to parade one’s origins in public, but I have been accused of idealising the working class in the past (from afar, as I understood) and this is so far from the case, it really tickles me.
Russell, the professional class was not that small, in my town, the largest non metropolitan town in QLD at that time, educational segregation occurred for religious reasons, not for reasons of class or educational aspiration. I have absolutely no doubt that I was fortunate enough to be publicly educated at the most egalitarian time in our history, I went to state high school with the daughters of specialists who knew my mother (who left school at 15) because she was a nurse. There were no Bogans, I agree, but it wasn’t because we were emulating our betters, it was because incredibly intelligent, incisive, working class people were all over the place and there was no social cache, or very little, in presuming to be superior to them. Since this post and Liz_beth’s take comedy as their springboard, just have a look at the long, wonderful tradition of working class comedy and comedians, much of which was still available via BBC/ABC in the 70s.
” …. a celebration orchestrated by latte sipping Liberal voting middle aged white people, the chattering fraction of the bourgeoisie.”
I’m not sure why you insist on trotting out the race card. You also falsely claimed on another thread that the three Muslims killed in a hit and run during the English riots were outside a mosque , even though it was reported pretty well everywhere that the men were outside a petrol station.
I also note you played the race card when an Indian youth was killed two years or so back while cutting through an unlit park on his way to work. We now know the killer was a pimply kid and race was not the issue.
Why the race obsession?
@40 – yes, indeed, Elizabeth, I never mentioned The Chaser, or Kath & Kim, or Chris Lilley, and neither did you. But, in general, it seems to me that the reaction “you can’t take a joke” or accusations of joylessness are really odd. Is humour not subject to critique? Isn’t humour an indicator of a whole stack of stuff about how people think others are like and the social work?
And why do people get so defensive when stuff they like laughing at is suggested as appropriate for reflection?
That’s extremely interesting, Dr_Tad. The second bit sort of doesn’t entirely surprise me, just going on basically unsystematic observation of Greens workers at booths and Greens members at functions, etc, but you have to wonder why.
It may, in part, be the anti-population growth and indeed anti-immigration rhetoric that you get from some Greens.
@44 – Start, if I’m wrong about the location of the death of the three men in England, I apologise, but I was going from a live feed from The Guardian. Sometimes these reports are inaccurate initially. But there is no doubt that the men were Muslims and part of the South Asian community, and there are a number of what I consider to be creditable reports that race was a factor in a lot of the riots.
I don’t have one. What I do have is both a perception that race is a central point of tension in a lot of social, cultural and economic cleavages, and a desire that that should not be so. The fact that I choose to discuss it, while others may not, does not make it an ‘obsession’. It’s partly a social scientific question, and partly, for me, a question of social justice.
I’ve answered you now, but I don’t want to debate this on this thread. So I’d ask you to stay on the topic, please, if you intend to contribute further.
“Choosing to make some groups beyond mockery is also its own way of saying you think they’re inferior.”
Agreed 100% Anna Winter. But I’d go further: the rise of anti-Bogan humour dates *precisely* from their rise of the Bogan to the centre of cultural imaginary in Australia under Howard in the late 90s.
As always… humour then turns the world upside down. The king becomes clown.
Of course, that’s when I became a Lefty Elitist – when it got marginalised. I accept many on the left were too soft to follow the true path I was blazing, but hey, the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, yada.
But hear this! if you’re majoring in reaility this term, here’s a hot tip for exams: Opposing humour about bogans challenges *nothing at all* here in the wide brown; it defends *nothing at all* but the status quo. The idea that this is radical or “pro working class” or culturally authentic is risible.
Its the middle class on holidays, in a flanny – economically colonising previous working class suburbs as they do it and pretending theyre keeping it real my moving out. Its like some demented Maoist phase of the soft left – oh look at me, Im in a factory!
Meanwhile your so-called bogans are in McMansions – and the actual working class is now multicultural, feminised, disorganised and invisible.
LE out!
Mark @45
In some ways the Greens offer an “ethical” critique of the oppression of certain social groups, but they are not geared to developing the self-activity of those groups to struggle against their own oppression. Take refugees: There is much moral outrage from Greens politicians, but in seeing refugees as passive victims of bad policy, not as active participants who should be at the head of the struggle.
It’s an interesting tension.
“at that time, educational segregation occurred for religious reasons, not for reasons of class or educational aspiration”
Su, don’t think that class didn’t come into religious education! I went to a middle-class Catholic boys school and was well aware that there were lower and higher class versions of the same. My sister’s school – the oldest girl’s school in Australia, I believe – had a wall between the nice school (where she went) and their poorer school (where my sister-in-law went – and she has never gotten over the resentment).
…. only fair to add that my sister has never gotten over the feelings of superiority, either.
“Russell, the professional class was not that small ..”
Su, I think it was – as a snob in training I noticed these things. How many people went to university in the 40s, 50s, 60s? not that many, and of those some were dubious – teachers were educated, like professionals, but didn’t earn much, unlike true professionals (and anyway, mostly women).
There were wealthy people who were not professionals, and though they were up there socially, they didn’t get the same respect that doctors or lawyers got. They were often more flashy too – your doctor drove a Jaguar or Mercedes Benz or a Rover (and how many of those did you see around 50 years ago?) whereas the guy who owned the building company had a Chevrolet Bel Air. We had a Holden.
Many years ago before the word bogan was invented I wasd told I looked too Western Suburbs to live on Sydney’s North Shore.
@Russell and Su – The composition of the workforce has definitely shifted since the 1970s with more managerial/professional workers. Probably things looked very different in Sydney and Melbourne than in Brisbane and Perth.
If you think of things like the enormous marketing industry now, most likely very little of that existed in the 70s – in a town like this one, ‘professionals’ would largely have been doctors and lawyers, I suspect.
There would be historical stats available, but I’m pretty sure that’s right.
Certainly the percentage of people going on to Grade 12, let alone to university, in Queensland was very low compared to what it is now. That started to change here in the 70s, but these things have a big lag effect.
My take on the ‘what brogans like’ phenomenon is that it represents the ‘knowledge class’ scratching an itch. Those of us in communications, media, academia and other knowledge-based industries are irked about the material success (albeit debt-driven) of people in the outer suburbs whom we may formerly have patronized in an affectionate way. In that sense, ‘The Castle’ was referring to a world long gone.
The culture warriors of the Murdoch empire, meanwhile, and the traditionally conservative classes that read them, are taking delight in the discomfort of the progressive left. But the right’s motives aren’t pure either, as this game only continues to work so long as the economy keeps growing and we avoid recession.
So my theory is that Australia’s long uninterrupted expansion (20 years) has masked many of the more traditional economic class based distinctions and political divisions of former decades.
We are seeing now – in the US, UK and Europe – what happens when the merry go-round of leverage-driven consumption excess comes to a halt. And when that happens, the baby names chosen by supposed ‘bogans’ will be the least of our concerns.
@ 54 My worry Mr Denmore, is when it happens (and we see shades of this already) it is those picking the ‘bogan’ baby names that will be blamed. It will certainly be them who are one of the groups that bear the brunt.
Mark @53
I think it’s important to separate “professionals” and “managers” analytically. The expansion of higher education has created a much bigger layer of people skilled in “thinking” work than previously, but it seems to me that this has not resulted in a big expansion of people who have more control over the organisation of work (or even their own work process). Rather, a series of “professional” jobs have become proletarianised. I think of teachers and nurses, but many administrative workers in state and private bureaucracies now need degrees as an entry requirement yet have little more power over their relationship to the means of production than Fordist-era assembly line workers.
I am not across the data on middle management but speaking from my experience in the public health system I’m not sure their expansion (as opposed to the expansion of the paper-pushers who work immediately under them) has been enough to make up for the general hollowing out of the relative privileges and autonomy of the clinically-focused doctors, nurses and allied health workers in the system.
I think I may need to peer in more detail at John Buchanan’s work to get a clearer sense of this economy-wide.
I think that some of the status anxiety of white collar workers about “bogans” may be related to something else – the psephologically observed way that social/educational capital leads to progressive social/cultural views (and voting) and the mythology that therefore the less educated are necessarily more politically reactionary (and vote Tory). But the persistence of “economic” class factors in voting patterns underneath this layer of “cultural” voting means that even the less educated can be won to a progressive program; it just has to be tied to their economic interests and cannot rely on cultural identification alone. By attacking these backward workers (or the mythological cultural tropes surrounding them) the progressives actually make it much harder to build a majority progressive constituency.
By abandoning workers to the market (and promoting the idea that the market has actually made things better for them when the opposite is true) the ALP has lost its ability to weld these electoral forces together. And with their “ethical” approach to politics (i.e. an absent economic/structural analysis of class injustice), the Greens suffer from this weakness too.
I wrote a bit more about this issue here: http://left-flank.blogspot.com/2011/04/last-rites-for-labor-party-part-two.html
Sorry to be a bit OT there.
My wife is a hard core coal miner’s daughter and proud of it. I have lived a large slab of my life in mining towns. As a result I have got used to a culture where you insult your friends and are polite to your enemies. A cultures where you show respect by treating people as equals. Above all a culture where taking your self too seriously is to become a source of ridicule and you lose face if you take an insult seriously.
I put it to you it is the features of this culture that has made Australia so remarkably successful at building a nation out of such a diverse group of people. It would have been a much harder task if people had been given the luxury of taking insults seriously and not been forced to learn how to laugh at themselves.
The mining towns have been places with large migrant populations. We have watched the struggles that new migrants often have to make to fit in. One of the things we have found really helps is explaining that, unlike most other places, you lose face if you take insults seriously and the smart reaction to an insult is to laugh and come back with some outrageous reply.
For example, the Thai daughter of one of our friends was having trouble fitting in and was being upset by people calling her “smack”. We explained the losing face thing and suggested that she reply by saying something like “I am not smack I’m super smack”. She actually did what was suggested and that all of a sudden she was accepted and that her group got stuck into someone who tried to give her a hard time later in the day.
Given this background you might understand why it startles me that the PC class is now starting to talking about protecting bogans from the insults of “us superior people”. To me, PC has always been about “We superior people protecting those very inferior people from you inferior people.”
As Anna @7 puts it so well:
But there are limits. I would never accuse anyone of being a Collingwood supporter.
@Dr_Tad, totally agree with all that. I was just thinking in terms of the categories used by the ABS, which I think would allow a comparison to be made on the same measure between the 70s and now.
There’s obviously been enormous changes in the dynamics of professionalisation, the loss of professional autonomy, the increased propensity of professionals to be within employment relationships rather than in partnerships or as sole practitioners, etc.
Chris Lilley doesn’t make humour about bogans with any affection. Pauly Fenech does tho. Pizza was quite satirical too, in its own way. Like the time the guys were stranded on a pacific island so the wrote Fuck you USA in 40 foot high letters on the beach. And asked the warship that came to blow the island up to take them home.
They predicted flash mob violence over a decade ago.
Here’s their take on Alan Jones inciting a riot.
@ 57 – Again I would make the point there is a difference between working class people (or those who have that background/married in to that background) joking with each other, and the ridicule of those who want to deride and insult someone because they are ‘lower class’.
There is a joke I’ve heard a number of Carlton supports tell: Q: What is the difference between a Collingwood and Essendon supporter. A: Essendon supporters can read and write.
When I hear/tell that joke, it has a different meaning and context to when some other Carlton supporters tell it. I support/am a member of Carlton because my grandfather did: he grew up in the slums in Collingwood. Me telling this joke would be an example of what you describe above, splitting hairs amongst people who are all working class/poor. But Carlton has roots in both the poor catholic and Jewish communities of the inner north, as well as in wealthy and privileged communities. That joke would sound very different coming from the mouth of some Carlton members. Would the joke have the same giggle value if Richard Pratt or Megan Gale told it? Does it have the same context when a group of Carlton supporting hipsters tell it, while watching the game in their favourite gentrified pub in Fitzroy?
“But there are limits. I would never accuse anyone of being a Collingwood supporter.”
indeed! Or a war criminal.
I think the whole issue needs to be understood in terms of a Howardian cultural project of declaring “we are all Bogans now” as means of collapsing and masking widening class distinctions. Which incidentally, also allowed him to elevate the Anglo-Celtic core ethnicity (yer bogan is rarely a wog, after all). A new post-Hansonite nationalist rubric, all lassooed together by mounting personal debt and fear.
What it ultimately meant was talking about class was now unAustralian. Its since become un-PC to satirise the wealthy, since they’re just aspirationals who made it etc. And after all, they like footy too, hold number 1 tickets at the club, and so are also honorary part of the great national boganariat.
Its hardly surprising that people have been taking the piss out of this bullshit left right and centre since.
Its a myth, after all.
mark b. said:
So the Class War has been replaced by the Culture War. But I thought the Culture War was declared over when Howard lost office?
Ooops.
As I have said for, a decade or more, the Culture War is based on anthropological conservatism, not ideological “constructs”. The London “flash mob” riots show that it ain’t going away any time soon.
Great thread, Mark.
Even though I am a Tory, may I be permitted to make a comment or two.
Of course, I am ignorant of a lot of things you mention, being a lawyer who lives in Bellevue Hill and went to Cranbrook, but I actually do know about the upper classes at first hand. Most of them are good people, just like most working class are good people.
You can count the wealthy people who vote Green on the fingers of a leper’s hand. What you will see if you observe at a Wentworth polling booth is that it is usually the young or the help who vote Green or Labor.
The days of the ALP being solely a working class party have long gone, because politics is now really a battle between those who think Government is the fairest arbiter of most things in life (‘the Left’) and those who think that private initiative is the true basis of a healthy society (‘the Right’). All classes split both ways in that divide, but it is true that the higher up the socio-economic scale you go, the more people tend to be of the Right.
su @ 43. We’ll probably have to respectfully disagree about Lilley.
But, really no empathy? What about Jonah the illiterate Islander who’s school fails him with their piss-weak “Paths for Polynesians” programme? The twins from Dunt who’s terrible behaviours are obviously caused by grieving for their dead father and with no recognition of this from the adults around them? S’mouse with his constantly abusive father? The ‘gay; skateboarder constantly humiliated by his mother? Gran, who wants to be a surrogate parent to her gaol full of angry boys, but has little capacity for being so, because she’s so blinded by her own racism? In ‘We Could be Heroes”; Pat who wants to roll for Australia but ends up dead and her grieving bogan husband? The Asian character who wants to be an actor but is thwarted by his father?
I think one of Lilley’s themes is the inadequacy of parenting and the way teenagers just get lost in the modern world. It’s not called ‘Angry Boys’ for nothing. I don’t think Lilley’s work is perfect. I think he fails in ‘Angry Boys’ to create a world that works as either comedy or drama. I also think he fails most of the time when it comes to female characters. But, I think it’s a very interesting failure.
I think Su is way off beam. The Ja’amie character was actually quite subversive and did manage to ruffle the feathers of the elite private schools where Bogans are only present as dishwashers and floor sweepers.
@ Fine: Yes I think we will, to me the characters’ lack of insight, a failure that was taken to parodic, completely unrealistic extremes, was often supposed to be the source of amusement and it really disturbs me that people have received some of these characters as “not fiction”. If the female characters (I agree with you there) fail for us, I suspect that the characters in brownface may be similarly alienating for others, and are most “true” for someone who is an outsider looking in. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned him, it has been a bit of a diversion!
The couple of people who have framed this as “we” shouldn’t mock “them”, and rightly saying that this is patronising are assuming a distinction which simply does not map to my understanding, the “them” is not “them” but me, us, we. It isn’t because of shared characterstics, because there aren’t any, the category is pure projection as the author of The Bogan Delusion pointed out, but you’ll know it when you’ve been so labelled.
Mark – Well, that’s true if you take an objectivist rather than subjectivist view of class, Adrien.
If you’re implying some Randoid perspective your flying over the wrong mountain. Never read her. My impression is of some super-egotistical second rate mind.
Epistemology posits a question that can’t be answered. The truth of it is in this fact. Gillard may have a ‘working class psychology’. Sure, the material circumstances in which one grows up, the status of one’s parents are all embedded in a child. It lastst forever.
Okay granted.
But the ALP is composed of technocrats only some of whom have working class origins and all of whom are no longer ‘working class’ according to that classification’s formal definition. That’s significant in a way that has nought to do with epistemology.
Rococo – What you will see if you observe at a Wentworth polling booth is that it is usually the young or the help who vote Green or Labor.
Why vote Green, the Liberals at Wentworth have a much better environmentalist to offer.
Adrien, I’ve never read Rand, and don’t plan to! So we may be at cross purposes because of an overlap I’m not aware of between her jargon and mine!
My point is simply that there are different ways to define class, and if we’re going to talk about it, it makes a lot of difference how we do define it.
There are objective descriptions, ie:
(a) Marxists might say that you are working class if you are primarily reliant on wage labour for your income;
(b) Some non-Marxist sociologists would ascribe a ‘class’ to particular income levels, levels of wealth or occupations;
(c) Others would accept self-labelling as the only objective measure (which doesn’t tend to give you many working class people these days).
Now (c) slides into subjective definitions of class, which usually have to do with degrees of class consciousness, culture and/or identity.
Thus, if we were to have an argument about whether or not Julia Gillard is working class (and I’m not sure we should – because I’m not persuaded of the importance of the point), then we would need to be on the same page in terms of what we mean by class.
“But, I think it’s a very interesting failure.”
Me too, good call.
It’s like a cross between The Castle and The Boys.
@67
Just one that does not openly support gay marriage, and celebrates the economic system that has exacerbated inequality in this country since the 1970s.
As David Harvey notes, in the period after the 1970s economic crisis the ruling class has sought to re-establish profitability and this has resulted in inequality increasing between the developed world and the developing world (as well as within individual nation states including Australia). It is not only in periods of economic downturn that class differences can be prominent, as between 1987 and 2008 Australia’s national income doubled and yet inequality grew. See Australia’s recent Gigi Coefficient data (as derived from the ABS Household Income & Income Distribution Survey):
1990 – 1991: .284
1997 – 1998: .302
2005 – 2006: .307
2007 – 2008: .331
As Meagher & Wilson note: Stronger growth has complex effects on how much we think about – and tolerate – inequality’ (p 220).
It is a very interesting article (see Meagher, G. & Wilson, S. 2008, ‘Richer, but More Unequal: Perceptions of Inequality in Australia 1987-2005′, Journal of Australian Political Economy, vol. 61, no. June 2008, pp. 220-243.)
Mark “It may, in part, be the anti-population growth and indeed anti-immigration rhetoric that you get from some Greens.”
You see the point about “some Greens” is that they ndrstand the laws of physics and ecology and undrrstand they apply to humans too.
Such greens aren’t likely to be worried in the slightest by what class people
Think they belong to, or want to belong to, but simply in what they do.
@71 – Calyptorhyncus, the reference was back to Dr_Tad’s point about The Greens, in his experience, not attracting non-white members or supporters.
Su,
do you also have a problem with the crude way left wing “intellectuals” employ the terms neoliberal and neoconservative to marginalise and delegitimise theories, and the people who subscribe to such theories?
liz_beths @70
The “Gigi coefficient” sounds like much more fun than the Gini coefficient.
Calyptorhynchus @71
It’s funny how you reduce highly social and political phenomena like immigration and population to the “laws of physics and ecology”. I guess it helps you justify this reactionary aspect of Greens politics as mere “scientific” “truth”. Much like the way that markets, unemployment and economic crises are treated as “natural phenomena” that cannot be bucked through social policy.
Luckily there are excellent Greens activists (some of them migrants) who have challenged the party leadership on these issues. But no wonder it remains such a depressingly white party.
I read liz_beths’ post and thought to myself how hard it must be to be a lefty. A lefty has to be so earnest all the time and analyse everything from a politcal standpoint. Then there’s always the worry that you might do or say something that is sexist, homophobic, classist, agist, racist, speciesist or what ever other ist is vebotten by the PC police.
Alexei Sayle once spoke about how every time he did left-wing benefit gigs there would be a pause after each punchline whilst the audience politically vetted and then the lefties would laugh.
Life seems such a dull hair-shirt, puritan experience for these poor modern folk-marxists: sans beauty, sans style, sans taste, sans everything.
Of course one should extract the urine from the inanities and foibles of society. That is what comedy is all about. And condemning someone for making humour out of stereotypes on political grounds is fatuous and a complete waste of time. If a comedian gets up and makes a joke about all slapheads being sad tossers, I probably won’t laugh; not because the joke is baldist, but because it isn’t funny.
Lighten up people! It’s time to forget politics, grow up and have a few laughs.
Peace be with you.
Tad:
“Luckily there are excellent Greens activists (some of them migrants) who have challenged the party leadership on these issues. But no wonder it remains such a depressingly white party.”
I think you’ll find the Greens represent white flight from the ALP. I know a couple of inner city lesbian girls who made the mistake of turning up to a predominately Turkish ALP branch meeting with not unexpected consequences. They subsequently joined the Greens.
Is that the speech you give the help each evening Roccoco Liberal?
True, there can be sometimes but I find it’s much more prevalent amongst the echo chamber of ALP diehards on the Pollbludger blog. The snearing contempt shown to what they perceive to be “bogans” on there is palpable.
It was a real eye-opener but then again makes a bit of sense given the degree to which the ALP have moved away from their blue-collar origins in recent times to the point you could probably make an argument there are nearly as much professionals and yuppies in the ALP as there are in the Libs.
Working class? If you work for someone else exclusively and pay a mortgage, you’re working class. So that’s most of us, in other words. And the new Howardian contracting class are just blue collar people working longer hours for the same money and writing off their expenses. They all think they’re JP Getty because they run a contracting business and get calls on their mobiles at 4am. it’s a con by real capitalists to co-op the people I grew up with in a lower middle class Catholic school to imagine themselves as entrepreneurs, while the profit maximisers extract the real added value and spend three days of the week playing golf. my old friends mIght call themselves entrepreneurs, but it’s still false consciousness as far as I can see.
“If you work for someone else exclusively and pay a mortgage, you’re working class”
But that definition surely can’t include a couple of lawyers working for a big city law firm, as well as someone who works in ‘retail’? Class has become very blurred by wealth becoming more detached from education or inheritance.
The mining industry here in W.A. has created ‘cashed up bogans’, different from previous species of nouveau riche in their uninterest in emulating their betters: Monaros instead of Alfa Romeos, trips to Disneyland instead of better schools etc. Although there has always been plenty of jokes about working class vulgarity, or pretension, that was a bit cruel, because the poor working class didn’t have the opportunity to be much different, and the wealth differential made for a real power imbalance.
But cashed up bogans are fair game. They have the wealth, but not only do they prefer glittery toys, slobbiness and tastless, trashy ‘fashions’ – they’re proud of it! I never watched Kath & Kim, but it was the bogans at work who enjoyed it the most. They could laugh at the characters, and a bit at themselves, and then go out at lunchtime and spend a small fortune on having red streaks put through their blonded hair, or even more vulgar things done to their nails.
They’re working class according to Mr Demore’s definition, but they’re not poor – if they’re not planning their next jaunt to Bali, then it’ll be to Phuket. Yes, I suppose some of the sneering at CUBs is a reassertion of position/status from those who feel their education isn’t valued, but I don’t think any bogans are going to be harmed by it.
Russell @80
While I grant Mr Denmore definition was a little too reductive, he’s got it way more right than you do. The issue with workers in the mining industry (or elsewhere) on relatively higher wages is that they don’t have either (a) accumulated wealth as capital or (b) significant control over their work.
There really is very little “blurring” when you look at wealth distribution figures rather than income, which is a cross-sectional and not very useful reflection of class divisions. Take a look at the wealth distribution figures: 61% of wealth is owned by the top 20% of the population, and just 18% by the bottom 60% (1% by the bottom 20%) — see: http://left-flank.blogspot.com/2011/05/whats-class-got-to-do-with-it-appendix.html
In addition, Andrew Leigh has demonstrated that socio-economic mobility remains limited in Australia, and has certainly not dramatically increased in recent times.
As a trainee specialist doctor I was making less than many mining workers, but my education, job and prospects on graduating gave me much more stake in the system than those workers have. Even as a registrar I had way more control and autonomy in my job than such workers can dream of.
Class still operates powerfully, and the “tastes” of some better paid workers are not an abstract question but one rooted in the society and social position they find themselves in. How do we think tastes are developed and transformed except in the social context and practices of real human beings? Not because of some idealist pursuit of high culture.
And whoever claimed the working class had to all be “poor” in the first place? To suggest that poverty was a condition of their “vulgarity” being understandable is just the worst kind of elitism.
Dt Tad: We’ll have to agree to disagree about how to define the working class, but my point about this: “How do we think tastes are developed and transformed except in the social context and practices of real human beings?” is that taste was once more authoritatively defined by what the wealthy had, and what they had was educated taste. The new wealthy bogans simply don’t care – they don’t care about education, let alone cultural pursuits, because they see you don’t need it to become wealthy, and they live in a culture that says that’s it authentically Australian to be uneducated and just your natural self, like them.
Well it isn’t. I don’t want to go back to the time I grew up in where ‘respect’ was automatically paid to the wealthy. But that respect extended to the cultural privileges that the wealthy had: you knew that if you had the opportunity you should investigate art, classical music, ballet, literature, design. After all, if the wealthy had it, it must be good, because they could choose! Fortunately, for a lot of the ‘working class’ this became possible, and it certainly is now, but what we have is this stupid bogan culture. I don’t know what could change it, but mocking it probably won’t do any harm.
And no, I don’t mean that everyone should go to the opera. We all enjoy popular culture – the problem is the assertion, in bogan culture, that popular culture is good enough. Popular anything, on its own, isn’t enough.
@57
“was being upset by people calling her “smack””
I think that the kind of person who would refer to her as such would be beneath contempt. But then I’m probably guilty of taking the moral high ground …
Hmm, from my perspective growing up in the underclass [welfare family] in a country town which had a highly unionised forestry industry side by side with an agrarian aristocracy, where everyone is lumped into the same schools [except for the families who sent the eldest son to PAC or Scotch in Adelaide] I think that the bogan stereotype is a little more nuanced than simple class divisions. Granted, I’m a complete outsider [even in my own family I'm the outsider...the marriage wrecking, jew/kraut mongrel bastard child - slow but not stupid, high school drop out] but from my vantage point bogans are people who are unthinking and uncritical about their affiliations…what matters is the connection to something they consider will boost their stocks in the identity stakes. I can’t stand being around bogans, but it has nothing to do with class [certainly nothing to do with tradies], it’s because I associate them with a bullying culture, that ostracises based on difference. I doubt they give a shit that people laugh at them..they have plenty of confirmation bias from their cohorts – that is what makes them bogans, and they exist in all classes of society, I reckon.
Though I’m a high school drop out, I went on to do a degree in Visual Art, and you meet plenty of affluent bogans at art exhibition openings. I now work in conservation and their are LOTS of bogan greenies. Likewise, I used to study mediation and there are a lot of Buddhist bogans. When the affiliation trumps all, then you’re a bogan. The fact that this is the basis of unionism is the reason why bogans and the working class are so closely associated in people’s minds….but the sexism, chauvinism and self-interest of some unionists is what makes them bogans, not their trade, class or their affluence.
@43 — Hi Su, if Chris Lilley is a Barker boy, then I reckon he’s got plenty of experience of having the piss taken out of him, and would be empathically attuned to the victims of stereotyping from long years of first-hand experience!!
While I am no Marxist, Marx should not be verballed for failing to recognise the distinction between “klasse an sich” or class in itself, and a “klasse für sich” or class for itself.
Highly paid mining workers think they can escape their structural relations with capital because capital is paying them barrowloads of money. The universal lesson of economic history is that labour aristocrats don’t keep their perks for long. Production managers are always on the look-out for ways to cut costs.
By the time labour aristocrats work out that their interests lie in broader labour organisations, it is already too late.
Cashed up bogans tend to be self-employed sub-contractors. Thus they claim that they are employers, not wage-earners. That was the exact argument of piece-working weavers in Lancashire at the end of the eighteenth century. These weavers made an excellent living for a while until capitalists devised means to expunge their independence by inventing factories. Poverty and class consciousness ensued.
On the other hand, institutional arrangements of 21st century political economy are very different. Compliance costs and costs of capital equipment these days are relatively higher. Decentralisation of control and liability for risk have been devolved down the chain of production. Cashed up bogans have accepted some of this risk. In this way they are petty capitalists.
For as long as the costs of centralisation of control are great than profits foregone because of decentralisation, then this class of petty entrepreneurs will persist. So long as these folks remain proud of their status, cashed up bogans will continue to be a part of our cultural landscape.
Thus, if we were to have an argument about whether or not Julia Gillard is working class (and I’m not sure we should – because I’m not persuaded of the importance of the point), then we would need to be on the same page in terms of what we mean by class.
Okay then – is a lawyer working class? Does the following apply to a graduate of the law school at Melbourne University:
???
Or to a graduate of, ha ha ha, administration at the University of Qld. Or someone with an Arts degree in Chinese from the ANU?
Thing is you know what I’m saying, haggling over different classifications of ‘working class’ is mere evasion. This evasion is a persistent feature of ALP culture and contributes more than somewhat to the hole in their collective soul. Say what you will about Tories they know who they are and what they believe.
Highly paid mining workers think they can escape their structural relations with capital because capital is paying them barrowloads of money.
They don’t escape relations with capital, they have excellent relations with capital.
Your post implies a tendency of capitalism to impoverish. This is one of Marx’s incorrect doctrines.
furious balancing: that’s a nuanced description of boganism:
This definition of boganism alows us to understand how Ratty was a bogan (affiliation to the white Australia club) no more or less than anyone who over identified with, say, Ford or Holden as their car of choice.
Eye opening. Thanks.
Katz @86 and others…
The use of the term “cashed up bogan” is still an attack on the working class. As in, “they have some cash, don’t they know better to ape the (infinitely superior) tastes of the ruling class, like really progressive people would.”
This issue of taste and culture is at the centre of it, because taste and culture are not the same as class consciousness. In the alienated and commodity fetishised existence of the working class, why would tawdry, immediate entertainments not play a bigger role in diverting them from the realities of life? Why would escapism not be a rational strategy at the individual level? Even for otherwise left-wing, politically savvy union delegates?
It’s not like the mainstream Left, with its abandonment of traditions of solidarity and class struggle provides some great alternative example or space for improvement. This is one of the things Gramsci got at, I think, in arguing that a serious Left needs to provide such a space; a cultural life that is not simply high-bourgeois or trash-bourgeois.
furious balancing – I should have added this:
As a Buddhist that really rang a bell for me. Dogmatists who identify with and rigidly adhere to doctrine are bogans wherever you find them whether they chant or not.
“a serious Left needs to provide such a space; a cultural life that is not simply high-bourgeois or trash-bourgeois”
Just as the environmental movement has been busy doing for decades.
This is the predictable error of an uncritical and habitual polemicist. My comment does not assume impoverishment. It assumes homogenisation over time of statistical outliers. Only a idiot would argue that global real wages have fallen since Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. That is why I am not a Marxist.
Katz – “For as long as the costs of centralisation of control are great than profits foregone because of decentralisation, then this class of petty entrepreneurs will persist. So long as these folks remain proud of their status, cashed up bogans will continue to be a part of our cultural landscape.”
Speaking as a ‘petty entrepeneur’, who [in theory] earns more than the managers that contract my services, I don’t see much status in this type of tenure. Indeed the main reason that charges are currently high is because of the lack of prestige in labouring type roles.
When considering the costs of compliance for myself, as well as for the government agencies tasked with monitoring safe-work procedures etc, I hope, in my field at least, the days of contracting are short-lived.
The mining industry is the extreme end of the contractor sector, but government is the main offender, outsourcing to both the so-called ‘petty capitalists’ as well as the not-for-profit sector. For as long as there is community sentiment that favours the rhetoric of ‘small government’, unfortunately I can’t see the situation changing. So yes, people who want a job, will have to accept the trade-off that is the complete lack of security in contract employment, but to suggest that there is no awareness, or indeed that they take pride in this condition, seems rather presumptive.
On a side note – I subscribe to the email list of the Fairwork Ombudsman, and the cases presented are a pretty sad indictment on the exploitative nature of employment in Australia…regardless of whether it is PAYE employment or sham contracting, Australian’s seem to be rather good at stealing from the most vulnerable. A significant number of people I encounter who are also contractors, chose that role to escape exploitative employment – I think most realise they’ve escaped to something that is also deeply exploitative. That contracting offers some degree of self-determination, however short-lived, is it’s only saving grace.
Nope. These folks *choose* not to emulate traditional bourgeois tastes. To allege that they do this because they are ignorant denigrates these folks with condescension.
What anti-anti-boganism fails to take into account is the steady stream of vitriol in the comment threads and letters pages of the Herald Sun, Tele, Punch, etc, against anything deemed to be green or left or non-mainstream. You’d have to have a fairly high level of awareness not to be provoked not to hit back. (I am not endorsing bogan jokes, just looking at the milieu which fosters them.) One can have a clear understanding of the failures of both Labor and Liberal governments at both levels to properly nurture public education and early childhood education, but one would have to be a saint not to feel impossibly exasxperated after the 24,000th ad hominem insult. This thread implied that “bogans” never call us lefty greenie watermelon latte sippers insulting names.!
To some extent – please note that qualifier – once you get to the “cashed up” level, where both bogans and non-bogans have roughly the same level of material security, it’s just two groups of white people slagging off, so where it’s like that, well cry me a river! If it’s genuinely well off people denigrating really marginalised people, then you have a point.
Furious:
While I agree with most of your comment, I demur from this.
In fact, those high compliance costs of which you speak are the result of big government. If they were removed, then capitalist centralisation of control would begin to make a comeback.
Helen, but where’s the agency here? I don’t think it’s ‘cashed up’ (or otherwise) ‘bogans’ actually writing comments on Bolt’s blog or the like. If you’re working in the mines or as a building contractor, I doubt you have your iPhone out all the time making derogatory comments about latte sippers. It’s the way that the non-unionised working class and contractariat are *used* as foils against progressives (‘Howard’s battlers’, etc) that’s generating the inevitable pushback.
(As the post argued.)
It’s interesting to see the very quick slippage towards assumptions that ‘bogans’ have lots of money that’s happened on this thread. Dr_Tad is absolutely correct that professional middle class people have advantages over ‘cashed up bogans’ in terms of wealth and earning capacity over the life course. It’s hard to be a building worker, for instance, after you’re 40 or 45, because almost inevitably your body is buggered.
But *most* of the people living in areas which are the imaginary homes of the ‘bogan’ are actually not earning much money! Hence, again, the point in the post about how this cultural politics assists in focusing attention away from actual social inequality, and displaces it onto a set of imaginary figures.
Ps – if you look at the visual evidence of who attends the crazy anti-Carbon tax rallies, the Bolt commenters look to me to be largely a bunch of middle class white retirees.
Elizabeth @60: When you say:
you are in danger of doing what Anna @7 warned against
. Yes it is a fine line that requires some judgement.
For example, I have been an engineer working with operators for most of my life and exchanged more than the odd bit of banter. I would say that it would be OK to respond to some “dumb engineer” banter with something like “at least I know how to tie my bootlaces” because it is outrageous exaggeration.but not OK with “at least I know what Froude numbers are all about.” The first is OK The second is not OK because most operators don’t know what Froude numbers are all about – So the gibe is an attempted put down based on my superior education.
For much the same reason I think your arguments about the football joke a flawed. The joke is OK because its because it passes the outrageous exaggeration test – Even Collingwood supporters can read and write.
I haven’t met anyone who is willing to admit to being a Collingwood supporter but even so I suspect most of them would be appalled by the idea that they are so unsure of themselves that they need protecting from insults from supporters of other teams.
Just as the environmental movement has been busy doing for decades.
I’d take exception to the word movement simply because it’s not a coherent cultural/political movement but a multifarious ethos. Steve Irwin was, in his way, part of it but he wasn’t a Green voter by any means. He also probably wasn’t a vegetarian either which’d exclude both him (and myself) to proper ‘admission’.
But in aspects it tends to diverge from the Left in significant places, there’s an opposition to taxation. There’s also a curious anti-modernism. They don’t like industrial production but they do like digital technology. They also have a preference from pre-hip culture. It might be 19th century illustration, currently obscure Italian masters or pre-Beatles/Stones non-jazz popular music. There’s lots of permutations which is part of the point. However opposition to taxation is, whilst not universal, apparent enough.
Not all Greens members are switched on to it really. In fact there’s significant section that isn’t. (IMLE)
My pool (billiards) league has a large representation of CUBs. Helen’s characterisation of their opinions and their willingness to express them, by iPhone or other means, rings true. These folks are endowed with firmly held and vociferously expressed opinions on many important and interesting topics.
who attends the crazy anti-Carbon tax rallies
Those with a different view are always insane, ignorant and/or evil. There is bipartisan agreement on this issue.
a bunch of middle class white retirees.
I don’t suppose that generation would feature quite as many human flavours as the Gen Y crew so I’m not sure why ‘white’ is a factor. But could it be that retirees are dependent on investments to maintain themselves? Could it likewise be that said investments which are reliant on resource stocks?
No. Then they would be advocating their interests as opposed to suffering psychosis. That is not an acceptable reality. If that were true the current policy of the government may resemble that of a cold and ruthless resignation of a section of the public to the Nevermind Bin which can be born because they vote Liberal anyway.
I don’t think the distinction is actually between salt-of-the-earth working-class bogans and exploitative bourgeois latte leftists. In fact I think that framing is *just as wrong* as the unreconstructed put down of ‘bogan suburbia’ as an unenlightened wasteland.
The distinction that is really at play here not ‘working class’ versus ‘middle-class’ but between ‘culturalists’ who use their money to acquire cultural capital (eg cultural travel, books, fashion, art, politics, etc) and ‘materialists’ who use financial resources to acquire material goods (mcmansions, expensive cars, etc). It’s a battle over what are the markers of ‘status’. Is it material capital or cultural capital that decides social capital?
Frankly someone who drives a $90,000 car – whether that’s a Beemer or a HSV/FPV ute, is not materially disadvantaged in life. And there are plenty of ‘middle-class background’ people who drive BMWs Mercs or Audis and who fall distinctly into the materialist camp. Just like there’s plenty of people who can’t afford diddly-squat material goods beyond the basics who are definitely culturalists.
Yes, its a sort of discrimination that culturalists engage in to look down upon the choices of the materialists. But then I don’t think that the materialists look very favourably upon the choices of the culturalists either.
I think it’s really shallow to simply valorize the materialist class (not all of them are ‘working-class’) against all comers. Some of the jibes by culturalists against them are indeed, racist, sexist, classist. But a lot in the materialists’ sneering at the culturalists is racist, sexist and homophobic too. I don’t think we see a lot of it, most of us commenting on this blog would be culturalists.
Adrien, the degree to which people at those rallies put forward literally crazy views has been well documented. I suppose you’re going with the same line as the media and Tony Abbott – “many are just *mainstream* Australians”. Whatever that means.
Substitute “Anglo” for “white”, if you like…
Yeah fair enough – point taken, Katz @ 97. I guess it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
The CUB trope is just an expression of resentment from people who with all the choice in the world, chose a university education, and the status signifiers inherent in that, and can’t stand that people with barely a high school education are gaining short term wealth, rather than plodding their way to long-term success and prestige – the angst over HECS debts is so much more all-consuming than knowing that yer hips are going to give out at age 50 from years of toil.
As for the iPhone blog commenters….it must be all those traffic management folks you see leaning on their cars with the STOP/SLOW sign in one hand and the smart phone in the other.
@furious balancing – heh!
@Katz – sure, a lot of people have strong opinions, but not a lot of people make blog comments embodying them.
This is what I was talking about in the conflict between culturalists and materialists. I don’t have “all the choice in the world” just because I have an University education, I have made a set of choices which give me access to specific other life-choices … and certainly I don’t possess the “status signifier” of an expensive car either (what do you think a customised HSV ute is? just a working vehicle?). The conflict is in part over *exactly what* should be regarded as an identifier of status in the first place. Is it my love of Latin poetry or the fancy car? The owner of the fancy car is just as likely to sneer at my choice of acquiring knowledge of such obscurities as I am to deride the Chevrolet badges on his purple metallic Holden ute…
I don’t “resent” CUBs at all. On the contrary, I enjoy the good-natured mutual blagging. No one has ever been whacked with a cue stick either by a ute man or by a latte-loving fixie pedaller.
A sense of humour consists as much in being able to take it as being able to dish it out. We all go home as friends and look forward to the next bout. Is this experience so unusual?
Adrien, the degree to which people at those rallies put forward literally crazy views has been well documented.
And the degree to which the Greens are a bunch of Watermelon Leninists bent on doing a Pol Pot to the world has been ‘well-documented’. This is the most furious propaganda war I’ve ever experienced. I hesitate to endorse documentation until it’s organized by a reliable historian.
I suppose you’re going with the same line as the media and Tony Abbott – “many are just *mainstream* Australians”.
Are you Currency Lad’s good twin brother? I merely point out that they have interests and that calling one’s opponents ‘crazy’ is, well, not respectful.
Whatever that means.
Dunno still figuring ‘working class’ mate.
Substitute “Anglo” for “white”, if you like…
In practice though, do people administer a full questionnaire to discover whether people are dogmatists or materialists or homophobes and racists etc, before they make the judgment? My experience is that it’s shoot first, ask questions never. The thing about Ed Hardy (as it is described, they don’t exist here so I have no experience of this), and Plasma screens suggests to me something different to materialism vs culturalism too, it suggests to me that a middle class feels some of their prized class markers no longer signify, are devalued.
Substitute “Anglo” for “white”, if you like…
Anglo-Celt? I was just saying it isn’t pertinent. Isn’t one of the complaints about the right-wing Culture Warrior that s/he always throws race in?
And we have our disagreements but saying that I’m in like-mind with Tony Abbott a bit low Mark.
Adrien, it’s very pertinent, and I’m very far from the first to make the observation. It’s a similar demographic (not identical, but overlapping and otherwise similar) to the supporters of Pauline Hanson – largely older and largely Anglo people who have a deep dissatisfaction with contemporary Australia.
Tyro – “This is what I was talking about in the conflict between culturalists and materialists. I don’t have “all the choice in the world” just because I have an University education, I have made a set of choices which give me access to specific other life-choices … and certainly I don’t possess the “status signifier” of an expensive car either (what do you think a customised HSV ute is? just a working vehicle?). ”
I think you misunderstood me. I’m not saying a University education GIVES you all the choice in the world. I’m saying that you had the choice between university and a trade, and you chose university. I think a lot of people choose to pursue a University degree because of the lack of prestige [in Australia] of trades and ‘blue-collar’ roles. To then denigrate [and I'm not talking about the mutual jibing that exists amongst friends and associates] as CUBS, those who may not have had a similar choice is bizarre to me, and if it is not based on resentment, then it is simply mean-spirited.
As I said, I have a BA [visual arts] it’s got to be the least prestigious degree going in this country. I KNOW a university education doesn’t give you all the choice in the world . I’m probably the biggest idiot around because I have the HECS debt but now I’m basically a glorified labourer. I even have the to suffer the indignity of high-vis clothing!
Because of the aforementioned safety compliance, I do need to drive a ute though [I carry chemicals], the choices are not great in that regard, pretty much all the options are expensive, unless you want a rural rattler. If you have problem with the tax-deductability of the ute, take it up with the tax office, or you could just find some conference-related travel expenditure to even up the ledger – I don’t think the CUBs have invented a neat acronym to sneer in kind at the status signifier of the conference culture yet.
Of course not, that is an analysis of social phenomenon by sociologists (like Pierre Bourdieu, in his work ‘Distinction’). But all such analysis is inherently flawed because it is, of course, “not real work”.
Patrickb @83: Being called “smack” seemed to have far less bite that being called “bogan” on this post. The reality of life is that most of us get called something we don’t like being called at times in our life.
Our friends daughter was lucky. She learned not long after arriving in Aus how to laugh at herself and how to use humour to defuse an unpleasant situation.
Australia is also lucky that our culture puts pressure on people to learn how to laugh at themselves. It is much more pleasant to live in such a society that one where there are endless fights and killings because someone feels their precious dignity has been insulted.
Ouch Tyro, is there anything in what I have said to make you believe I despise people in academia, or think they do not do real work? If I am that ignorant why would I ever bother to read this blog? Nichols pointed out a disjuncture between the ways in which people will justify the use of the term bogan after the fact, and how it is actually applied, that is all I meant to suggest.
The first time I ever heard the words plasma screen uttered in a negative consequence was when people began sneering about single mothers buying them with their baby bonuses.
*context*
su, I did not mean to imply that you hold that view, I meant it as an illustration of the sort of counter-sneers the ‘materialists’ put onto the ‘culturalists’.
I agree about the post-justification. It does seem to me that people who often run down the ‘bogans’ can’t tell the difference between someone with a $90,000 holden and someone who has to live hand-to-mouth and raise two kids with no partner while living in the ex-burbs. I certainly don’t think it was single mums running off to buy plasma TVs with the baby bonus, but that’s not to say that the bonus was never used by anyone to buy such TVs.
However there are ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and most of the markers of this so-called ‘bogan’ identity (jet skis, V8 utes, ed hardy, etc) are, in actuality, fairly expensive material goods, which places their owners firmly in the category of the ‘haves’ if you ask me. The fact that some members of another class of ‘haves’ conflate the ‘bogan’ identity with the ‘have nots’ *is* prejudice, but I don’t think it invalidates ALL humorous fun at those identity markers (nor of course, a serious analysis of it!).
Adrien, it’s very pertinent, and I’m very far from the first to make the observation. It’s a similar demographic (not identical, but overlapping and otherwise similar) to the supporters of Pauline Hanson – largely older and largely Anglo people who have a deep dissatisfaction with contemporary Australia.
Okay I concede. But we shouldn’t over-emphasize it. The deep dissatisfaction’s surfeit of change. What character this assumes would vary from person to person but ethnic alienation in one’s homeland would be strong I’d wager.
Not as strong as economic interest? Or more so? It doesn’t matter as these forces are in tandem here. Are these bogan fogies we’re talking here?
I’m beginning to think that liberalism and socialism are dead. They’ve both passed while we’ve all been engaged in this most serious discourse. What’s placed them are a binary and mutually hostile alliance of groups who are joined in hatred for other groups who don’t matter.
Pardon the butt-in here but apropos @120 the deep deep dissatisfaction that Hansonites experience, and many middle aged others experience, is with themselves and how their lives have disappointed them; they then project the cause of this dissatisfaction onto others as directed by Hanson and whomever else. They haven’t grown up is all.
Ok Tyro, my mistake. The other thing I was thinking about the photo illustration at Left Flank (which I think may be a satirisation of anti-boganism, though to tell you the truth, it is very difficult to tell) is that it expresses what is a real fear of some kind of cultural contagion, and perhaps that has to do with anxiety about where this shifting category begins and ends, if bogan has expanded out from its headbanging roots to signify, larger and now, more affluent groups of people, perhaps it will swallow us all unless we head it off at the pass. It reminds me of a NY Times piece that described the choice of consumer goods as a kind of shell game, by the time the upwardly mobile thinks they have located the kind of good that marks their new found status, the pea has been moved to a different shell. The same article talked about the conundrum of Godiva chocolates whose expanded market share meant a loss of status which it had to reinflate by putting out a range that was not only $100 a lb but only available during the holiday season!
Adrien – I don’t think it’s ever a problem to point out some attitudes are held mainly by white peeps. If it’s true. We should foreground and critically reflect on white privolege. As the post points out it’s the whiteness of this stereotype that lows it to stand in for *Australia*.
Forgive typo. Commenting from phone.
*privilege*
*allows* Eep!
I don’t think it’s ever a problem to point out some attitudes are held mainly by white peeps.
Which is why I bring it up. Because the tendency is axiomatic and does actually apply a prejudice on racial grounds. It’s not a racist prejudice however.
If it’s true. We should foreground and critically reflect on white privolege.
I strongly agree with the basic principle but I would also issue caution. Just because you’re white doesn’t mean you’re fair game. And I believe the attitude of older Australians is to be understood (as well as combated if you’re so inclined).
I’m not certain the issue of whether the Govt’s carbon price policy will adversely affect retirees is an ethnic matter. However as there’s an alignment of views in conservative propaganda at the moment it is pertinent.
As the post points out it’s the whiteness of this stereotype that lows it to stand in for *Australia*.
There’s two Australia’s there the New Australia which takes for granted many lifestyles riffs that only Bohemians indulged in back in the day and is wired to the world post-Rock n Roll. And there’s old ‘Straya where you left school in grade ten and ended up with 2 houses and a boat.
They co-exist. There are many battlefronts.
I’vs spent a lot of time living and working in mining towns and working with operators and tradespeople.
So I am not impressed by people like Russell @80 saying things like:
Russell and his ilk are merely providing a text book example of lazy prejudice. The people I know are individuals with different interests, priorities and behaviors. Some of them even have the grace
Yes, they are all individuals!
“…the steady stream of vitriol in the comment threads and letters pages of the Herald Sun, Tele, Punch, etc, against anything deemed to be green or left or non-mainstream”
Indeed. anyone who thinks ‘anti-boganism’ is anywhere near the top-rating theme of contemporay culture wars isnt paying attention. It *might* make the top 5, but as noted, Im far from convinced its a problem – or even has much to do with economic class.
The dominant narrative as we speak is surely feral anti-Gillardism.
John D – thanks to FIFO your mining worker CUBs spend quite a bit of time down in suburbia (and the Education Department can tell you which suburbs they’re concentrated in and how well their kids don’t do at school), but anyway there are plenty of office worker bogans around for me to know a few. Oh, and my younger brother, a contractor who has made a fortune (has the glossy SUV + Harley Davidson, holiday house etc).
Mark made a point earlier relating to the real point of this post – “Politics, and economic interest, are distorted and dissolved by a cultural imaginary.” The CUB bogan of the jokes are not the really poor people for whom there’s little choice or scope for ‘taste’. They’re not usually the subject of jokes – much harder to make that world funny. Bogan jokes are just another stereotype joke, like Irish jokes.
And yes, of course the CUBs are individuals and just as likely to be kind, honest, etc as anyone else. As Katz says the people the jokes are about are quite capable of enjoying the give and take of our Australian mocking form of humour.
What I don’t like about the bogan phenomenon is that whole self-satisfied-with-being-uneducated thing. Maybe it’s my deforming Catholic education, but I happen to think that life is something you work at. Now that religion has gone for most of us, I think access to ‘culture’ is more important than ever. If you get a bit of an apprenticeship at some cultural pursuit then you have the chance to get that expanding of your intellectual, emotional, aesthetic self that can take you past ego. It’s an education that will help you find out what’s important. Yes, very elitist, telling people what they should find important, but there you go.
@125 and @126 Adrien and Kim: There is some discussion at Left Flank about the ‘whiteness’ or otherwise of the term. I’m pasting here form there, so not a direct response to anything but some thoughts:
Sorry it is a bit long!
*from* there…I can’t spell/type/or do the grammars to save myself.
Here are definitions of “bogan” from a few sources, just in case people think liz_beths and I have invented the class angle that some people on here want to downplay.
Wikipedia: “The term bogan is Australian slang, usually pejorative or self-deprecating, for an individual who is recognised to be from a lower class background or someone whose limited education, speech, clothing, attitude and behaviour exemplifies such a background.”
Bogan.com.au: “BOGAN … is a term used primarily in Australia to describe a particular section of the working class demographic. This derogatory slang word is a gender-neutral noun; this being important as many bogans tend to gravitate towards one another forming relationships and extended families. A bogan family is not an uncommon phenomena in certain regions. A bogan typically resides in either a low-cost housing estate, government housing or in the outlying regional areas of continental Australia. Generally bogans tend to congregate in areas with little or no features & amenities.”
Macquarie Dictionary (Revised 3rd Edn): “A person, generally from an outer suburb of a city or town and from a lower socio-economic background, viewed as uncultured.”
I appreciate people may be wanting to create a new definition (e.g. “politically reactionary”) but it’s hard to make the case that your pejorative usage is more significant than the common usage.
Dr Tad – but the post is about bogan humour, rather than bogans. I just looked at the Things Bogans Like website and the jokes are about bogans playing the stockmarket, taking cruises etc.
I think maybe we still all have different ideas about what should be called ‘working class’. All of the people who work with me could be called working class (it’s our boss, the wealthiest, who is the most bogan, though let’s face it, we all have some bogan tendencies), but I don’t think there’s much point in lumping us in the same category as those who clean our office.
“what does someone calling their child Taneesha have to do with anything but hating a sterotype of a working class person? ”
I hadn’t thought about that before, though I do laugh at those names. I don’t think my laughing has anything to do with hating the working class. It’s because names have always had meanings – they were saints names, or the names of kings or queens (do your family tree and discover all those Alfred, Arthurs and Henrys; Marys, Catherines and Annes.) People nearly always used names of their father or mother or other relatives. The child was born into meaning. But now ….. “oh, I just made it up” – it’s kind of perfect for the vacuum of any larger meaning in their lives.
Russell: I have certainly seen the “Self-satisfied-with-being-uneducated thing.” in mining communities. In part this is because what the workers see is a world where truck drivers get better pay than tradesmen who get better pay than professionals.
In part too it may also be that people have seen how education can result in people “losing their children.” For example, I suspect a lot of my in-law’s friends would have felt that my in-laws lost out because my wife gained a second head when she got her degree (French and Latin) and then married an engineer who took her to the other side of Australia. (There was always plenty of respect and affection and her father was a bright working class intellectual who was strongly committed to my wife’s education – but the education did create more distance compared with others who became less foreign and stayed in Cessnock.)
Whoever first coined the term “bogan” certainly intended it to disparage habits and culture of the working class. The first “bogans” were, in the minds of those who used the term, young, male and economically marginalised. To call someone a bogan invited a fight.
Since then, the term has been elaborated. “Cashed Up” now qualifies the term, acknowledging that these bogans inhabit a very different economic space to the original bogans. Bogans are no longer young and exclusively male.
And most tellingly, bogans own the term. To call someone a bogan no longer invites a fight but on the contrary provokes the retort: “And proud of it!”
All these changes in linguistic culture are related to changes in the political economy of Australia since the early 1980s. It is unproductive to pretend that these changes have not happened when discussing political culture and how ordinary folk attempt to understand it and explain it.
Katz @138 wrote
Oh, sorry.
But my point is serious. The reclaiming of pejorative terms used as part of a repertoire of social practices that involve real discrimination or oppression is fraught with difficulties precisely because they cannot easily be divorced from something wider than just words. These words still have commonly understood referents because they are part of real world activities and not just the realm of ideas.
One of the few places where a term of abuse has been (partially) successfully turned into a term of pride has been the use of the word “queer”, but this seems to have been rapidly followed by bigots reclaiming the word “gay” (misspelt “ghey”) as a catch-all pejorative term.
The reason I put up the definitions is that the widely understood meaning of “bogan” has not changed, and whether or not people on this thread think “class” is a meaningful category, it has a meaning within the use of “bogan” that does correspond to the working class and poor.
I think liz_beths has raised this because in the inner city Left imaginary (which is where we have come across it most) there is a presumption that these types of working class and poor people are a real problem in our society, when there is no empirical reason to believe this. As one commenter on Left Flank put it in attacking liz_beths’ post:
It is disturbing that many on the Left have lost the bearings of where the truly reactionary centres of power lie in Australian society.
Dr_Tad, puhleaze.
Are you suggesting ‘n_gger’ and ‘bogan’ are similarly loaded terms?
Or that a cornerstone of the US civil rights movement was being conspicuously offended by racist jokes?
Or that bogans here need emancipation from oppression of some kind?
Pull the other one, it plays Flame Trees.
@116
I had thought that it was unacceptable these days to use that kind of language in public. My father, who’s in his 70s, persists in using “ding” or “chink” but that’s out of a Hansonist pigheadedness. I do think that under Howard this kind of language may have made a bit of a comeback disguised as an “anti-PC” protest. It’s not, it’s straight-out discrimination, denigration and unpleasantness.
Am I the only one here that admits to finding jokes about bogans funny for much the same reason I find jokes about hipsters, or geeks, or goths, or parents, or intellectuals, or name-your-subgroup funny – because I know to a significant degree I’m laughing at myself. I may not neatly fit into any obvious category (and few people do), but I’ve been ‘guilty’ at times of doing and thinking all the various things such groups get laughed at for. I also like to think *most* people have the sense to know when it’s done ‘in fun’, and when it crosses the line towards being unnecessarily judgemental or divisive.
FDB @140
Is “bogan” as bad as “n_gger”? No. Is it of a similar kind of pejorative quality? Yes. Both identify a disadvantaged group and seek to blame the members of that group for their own disadvantage (i.e. “n_ggers” are biologically inferior, “bogans” are vulgar and reactionary).
Was the Civil Rights movement focused on racist “jokes”? No. Did it recognise that such jokes were part of racial oppression? Of course it did.
Do the working class and poor require “emancipation”? I would think absolutely. Yet so many people favourable to bogan stereotypes want to perpetuate the idea that workers and the poor don’t deserve it, or at least that there’s a reactionary and vulgar subset who stand in the way of progress and the right kind of “taste”.
Plural of bogan is apparently boga, BTW.
The use of humour to isolate and differentiate a subordinate group (othering) is well known as a social process. As to class and bogans (sorry, can’t do boga) it seems to me that they are more than the working classes. They are the new class of outer suburban welfare dependents. Single mums whose children have multiple dads, the dads themselves and sometimes several generations in either direction. Their boganism is signified by clothing, haircuts and a general style all of which is circumscribed by poverty. These groups of people are being set up for a hard fall in the future (welfare quarantining, compulsory ‘parenting courses’ delivered by social workers for single mums of a young age, no prospects of work etc).
The description of them as bogans and the generalised contempt for these people exemplified by ‘bogan humour’ is highly suggestive of a social move to soften the ground prior to an assault on them by the state. They already are cultural outcasts and their outcast status is signified by mullets, tights instead of pants and so on. Their suburbs are famous for the absence social resources and public transport.
This suggestion might seem to be drawing a long bow. However, working for the state in the field of ‘human services’, I’ve been able to observe up close the way that this sort of discriminatory demonisation of an entire category of people opens the door to treating them as non-rights bearing citizens. This treatment would be impossible were it not for a generalised culture of contempt for ‘under classes’ that is exemplified by bogan jokes. That the young social workers who treat these people so poorly are most often only one degree removed from bogans themselves (quite literally a degree in social work) means that the treatment is frequently vicious and humiliating. Thus they differentiate themselves from their own immediate social background.
Occasionally though there are other social welfare workers from a middle class background who behave as a quasi police force over the bogans; as if the poor buggers didn’t already have enough trouble with the coppers.
I think Dr Tad’s point about ‘niggers’ and bogans is spot on. We wouldn’t cop a ‘boong’ joke these days and nor ought we to cop bogan jokes either. Moreover, I’d kick the shins off of anyone except a very close friend who called me a bogan even if I do drive a souped up wreck much beloved of bogans and wear cammo clothing from time to time.
While I haven’t had time to read all of these responses properly, I will say that I enjoyed Liz’s article. I totally agree with Owen Jones that this discourse aims to racialize the working class and portray ‘middle class’ values as ‘normal’. Two comments/questions. First, am I a bad person for enjoying the ruthless lampooning of the two ‘Burnside Village’ characters in Kath & Kim (the shop assistants with the ridiculous accents who probably earn $30,000 a year in those jobs but it’s just play money for them anyway)? I also enjoy giving Audi and BMW drivers a fright when changing lanes in my rusty old Ford. Second, although they are not necessarily described as ‘bogans’ every street in a working-class area has ‘that house’ with the children who keep everyone awake at night with their burnouts, parties, etc. Is it okay for working-class people to deride such families as ‘dole bludgers’, ‘shitbags’, ‘dropkicks’, etc? Some of the humour on television – for example the work of Paul Fenech – seems to come out of the latter experience, rather than being a middle class sneer at those who shop at K-Mart etc.
akn @144:
*LIKE*
“This suggestion might seem to be drawing a long bow….” no, I don’t think so akn, I think you are spot on.
Someone will have to explain to me why Bogans – even *if* discriminated against and slurred by this term, as (rather unconvincingly) alleged here – might need defending by you lot.
“..as if the poor buggers didn’t already have enough trouble with the coppers.” What, hoon laws? Are we pretending this is a potentially radical group of industrial workers? LOL.
There’s no escaping the CUB phenomenon here. Indeed, representations of bogans in contemporary Australian comedy *exclusively* settle on this group (Kath & Kim dont live on in commission flats, people, they’re small business owners like Kel, or lower middle class folks working in retail).
Its hilarious, and Pru and Trude are even funnier. Wake up – our bogans are lower middle class reactionary, ute-owning aspirationals.
Come in one night with me at Fitzroy Legal Service and see who’s marginalised and living in commission flats these days (hint… bring a translator)
Surely at the point the term ‘nigger’ was widely used, the target of the term was quite literally considered sub-human, and not even capable of normal intelligence. Maybe I’ve never been exposed to the level of snobbery that akn has, but at worst ‘bogan’ to me as implied a lack of taste and education. I’ve never even associated it with likelihood of welfare dependency, though I suppose among the longer-term welfare dependent there may be a slightly higher representation of those that would fit well enough into the typical bogan stereotype. But at least from my experience, ‘bogan’ has never been any worse of an insult than ‘nerd’ or ‘jock’ (and I’ve been told at least once to stop acting like each of those – something I could hardly say of ‘nigger’). Which makes some of the attitudes here a little mistifying…
Just a side note – I think you’ll find that Pru and Trude were just indulging in a spot of retail employment to earn a bit of pin money, as their hubbies were no doubt more than capable of maintaining their Mozzman lifestyle, although I think that one hubby was in a spot of bother with ASIC at some stage.
They were at no stage ‘bogans’, unless the term has come to mean wealthy North Shore trendoids who were prepared to take a job considered way beneath them for a bit of pocket money and the chance to have a laugh at the expense of the lower classes.
LeftyE: you’re right in some ways. Maybe a more nuanced view than I originally put would be this: it’s ok for the left to disparage bogans because they’re whitefellas whereas it’s not ok to take the piss out of reffos and Aboriginals. A type of displacement of social hostility happening here. Myself, I reckon that Gina Reinhart is the sort of cashed up bogan we need to be most concerned about. But that’s just me.
“The description of them as bogans and the generalised contempt for these people exemplified by ‘bogan humour’ is highly suggestive of a social move to soften the ground prior to an assault on them by the state.”
I think that is probably drawing a long bow, because that sort of humour has always been around, more or less. I think it was Su, many comments ago, who mentioned old TV comedies and I recalled Dawn Lake, who’s main character, as I remember, was a loud-mouthed, vulgar, stupid, working-class woman.
I know words are important, but actions are more important and maybe the link between the two isn’t so straightfoward. I once worked with a classic bogan, and after she retired we’ve continued to meet a couple of times a year for lunch. She always referred to Aborigines as boongs and anyone else who wasn’t white as darkies, but would never have acted in a racist way. When I last saw her and asked what she had been up to, she said she had volunteered to teach a group of women how to sew. A friend had told her about a local church that needed such a teacher. Well, apparently it was so interesting, and they all had a good laugh …. and all the women were Sudanese refugees.
So, I think it’s good for the left to analyse these things, and work out implications and connections, and discuss it all, but maybe it’s going a bit far to see any form of words or humour as ” a social move to soften the ground prior to an assault on them by the state”
All of these defences exactly mirror the defenses of racist, sexist and ableist jokes. Show us the proof it hurts! I think akn is spot on and from my vantage on the other side of that equation I’ve seen lots of examples, like the friend told by a Centrelink employee that she had “coached” her children into “acting blind”. This was after she had given them a report from her paediatrician, so the suspicion was completely without reasonable basis, it was an act of pure class bastardry. They made her jump through many more hoops than I have ever had to endure. Similarly a number of my friends, all of whom have children with disabilities, have had contact with Docs officials after school staff contacted them. None of these ever resulted in a thorough investigation, let alone a finding of neglect or abuse and yet I have never once had to go through a similar process, despite my children manifesting the same kinds of behavioural challenges and in the case of my youngest, occasionally turning up to school with faecal soiling as he is often incontinent. The only difference is our accents and other completely superficial traits like tattoos and piercings which say nothing about the parenting ability. I am immediately given the benefit of the doubt in circumstances which put them under immediate suspicion.
Elizabeth Humphrys @ 40
On reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not really ‘othering’ anybody because actually I’m talking about attitudes, not people.
I don’t think I actually know any bogans. But a bit like the wind, while I can’t see boganism, I can see its affects, and what I see I don’t like. So, when I talk of struggling to cope with bogans, what I am actually struggling to cope with is the observed impact of boganism. That includes Masterchef and the reality TV juggernaut, the top 10 selling books of the week being coffee-table crap, Bram Stoker’s masterpiece served up as soft porn for teenagers, political debate reduced to whining about border security and Nixon’s meal, bellyaches about the cost of living when we have never been richer and the absurd preoccupation with ‘celebrities’.
And I do feel ongoing anger at this perversion of society towards the superficial and banal. I guess I could respond by going on a shooting rampage, rioting in the streets, or boring my friends catatonic. Instead I choose to mock bogans and enjoy the mockery of others. But I’m not having a go at a class of people – I’m mocking the increasingly dominant attitudes that I see as having an adverse impact on my environment.
Can anyone think of an Australian sitcom where bogan culture was not a main, if not THE main, source of humour? [other than ones where minority race features heavily, but there's a huge crossover].
Mother and Son, I guess.
And yet the ‘bogan psyche’ becomes more and more comfortable with itself as such, despite the withering oppression of Kingswood Country, Hey Dad! and Kath and Kim.
Perhaps it’s the case that very little harm is being done.
Perhaps it’s the case that whatever the term once might have meant, it no longer refers explicitly to (indeed usually doesn’t even point to) poverty or lack of opportunity.
Perhaps these days the prevailing tenor of bogan humour is one of envy, more or less. I know my life would be a lot more fun if I brought in 150k p.a. from semi-skilled labour and didn’t care about much more than my car and my holidays. It’d be awesome!
As LE points out, there is an underclass in Australia. It is not typically the target of bogan humour any more though. It just isn’t. If anyone thinks it is, I’d like a few examples.
Wil Anderson was always making jokes about Flannie wearing bogans, when he could tear himself away from jokes about Paris Hilton’s sex life, he probably still does, but I am a conscientious objector so someone else will have to watch Gruen to check, and let’s not go round in circles about Jonah and the Dunt twins again. But the post was not just about comedy shows, tightsaspants# and Boganmovies# definitely target people based on class just have a look at the examples given.
su: exactly. I’d trade horror stories of class and race bigotry all day if I could but am under surveillance for potentially doing so, so won’t.
FDB, here goes then. A mother with seven kids goes into a social security office seeking additional payments. The kids are the usual snotty, squabbling, uncontainable mahem with rat’s tails haircuts, piercings and tatts, even the one’s under five years. The social worker sighs and pulls out the sheef of forms and says “well, we’re going to have to get all of the children’s names again because you seem to have some more since the last time we saw you.” Says mum: “ok, they’re called Jason”. Social worker says: “What all of them?”. Mum: “Yeah”. Social worker: “Why? Isn’t that confusing?”. Mum: “It’s really efficient. Watch this” and then she speaks sharply to the whole lot: “Jase, just shut up and sit down” whereon the whole bloody lot just shutup and sit perfectly still. Social worker: “But isn’t it confusing? What if you just want one of them?” and mum says: “Oh well, when I just want one of ‘em I call ‘em by their dad’s surname”.
TD’s attempt to verbal me @ 139 demonstrates that he has jumped the shark. There is no equivalence between bogan and n*gger. The fact that one draws asterisks and the other doesn’t is proof of this.
And as for this:
How about these?
Yankee
Old Contemptibles
Ocker
Squatter
Reb
Tory
Revisionist
As a Victorian, I might object to being called a Mexican. This term has all sorts of negative connotations. Happily, however, I shrug it off.
FDB @155
From hipster street mag Vice Magazine in December 2009: http://www.viceland.com/wp/2009/12/10-bogan-jokes/
Or most of these:
http://www.vikingidiot.com/the-best-of-bogan/
If you can’t spot the object of scorn as an overbreeding, semi-criminal, feckless underclass here, I’m not sure you’ll ever get it.
Katz @158
The underscore was only to avoid the auto-moderation. And my use of the words “term of abuse” was clearly in the context of an established notion of “real discrimination or oppression”.
The point of this discussion is not that about opposing all words with “negative connotations”. I use the word “capitalist” pejoratively (rather than just descriptively or analytically) sometimes, and there are many proud capitalists.
The issue that you’re missing/dodging is that those of us critical of the use of “bogan” are making a point about it being a cultural expression of real systems of inequality and injustice directed at the working class and poor. We’re not making an abstract argument about “being nice” to these people but a political argument about the Left taking class oppression (and its mediated cultural expressions in such pejorative terms and humour) seriously.
An interesting review of the Things Bogans Like book from Mel Campbell at Crikey. This bit is germane to the current discussion:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/01/19/smart-summer-reading-bogans-not-nationally-lampooned/
Dr Tad:
Huh?
Take a look at what I have written. I have never denied this. My point of dispute with you is that the word has evolved to mean more than the monodimensional meaning you are attempting to inscribe on to the word.
Dr Tad, thanks for those links…what strikes me is that of those jokes, they mostly point out behaviours that there are good rational reasons for wanting to discourage – smoking around children, teenage pregnancies, unnecessary violence etc. Yes, the implication that somehow all bogans are inextricably involved in such behaviours is probably unhelpful – but I laugh anyway, just as I can laugh at jokes aimed at stereotypes I do unashamedly fit but are clearly exaggerating particular traits/behaviours that such a stereotype is supposed to indulge in./
Katz @ 162
There is a reason I have posted the definitions and links to jokes. Whatever evolution has gone on, the basic class prejudice remains in place. I think the attempts on this thread to argue that the new meanings have been mostly detached from the old referents are pretty unconvincing.
It’s not me who has “inscribed” a definition; I’m just working with what’s commonly understood. It’s incumbent on those who say the classic definition no longer applies to make a strong case. Talking about “multi-dimensionality” doesn’t wipe away the original “mono-dimensional” core, and if it’s still there then it’s still class prejudice.
BTW, I don’t think the Left should be opposed to all class prejudice. Just the sort “from above”. The other kind is just fine with me.
“If you can’t spot the object of scorn as an overbreeding, semi-criminal, feckless underclass here, I’m not sure you’ll ever get it.”
If you think I’ve claimed that no lists of jokes at the expense of the underclass exist which refer to them as bogans, then you haven’t the slightest idea what I’ve been saying. I won’t go so far as to say you never will, as I’m not a sneering blowhard. I honestly believe you can do better.
If you like, I can link you to dozens of lists of “jokes” with all kinds of soft targets being vilified MUCH more severely. Would that prove anything though? Most ‘jokes’ in these contexts are, after all, jokes about the Irish or Mexicans with the serial numbers filed off.
I thought we were talking about contemporary Australia.
Dr Tad
This is my argument. The only point at issue is what metric one applies to “mostly”. What is the distinction to be made with “largely”, “significantly”, “materially”, or otherwise, perhaps even “majorly”.
Anything short of “like… totally!” appears not to suffice for Dr T, Katz.
Absolutism is fun!
I guess thats where Im coming from: I dont believe Bogan *ever* referred to the working classes of this country. The corollary of of my belief is that sources claiming the origin of the term are *wrong*.
For starters, the term didnt exist when the inner-cities were the clasic industrial working class areas. (No argument from anyone there, Im assuming.)
Its therefore not associated inherently with the Australian working class, but rather to a particular culture that followed:
- an historical shift to the suburbs and sprawl
- to individual home ownership
- to individual car ownership (very strongly associated with this)
- to the collapse of hard and fast urban-demographic per 1950 ‘middle v working’ class distinction in a great suburban home-owning sprawl
- which Menzies himself developed great elaborate paeans to
- as Ken Livingston said on his visit to Australia in 1987 “its like the entire lower middle class of Sheffield has formed their own country”
Now, I dont doubt that areas of cultural working class redoubts (eg the ‘Gong, Illawara, Newcastle) can bogan it up as well as anyone – but Im buggered if I can see how theyre really any different to the great lower middle class burbs of the major cities.
I’ll tell you where a classic “Bevan” lived in Brisbane: at Mt Gravatt, or Browns Plains, or Slacks Creek – or anywhere on the Brisbane to Logan corridor. Hardly working class heartland – until you get to Logan itself. Its a ‘new suburbs’ culture – united only by not being the pre-WW2 leafy green ones.
identified not by any single relationship to the means of production – but by particular modes of consumption and dress that actualy flattened classic distinction between labourers, shop owners, and lower clerk white collar workers.
Anyway, since I reject the entire premise and thesis out of hand – I should leave the field of this thread to those who dont.
Geez, youse guys are still goin’ but?
I’m convinced that boganism is a form of classism in which the objects of contempt and disdain are the working classes transformed to ‘bogans’ by joblessness, job insecurity, casualisation, welfare dependence and all the other ills that now befall people who once would have been at least allowed the dignity of a class identity but who are now denied it by the altered material conditions of globalisation and generations of Labor treachery. Thanks to #liz_beths and mark for running with it.
akn, curious – why do you think there is ‘dignity’ in a class identity?
I want to know where ‘Bogan’ comes from. I thought maybe it was ‘bodgie’ mutated. The earliest example of the word appears in the following:
Sorry about the distraction. Now back to the is b*gan as bad a putdown as nigga. (Hint: the N word’s mostly got an entirely other purpose these days. Actually it’s multi-functional)
@Adrien
Narromine, from memory is in Bogan Shire, so maybe the original referred to country folk from the area?
“Can anyone think of an Australian sitcom where bogan culture was not a main, if not THE main, source of humour? ”
Aunty Jack .The humour of Kev Kavanagh meat artiste may be close but was really rooted in the alternative lifestyle counterculture of the 70s.
LeftyE: yeah, ok, I always thought that ‘bogan’ was an agricultural reference anyway, like calling someone a ‘dubbo’.
wizofaus: the mention of dignity and class was specifically to a type of dignity associated with the working class that derived from class cultural attributes – remember the Workers Education Association or, going back further, the Mechanic’s Institutes?
murph: yes, just watched Shift and Swift followed by Fat Pizza in which every ethnicity got a serve including a singlet and undies clad whitefalla smokin’ a bong while residing in a caravan. Bogans not singled out.
Lefty E @ 168 growing up in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne in the 80s the only people who used the term “bogan” were people from the private schools in the Eastern Suburbs.
Its more of a cultural cringe thing than a heap it on the working class thing. Bogans were sposed to be dumb, but they aren’t – classic example, some bogan, of mediterrean descent probably from Sunshine, with the mullet, and fronds, wearing trackies and moccasins being interviewed about television “I only watch the Simpsons, everything else is an insult to my intelligence.” This was the v early 90s when the Simpsons had some edge to them.
Bogans were (IMO) a place to put the “cultural cringe” as it died/went to sleep. They were as ugly as the people from the good schools, but as the song @ 136 says the people from the good schools hid it better.
Back then it seemed Australia wasn’t as secure as a nation. IT took bands like Midnight Oil and INXS, and then Kurt Cobain talking about Kim Salmon, people realising how influential the saints, and nick cave and radio birdman and the triffids and foetus and ollie olsen were. It took winning the olympics, (as in “the Olympics – we won it) to really end that. People like Fred Hollows, owning Australia’s contribution to science etc etc.
All that stuff ended the bogan hating (imo). To me it seems the new skool bogan is everything that makes us cringe – a racist selfish arsehole. They are not the same as they were in the 80s. These days if we cringe at something its at the disgusting hatred for people for no good reason. Not at some colonial inferiority complex.
Thats how I see it anyway. (These days I rarely get to major cities, and am totally out of touch so I wouldn’t really know.) But obviously people see all this stuff differently, cos some people seem to think that the word nigger is somehow in the same league (or galactic orbit) of offensiveness as bogan.
White people don’t to get to use the word nigger, or nigga. Ever.
The fact that some of you still want to is why you don’t get to.
(There’s one exception and it was in a John Lennon song.)
Everyone in Australia has a bit of old school bogan in them, and probably more of the new than they’d like to admit.
Yeah, that rings true to me Jules. I was watching an old Painters & Dockers video recently and thought: what happened to good old anti- authoritarian working class culture that brought us eg streaking? Or anything mildly challenging to middle class order? I loved that culture.
What is the new boganism but a well fed spiritually under nourished politically comatose self interested illl-informed suburban Lower middle class whinge culture? And I’m sposed to defend this on ‘class’ grounds from the pernicious attacks by ( wait for it) comedians?
Holy crap – if we stop taking the piss of that we might as well give the game away.
I’m fishtailin
“Everyone in Australia has a bit of old school bogan in them, and probably more of the new than they’d like to admit.”
I remember my sister calling me a bogan sometime in the early eighties. I didn’t know what it meant but gathered it had something to do with my fashion sense being stuck in the late seventies. It definitely had a class element to it. Not in a nasty way – but just inevitably given a new outward looking culture was first building amongst the richer and therefore more mobile younger generation.
The new bogan thing is a manifestation of a hyper charged internecine fashion arms race. Consumerism gone mad. If you are wearing last week’s clothes or watching last week’s reality show you are a bogan. If you go out of the country on a medium length holiday you can leave as a trendsetter and return a bogan.
Mark’s point that redistributional politics is being put into the shade by this meaningless fashion contest is true but more to do I think with economic boom times shifting a large part of the working class into entirely overlapping income categories with the middle class.
A bit O/T again but I was trying to work out why neither Pizza or 7 Periods with Mr Gormsby bothered me at all (and although uneven they both have some great moments), but Lilley really does bother me, I feel there’s something cheap and nasty going on and I think it isn’t just because of the blackface, it is that the other shows create characters with some degree of self-awareness, they don’t create a huge gap between what the characters believe of their situation and what we as an audience understand to be the case and then exploit that gap for laughs or dramatic effect. It’s why I can’t see them as empathetic or affectionate portrayals. They’re patsys.
Yes su. Compared to Fat Pizza, Lilley’s stuff is all contempt for others whereas Fat P has a stong sense of ‘we’re all in this sh*te together’; it unpacks the humour of the working class trying to work out ethnic and cultural identity issues while living and working alongside each other without the advantage of a course in cultural studies. While it may offend some I find it a rib buster even as it is, as you say, uneven. But democratic because absolutely everyone gets a serve and the characters are reflective in a perverse way.
Had an ante natal class last night so I missed the Pauly double. Fenech’s shows remind me of people I have known, worked with and often liked over the years. Plus the Pizza crew tackling the Cronulla riots was just beautiful. (Was that last nights episode by chance?)
But I totally agree about Lilley su – and no its not about the blackface, its about his seeming alienation from his characters – I thopught the first show was ok – the high school one started to lose me tho, and I could only watch 10 or 15 minutes of the latest show before I got bored and irritated. Gormsby was funny tho – and that cartoon about the Islanders “Morningside for life”.
I agree lefty E, and I was an 80s bogan.
Painters and Dockers wooooo.
As not only a leftie but also a former delivery driver, pizza deliverer, and bogan who was a revhead and hung out with the wog boys at high school I have to say that I find Pizza and Swift&Shift hilarious but I have nothing but distaste for all that Lilley has done with this Angry Boys series. The previous show was more likeable, although all of the characters besides the Maori boy grated on me, perhaps due to the fact that I was working as a relief teacher at the time and knew these characters a little too well!
Mindy – Narromine, from memory is in Bogan Shire, so maybe the original referred to country folk from the area?
Narromine is real and it’s in Bogan Shire….
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That’s just so cool.
White people don’t to get to use the word nigger, or nigga. Ever.
Given the classy eloquence of that phrasing how can anyone challenge it. Tell it to Taranatino.
The fact that some of you still want to is why you don’t get to.
There someone here who wants to use the word as a term of racial vilification? Or even would use the word at all if Hip Hop hadn’t made it the new macho term of endearment? I doubt anyone born after 1980 would even know the word if ‘t’weren’t fer Snoop Dogg et al.
It’s just a word. – http://www.racialicious.com/2007/06/13/book-review-jabari-asims-the-n-word/
Eliminating it doesn’t make the world a shiny multi-coloured paradise.
@ Jules – Bro Town!
Narromine is in fact it’s own Shire and Bogan Shire is based around Nyngan.
@adrien 171 @Mindy 172 on origins of the word.
I have a friend whose first name is “Bogan”. Born in the late 1960s. I think it’s a name, originally. From a pretty middle-class background.
There’s one exception and it was in a John Lennon song.
This how silly this kind of word-jail thinking is. It’s okay for John Lennon to sing ‘woman is the nigger of the world’. And that’s it?
Okay. How ’bout:
Well obviously the guy who wrote that’s a straight up Nazi. In fact he been trying to join the Nazi party since forever but for some reason, I forget what exactly, they won’t let him in. There’s a lot of these fascists about check out this one – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLIkM4wvcC8
Is it off topic? Not really. The acceptance of the term ‘bogan’ and whether or not Chris Liley is funny has exactly what to do with whether or no people are prevented from from fulfilling their potential due to the socio-economic disposition of their parents?
Outside of the Revolutionary School of Endless Semantic Vortex Palava – nadda.
@ Tyro Rex
When Bevan was on Young Talent Time his name became a word used like a bit bogan (or loser) is used now, at my school (in the 80′s).
Adrien, it is a term of racial vilification still, today. I doubt anyone who posts here really wants to speak hatred to anyone. But the only thing that word generates is an emotional reaction. Thats its only meaning, cos the power of that emotional reaction is so strong.
That article mentions Dave Chappelle, and I hope you have seen that skit he does, where 3 (american) blackfellas have a white mate. They finally give him permission to use the “n word”. He does, and despite the fact that they are mates and close, they still beat the crap out of him, instinctively. They feel terrible about it, and all of them are there at the hospital, while he is recovering, covered in bandages, splints and life support gear they agree to let him use it and promise not to hurt him. They are shocked and surprised by their reaction obviously, but that reaction is still there.
Unfortunately for their mate, he happens to use the word just as a black doctor, with no knowledge of the situation, walks past.
Chris Rock does a skit about “niggers” and black people too. It kind of leaves me cold tho.
No it doesn’t, but its not about that. Its about power. If you have ever had that word used against you you’ll feel the weight of it. I have, as a kid, and its still shits me. That word was used by white people to reinforce institutional power over black people. Thats still the only meaning it has if you are white and you use it. I mean why else would you? What other possible reason would there be to use it?
We don’t want you to have that power anymore. We won’t let you.
(And unfortunately it is still an “us and them” thing.)
Adrien, (and any other LP regulars,) I’m really not having a go at you people here. I just don’t think you understand. Its still a matter of something healing and thats gonna happen on its own terms. The modern use of it is part of that healing tho, hip hop, and even Tarantino. You know when something starts healing, might scab up and gets damnably itchy, and if you scratch it too much it might rip the scab off and reopen the wound? The use of that word is a bit like that.
And the written word is way different to the spoken word. For some reason reading it just doesn’t jar the way hearing it does. Possibly cos if its written down its not being used against me.
Julian Curry – Niggers Niggas & Niggaz is worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.
Anyway this might be drifting OT a little.
I think that’s a really good simile, Jules. (Also, re the ante natal class? Congratulations!)
Patti Smith didn’t know what she was talking about with that colonialist noble savage bullshit.
Thanks Helen.
My wife is now officially “at term” (37 weeks) so any day in the next 3 or 4 weeks. First child, and I’ve got this massive goofy grin all the time at the moment.
Jules – Thats still the only meaning it has if you are white and you use it. I mean why else would you? What other possible reason would there be to use it?
But you yourself cited John Lennon using the word. Was he doing this in aid of the Backlash Blues? And Dylan, was his protest tune viz Hurricane Carter simply trying to return to the ‘good ol’ days’ and Patti Smith…
And Dave Chapelle’s entire riffing on that word?!!
It’s just a word. You say there’s no other reason to use it and yet you’ve got other reasons to use it right there in front of you. You’ve got Dave Chappelle’s lampooning of the protracted racialist power the word possesses because of the taboo status ascribed to it in America by Afro-America and yet you make the above statement…
We don’t want you to have that power anymore. We won’t let you.
What power is that? The power to say or write this or that word or the power of State-induced racial supremacy. Well in the case of the latter laddie there’s no you and me. You might be affected directly and I might not but as one of the old school says: on the front line’s where you’ll find me.
In the case of the former. No-one’s going to tell me what I can and can’t say. If you don;t have that freedom that you haven’t any other either.
And the written word is way different to the spoken word. For some reason reading it just doesn’t jar the way hearing it does.
I sorta agree. I do agree but I’d add that hearing it depends on context and tone. I have friends they use the word as a term of endearment interchangable with ‘brother’. They’ve got a lot more melanin than me yeah? Now they hear the word as a term of abuse and… pow!
And what you say about healing too.Gotta be careful. Peace.
“What power is that? The power to say or write this or that word or the power of State-induced racial supremacy.”
Adrien – both, but thats cos the idea of racial supremacy is still associated with that particular word. When I wrote We don’t want you to have that power anymore. We won’t let you. I meant “you” in the third person, tho at other times in that comment I was addressing you (1st person Adrien) directly, so again, please don’t take things the wrong way. I wasn’t implying you (1st person Adrien) specifically were likely to use that word to hang shit on other people.
And honestly I don’t think freedom is the foundation of freedom. The freedom not to be owned is a bigger one. Although both are obviously closely related.
Cheers.
The freedom not to be owned is a bigger one. Although both are obviously closely related.
Interesting question. They’re both the same in my view because they both rest on the principle that individuals are sovereign and that no-one has the right to incur on them without consent. Obviously slavery is such an incursion but instructing people as to what they can say is likewise.
Is saying you can’t use this word as bad a slavery? Hell no. But to do so starts you down a road that can lead to slavery. And to deprive people of the freedom to speak and think as they will prevents one from challenging injustice such as slavery. The abolition of slavery owes something to free speech.
Likewise the word-jail approach also necessitates, on the part of racial supremacists, a certain subterfuge wherein they don’t actually come right out and say what they actually think and you therefore can’t challenge it. I ran into a white supremacist a couple months back and I couldn’t pin him down because he’d learned these tricks.
Meantime because of this semantic diversion people who fight against racism have a tendency to tie themselves up in knots over the proper use of words.
PS I don’t think you mean ‘me’. I don’t use the ‘n’ word in regular speech because the first time I heard it (and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc) it was a nasty term of abuse accompanied by nastier physical abuse. But I know younger guys who use it, white, black, yellow, and it’s used like it is in Hip Hop. When it’s used that way it’s not a term of vilification but its opposite. Word-jail approaches can’t make the distinction. At the end of the day regulations can only help so far because they can’t change people’s hearts. Only people can do that.
I’m from the pre-baby boomer days and frankly the term “bogan” has largely passed me by. I asked my wife. Both of us had heard of the term, but couldn’t give an explanation. So I googled and found the Wikipedia definition, which Liz_beths uses at the top of her post:
I checked my 1998 Oxford Australian Dictionary, and there the term is unequivocally pejorative:
But the rest of the Wikipedia entry makes clear that there are non-pejorative usages and the term has been used in marketing.
For an attempt at humour, you might try Urban Dictionary or select another.
FWIW, I agree with Mark’s post and think contra Lefty E that what’s happening is of fundamental performance. Left to my own devices I’d tackle it using a different lens along the lines of Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of how post-modern capitalist society shapes identities, and has little use for some, but at this stage of the thread, I won’t go there.
I should point out I also think its of fundamental importance: I just dont believe the left should be beating itself up over this – when the genuine semiotic closure of concern is that its now politically incorrect to satirise the wealthy.
As some may have gathered – I also agree quite strongly with Mark’s analysis (if not his ultimate conclusions) that these are reorganised cultural identities rather than expression of economic location – first under Menzies, then again by Howard, and for the most part uttterly reactionary, anti-community, anti-solidarity, ‘battler’ crap. Not worth defending for a second. Completely deserving of having the piss taken.
Again I ask: where has the anti-authoritarian working class culture gone?
And finally, I agree with Mark here:
“The paradox here is that the space of the political narrows to a debate between different groupings of inner urban highly educated progressives; and actual poverty, inequality and, well, class are screened out in the ultimate social exclusion.”
Absolutely. This thread is a great example. The new working class are actually multicultural, feminised, unorganised, marginalised, living in commission flats – and Im sposed to worry about some suburban home-owning lower middle class whiteys in Toranas, and call it ‘solidarity’.
No thanks.
LE, thanks for a coherent, consolidated statement of your position. I was having a bit of trouble putting the pieces together.
Lefty, Toranas are now pretty much the preserve of classic car enthusiasts. I think you mean Subaru WRXs.
The same place as anything anti-authoritarian in Australia these days – down the plughole, with the honorable exception of the Greens probably.
In case anyone is under the illusion that the manipulated millions protesting against the government are ‘anti-authoritarian’, let’s just be clear that corporate interests are the real ‘authority’ in Australia today.
For someone who’s denouncing a stereotype, Nichols does a nice line in stereotypes himself:
OK, so that was actually from his publisher’s blurbist. this isn’t:
Someone’s missed the irony here – I just hope it isn’t me.
That whole second sentence is confusing:
If he is referring to the website’s author then, given his previous and following paragraphs are about whether Cubs exist as a distinct and distinguishable group of people, then I think he might be having a bit of a joke by deploying an equally broad stereotype used against the inner city. I don’t know how else to make sense of it. It sounds to me like sarcasm.
On the car thing, the only thing I can think of that seems to be a reliable warning sign of reactionary views is the prominently displayed Australian flag, but around here they are just as likely to be hanging from flag poles on lawns clipped to within an inch of their lives by the middle class, middle aged homeowner as they are to be dangling off wing mirrors. These are the houses I hurried past when leafleting before the last election, I’ve had bad experiences in the past.
su @ 203:
Yes, it’s possible that Nichols is serving up a bit of sauce for the inner-city latte sipping gander. The trouble is that said gander was invented by conservative commentators in the Howard years to distinguish people who (for example) opposed its policies on asylum seekers, from the real Aussie battlers in the outer suburbs who – well you know how it goes. It’s familiar politically conservative rhetoric. Maybe socially conservative as well.
On the whole, I’m not inclined to join the mea culpas on the bogan issue.
@Brian – no worries, I’m sure any lack of clarity was my fault!
@Helen – I defer to your superior knowledge of contemporary bogan circleworkchoices
@Adrian – right. And its occurred to me more than once in this thread: should we therefore defend from ridicule anything thats allegedly “contemporary working class culture” (leaving aside Qs over whether it actually is). Couldnt we first ask whether there’s anything progressive about it before self-censoring?
This could be an entire thread, but what’s the working class in 2011? How do the thousands of “self-employed subcontractors” fit in? Sweatshop workers? Cubicle jockeys (is white collar work the new factory work)? People employed in those soul-sucking “marketing” jobs? And who is middle class, anyway? Apparently the middle class in the US has all but disappeared if you define it by a certain level of security. And as has been pointed out upthread, people earning higher salaries doesn’t map to people with degrees. Most of us are a paycheque or two away from the Vinnies food vouchers.
Well, I think pure middle class would be someone in one of the so-called professions:
doctor, lawyer, engineer, academic, architect (maybe?), etc.
But the class system is increasingly meaningless as families have changed so radically. Whereas in the past family and social commitments have been dominant moulders of social relationships, now it’s unadorned contracts and money.
Helen @206:
Here in Australia, the crisis of capitalism came and went and the lumpenproletariat took over: they’re all cashed-up bogans now! And so we move on to the next phase in the class war (for which we’ll need a new Karl Marx & Fred Engels): the oppressed & exploited petit-bourgeoisie vs the cubbies and the capitalists.
I think given the confusion as to what actually defines the working class, what constitutes bogan culture and what pejorative commentary if any is to be authorized in the push for a world completely free of social prejudice or hatred we need to establish the Australian Institute for Bogan Studies tout de suite.
This should be a multi-disciplinary field with a five year bachelor’s degree examining the phenomena from the perspective of economics, genetics, anthropology, textile design, brand marketing and automotive engineering.
Assignment One
Two seventeen year old female Australian citizens of Anglo-Celtic ancestry walk the footpath to Cronulla Beach in the year 1970, this is their conversation:
Amanda: Cheryl, you know last week when Mark stood over my face at the beach while I was sleepin’ and squeezed the water from his crotch onto me face and woke me up?
Cheryl: Yeah?
Amanda: An’ you know how he went mental at me for not watchin when he caugh that rooly good wave?
Cheryl: Yeah?
Amanda: Do youse reckon’s sumthn rongwithat?
Is Amanda’s question a product of the bourgeois imposition of ruling class values causing her to negatively assess the legitimate mating ritual of authentic bogan culture against the analogous rituals of the capital owning class or alternatively is it a proto-feminist critique of patriarchal tactics of psychological oppression.
Discuss.
Adrien @ 196. Honestly when it comes to people saying nigger, if they say it around me they better be careful. No doubt you’ve noticed the aggro the word can generate. Honestly I would be a lot happier if punching someone was also considered free speech (it is a form of expression after all) and that provocation was a defence against hate speech. (It seemed to work in the oldschool/My old school bogan is stirring.)
Cos … one of the issues with “free speech” is that unless someone sews your lips up you are free to say whatever you want. Me typing:
“White people don’t to get to use the word nigger, or nigga. Ever.”
Doesn’t actually stop people saying anything tho does it. My words aren’t (that) magically powerful that now I’ve typed that no one is ever gonna say nigger again.
People are free to say whatever they want in public and even are under the most repressive of regimes. We are always free to do what we will, but we are also free to take the consequences of our actions. Criticising the Communist party in China or N Korea may have some nasty consequences, but all Chinese are still free to do it. We are all free all the time. The only way tyrants get away with what they do is cos the people they oppress have either forgotten or been conned into not believing that any more. The only reason we have the “modern state” and its protections and flaws, is cos people throughout history believed that and were courageous enough to act. To live their freedom no matter the consequences. (Which were often violent and brutal.)
What we call “free speech” is just protection from the worst possible consequences of our exercising free speech. Look at the Southbank sook – crying because he isn’t allowed to make inaccurate defamatory statements about specific individuals (and get paid for it) without them challenging him in court.
The people who won our freedoms did so by exercising free speech under the all sorts of extreme duress.
And honestly what you say about the consequences of jailing words. I do agree in principle. I don’t listen to much hip hop, but if Immortal Technique called me nigga I’d be cool, I’d assume it means bruz. Same goes for you Adrien. Its just one of those things, there is a paradoxical thing going on, cos its a word that has been used to oppress people who are around today.
But I know younger guys who use it, white, black, yellow, and it’s used like it is in Hip Hop.
Yeah, like that episode with Chef and the flag in South Park. With any luck it won’t be an issue in a generation.
Sorry for the OT.
Thanks Jules. I’ll only say that you need to fight sometimes to keep what those before us won much harder. What people in the ME fight to win now. We shouldn’t lose it.
‘Southbank sook’, snark.