Bogan Culture: A Cultural Report
Executive summary
The first thing to understand is that “bogan” is not really the name of a single, coherent social group. It is a remarkably flexible Australian cultural label.
At various times it has meant:
- a supposedly uncultured working-class Australian;
- an outer-suburban Australian;
- a person with conspicuously unfashionable tastes;
- a person with a particular accent or vocabulary;
- a petrolhead, hoon or ute enthusiast;
- somebody who drinks too much;
- somebody who is aggressively Australian;
- somebody who rejects pretension;
- or, increasingly, simply somebody who cheerfully identifies as a bogan.
That last transformation is probably the most interesting.
“Bogan” began largely as an insult but has been partly reclaimed as a badge of authenticity, national identity and resistance to cultural snobbery. Linguist Roslyn Rowen describes it as a distinctive Australian cultural keyword whose negative meaning can be transformed into positive self-identification and Australian nationalism.
And there is a delicious paradox at the heart of it: The bogan has become fashionable precisely because the bogan is supposed not to care about fashion.
