Lately, the word "bogan" has been raising its ugly (and hilarious) head in the public discourse. Be it drunk teenagers belting each other in Kings Cross, or a passenger on the "bogan bus" Brisbane to Denpasar flight causing an international incident like the pinching of a bar mat writ large, Australia’s en masse behaviour has been reverting to type.
But a central part of the Australian national identity is a massive, crippling insecurity about boganism. How are we seen by our neighbours? Wait, was that a mention of a local news event on CNN? How do you like the three seconds of Australia that you’ve seen so far, Will and Kate? The temptation has always existed to push back against our bogan tendencies, and accuse those who toss the word around of engaging in class warfare.
And then, today, we saw the delightful spectacle of multi-billionaire James Packer and multi-millionaire David Gyngell engaging in the most fundamental, primal bogan behaviour there is: going the biff in public because one of them thought the other had set recording teams in an anonymous van out the front of his house.
Here’s the rub – bogan is as bogan does. There may once have been a time when the bogan was a lazy pseudonym for a bloke with a tinny and a wifebeater sitting in his front yard, peering under the bonnet of a Kingswood. But those days are gone.
If bogan is to remain the quintessential Australian insult, it needs to be redirected. What we’re seeing is the apogee of bogan behaviour being not only normalised but celebrated. Bogan is now the behaviour of the winners – the economically, socially and politically dominant.
This is the behaviour of two men born into success. Kerry Packer set up his son up well for a proud future in the gambling sector. David’s dad was the first person to speak on Australian TV and remained a fixture in the industry his whole life.
The evidence is everywhere. Their excesses – the kind of excess that Australians increasingly aspire to – come in both the macro and the micro. Gyngell mimicked the bogan-baiting strategy of credit card companies the world over by buying his wife a platinum engagement ring (after all, platinum is better than gold, right?), while the Barangaroo Casino will create a seven-star bogan resort on Sydney Harbour.
You can see it now: Gyngell, in classic “I’ve seen too many movies to have an original thought” mode, puffing out his chest and bleating “you wanna hit me? Fine, go ahead and hit me!” We don't know precisely how it went down, but one of them apparently cracked his head on a brick wall.
Then, the most bogan moment of all: the immediate reconciliation after the dust-up, where the two foraged around in the grass for what is thought to have been a tooth. The press release and the large sums exchanged for the pics afterwards are simply the billionaire bogan equivalent of "hashing it all out" on each other’s Facebook walls afterwards, of course.
Bogan isn’t about class any more, it’s about class. It’s about having all the dispute resolution skills of a Real Housewife. It’s about two men over 40, shouting and snarling and scraping like wild animals on a Bondi street, while they lay into each other beside a $500,000 Mercedes.
