#55 – Chrisco Hampers

“After months of excited waiting, it’s finally arrived. OMG. A massive hamper full of festive goodness from Chrisco! Sure it’s a couple of weeks later than they said it’d be, but kids, come quickly – our magical Christmas is saved!”

This has been the triumphal squawk emanating from bogan nests around Australia as, one by one, they receive their big baskets of shit. After years of piously soothing advertisements from a middle aged woman with a vague resemblance to Mrs Claus, bogan families have fallen for Chrisco one by one. With festive food hampers ranging from $370 to a galling $1250, this clever company has somehow convinced bogans that waiting to have a massive basket of easily available foodstuffs sent to them is better than immediately getting the actual items they want from the supermarket up the road at half the price.

The key to the appeal of Chrisco is the idea of making direct debit installments all year, in order to have the hamper arrive for FREE* sometime in December. Clearly, this is a gift from the good people at Chrisco, massive earlier investment notwithstanding. As the bogan appears willing to invest $210 over 9 months in order to have a slab of Bundy and Coke appear magically on its doorstep, Chrisco appears willing to make enormous profits from their gullibility.

As the bogan ‘plans its finances’ in advance, it allows Chrisco to sit on a lucrative mountain of bogan bucks for months before it has to actually purchase inventory for the hampers sometime in October. In order to deal with pesky questions about value, Chrisco sincerely informs the bogan about the stresses and strains that abound when navigating the supermarket in December, as though there’s some kind of bogan demilitarized zone between the dairy aisle and the turkey fridge. Instead, it’s OK. Chrisco is here to help. Thank heavens for Chrisco.

The Chrisco company originally formed in the UK, where it was moderately successful. While Britain is riddled with boganesque Chavs, the founders recognised that, with its apparently far more limited grasp of accounting, the bogan populace in the antipodes could make them rich beyond their wildest imaginings. They moved to New Zealand, and from there, the company crossed the Tasman to storm the main bogan stronghold in 1997. Today, it fleeces over a million bogans per year, and turns over a cool quarter billion. This phenomenal cash harvesting often goes unnoticed, as Chrisco is a seasonal business without prominent shopfronts, and bogans rarely read anything with numbers.

In late 2007, a systems failure caused the company to fail to deliver thousands of hampers prior to Christmas, which made the bogans both furious and elated. Furious, because they had to go to the supermarket to chance their luck at Checkpoint Charlie. Elated, because it allowed them to conduct furious vox pops with 22 year-old Today Tonight reporters about a new, and enormous, rort. However, while bogan rage is intense, a crippled attention span causes it to also be brief. A month later, the bogans in question had already signed up for an extortionate 43 week installment plan for Christmas 2008. This is the distillation of everything that bogans love about buying things.

Like some kind of retarded Friedmanite, the bogan views Chrisco as a good deal. This is the bogan economy. In the belief that if something is paid for in installments, and purchased in bulk, it must be sensible commerce, the bogan parts with $4.70 a week. For 10 months. To get a slab of Bundy and Cokes and a towel.

As presented on their website, though, the hampers appear full to the brim with discounted factory seconds. This mass of consumerism tends to cause an eye twitch in many of us however, and we can find the ludicrous price/image conflation confusing. But it’s OK, TBL is here to help. Here is a breakdown of a couple of the simplest beverage hampers on offer:

Coca Cola Hamper:

Contains 2 slabs of coke (supermarket value $35), and a promotional beach towel, hat, Frisbee, and bag. Typically this stuff is only a few bucks each (or free) when coke puts a promotion on, because it’s basically advertising.

Chrisco price: $137.80, or ONLY $3.21 PER WEEK! Only $3 a week for all that cokey Christmassy goodness? Thanks for the 300% markup, Chrisco, Christmas will be magical!

Beers of the World Hamper:

Contains six 6-packs of mid-priced beer (supermarket value $15 each, total $90), and a 5 litre mini keg of Heineken (supermarket value $30).

Chrisco price: $202.80, or ONLY $4.73 PER WEEK! Only $3 a week for all that beery Christmassy goodness? Thanks, Chrisco, for only charging $80 for delivery. Christmas will be magical!

This is the most genius company in Australia. And bogans bend over and take it with a smile. Merry Christmas to you all.

TBL is going to take a break for a week, as we sit back, drink some hard-earned local label beer in a little-known inner city haunt while wearing ironic T-shirts. We will then head out and conduct some primary research into bogan mating season (i.e. New Year’s Eve), and return in 2010 with renewed anger, renewed vitriol, and a renewed mission to bring to you, the people, the truth behind the bogan menace. Merry Christmas!

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

#54 – Thailand

The recent proliferation of discount airfares has seen the rise of the wise, well-travelled bogan. Five years ago, Bali was the best place to observe herds of shirtless, migratory bogans in the wild, but the rise of terrorism in Indonesia, Schapelle Corby’s well-publicised failure as an importer/exporter, and the entry of Jetstar into the Australia-Thailand route has seen a new habitat emerge. Motivated by the lure of cheap alcohol, spicy foods (ordered ‘mild’), and sexploitation, the bogan has embraced Bangkok, Phuket, and that full moon place as its modern spiritual retreat.

Thailand is close enough for the bogan to leave its nest at dawn, read the latest movie readapted to novel or watch Anchorman, and land in time to be slurping from a bucket by evening. Much like the Contiki tour, Thailand allows the bogan to believe it is having an exotic cultural experience, while speaking English, interacting only with other bogans (hopefully including British and Scandinavian bogans) and engaging in activities they engage in at home abroad.

Safely ensconced in a Phuket tourist resort or an Australian themed bar, the bogan can drink near toxic amounts of cheap beer, “get bronzed,” eat spring rolls, adorn itself with braids, tramp stamp or tribal tattoos, and watch Anchorman again. The more adventurous bogan can have its photo taken sitting on an elephant, have its photo taken in front of a temple, or have its photo taken posing shirtless and sunburnt on a generic beach.

At the end of the week, the Bogan can round out its travel experience with its fourth visit to the Khao San Road tourist pit, where they can interact with impoverished locals for the purpose of methodically screwing them out of $1.30 of the $1.40 profit margin in their fake sunglasses’ starting price. Invariably, one of the items purchased is a beer singlet for itself or a loved one to wear at the gym back home. Other items regularly witnessed by Jetstar cabin crew include Buddhist iconography, stolen bar mat(s), painfully idealistic (and often misspelled or erroneously translated) tattoos in the local language, bogus high fashion brands, and a new found capacity for credible racism.

Once home, the bogan will get mild Thai food delivered to their next house party, enthusiastically regaling attendees with its bucket guzzling exploits through a mouthful of Pad Thai. The worldly bogan will employ its one word Thai vocabulary to attempt to say thank you to the food delivery guy, even though he’s an engineering student from Delhi.

#53 – Their Pre-baby Weight

It is increasingly apparent that bogans have a love of two distinct, but closely related things: celebrities (i.e. reading about, looking at, listening to, talking about, imitating etc.) and the appearance of health (i.e. thin (f) or huge (m)). And nowhere do these things collide more violently than in the guise of a post-natal bogan woman.

The logic, as the bogan understands it, is undeniable. Fat is unhealthy. Carrying a living being in your womb for nine months will tend to result in substantial weight gain. Ergo, childbearing is an inherently unhealthy thing whose effects must be reversed as rapidly and drastically as possible once the responsible offspring are removed and placental remains mopped up.

This belief is consistently reinforced as bogans gather to discuss the varying successes of relevant celebrity mothers who, with their vast fortunes, excessive spare time and cameras constantly aimed at their thighs, manage to lose about 30kgs within the week following childbirth. Seeing as, according to the bulk of the bogan mother’s reading material, celebrities are ‘just like us’, it is no stretch to imagine that this is how the body is supposed to work.

Thus, the bogan automatically reverts to a diet of shakes, egg whites and broccoli stems for three months, purchases a jogging stroller and effectively starves itself in an effort to return to the hallowed ‘pre-baby weight’. The true ideal, of course, is to actually revert to a weight that is lower than the week they neglected to take the pill. By this, they attain true celebrity status within their new mothers’ club – the most viciously competitive environment on Earth.

In an effort to defeat their rivals, these new bogan mothers will simultaneously deny themselves food while lactating furiously to empty their soon-to-be stretchmark-free mammary glands. At which point they can resume referring to them by their proper name, boobs. While almost all bogans have the desire to achieve this, many lack the will. The next best thing is to gaze longingly at New Idea and Woman’s Day, pining for the days that they featured in the liftouts in the middle of the street presses, pouting from behind a flirtini.

#52 – Telethons

The bogan is prone to inward-looking, self-serving, short-term behaviour. For this reason, it is rarely found to engage in any form of social cause aside from unionism, which is arguably self-interest dressed up as collective interest anyway. This all changes when a disaster occurs that costs the lives of Australians. Instantly, the bogan transforms itself into a generous, empathic creature who will dig deep in order to get behind the charitable appeal related to the disaster.

It is even better when the disaster takes place in a region whereby the bulk of victims are not Australian, but there is a notable Australian presence. This allows the bogan to engage in their standard nationalistic giving, while giving an outward appearance of racial tolerance. Non-disaster-related charities suffered in silence until someone figured out how to activate the bogan’s unique trigger points. It had to be glitzy, it had to be on commercial television, it had to have celebrities, and it had to offer the prospect of exhibitionism for the bogan itself. The telethon was born.

One of the commercial networks will cancel the day’s programming so that it can show its – and only its – celebrities manning phones, taking calls from the bogan populace. In addition to the possibility of speaking to a reality TV star or footy player, the bogan is motivated by the hope that their friends will see their name on the scrolling ticker across the bottom of the screen that announces recent donations.After all, there is no point to being charitable unless the world is aware of the charitability. The logical culmination of this is, of course, the moment when <insert anonymous soap starlet here> declares, carefully scrutinizing the piece of paper in front her, that ‘Ben from Sandringham will double his $5 pledge if it gets read out on television. There you go Ben!’ All of this is interspersed with bite sized snippets of entertainment from said celebrities.

By making a donation, it becomes possible to confidently participate in social conversations about the appeal, and wait impatiently to mention that they’ve dug deep. The one-off and public nature of the donation is enormously alluring to the bogan, who generally lacks the conviction and consistency to provide quiet ongoing support to a social cause. A more recent (and laudable) innovation in bogan philanthropy science is to incorporate charity into music festivals. Here the bands play for free (glitz trigger), the bogans can ruin an event (exhibitionism trigger), it can be rebroadcast on TV (commercial TV trigger), and Peter Garrett (celebrity trigger) can promote the ALP to a generation of young bogans who didn’t realise he was the singer of AC/DC.

#51 – Tribal Tattoos

Much the same as a herd of warring goats, bogans closely associate success and social prominence with pursuits relating to physical prowess. Finding a convenient way to channel the spirit of the gladiator in order to become the alpha of their town or suburb can be critical to the self-worth of the bogan. The bogan has a vague awareness that over the millennia, there have probably been thousands of brave feats of killing things performed by warrior-like people. But, opening a book to figure out what, where, and when can be quite threatening. Thousands of bogans have discovered that a quick and effective way to appropriate the battle markings of this imagined warrior is through a tribal tattoo.

Tribal tattoos serve another important function for the bogan; they actually allow it to convince itself that it is culturally and artistically aware. Because tribes are probably from some other culture, the bogan becomes proud of its open-mindedness and ability to embrace the thuggish tendencies of an abstract people from another era and/or community. By doing so, the bogan displays tolerance and acceptance of all people, and deeply connects with the cosmos.

Secondly, tribal tattooing allows the bogan to express its artistic ability. The bogan enjoys being able, upon enquiry about its tattoo, to state that he/she “designed it myself”. Designing a tribal tattoo requires the capacity to draw up to 60 arced or swirled lines with no defined spatial or thematic structure, and to then pass it off as inspired expression. Just as this was within the capacity of the glistening trail of a snail on a slab of hot concrete, the bogan is also able to triumph in this endeavour. Jagged lines in the design depict battle-readiness, hardness, and other unspecified warrior traits.

The bogan male is aware that a tribal tattoo is best displayed on a broad, warrior-like piece of flesh. Some bogans will achieve this through making their biceps huge at the gym, while others will eat more fatty food than they ever should. The female bogan also expresses interest in acquiring tribal markings, though generally in the form of a tramp stamp.

By expressing itself through the permanent application of a tangle of unintelligible and meaningless lines to its body, the bogan attains the status of artist, creator, warrior, and, perhaps most importantly, suitable breeding partner.

#50 – Discount Airlines

The bogan is no longer restricted to holidaying within a 5 hour Commodore journey of its nest, and it can thank a ginger Englishman for this fact. Now the whole family can whisk itself to the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, or some other coast with a well-funded regional tourist body that pitches effectively to the bogan’s needs. It can even get to ‘countries’ like Bali, Phuket, and other places where there are poor people to haggle with for hair braids. Australia’s first discount airline in the modern era was launched in 2000, and Virgin Blue quickly acquired the loyalty of the bogan with its blend of lower prices and titillating hostesses.

Qantas soon realised that the bogan no longer aspired to board the flying Kangaroo, and subsequently launched Jetstar in 2004, with its blend of even lower prices and Magda Szubanski’s less persuasive visual charms. To conclude this race to the bottom, Tiger entered the market in 2007, boasting the lowest prices yet, and some scrubbers that the bogan had never heard of. This did not deter the bogan though, as anyone who has had the misfortune of being situated in a Tiger departure lounge can attest.

The discount airline business model involves stripping airline travel down to the basics, and passing the savings onto the customer. While the bogan generally desires to live like a celebrity, it is very receptive to the idea of getting somewhere really cheaply. This is where the bogan’s logic fails on two different levels that it seems unaware of. Firstly, it expects celebrity service at bargain prices. If the discount flight is 30 minutes late, a small cluster of bogans can be seen gesticulating maniacally at the service desk, an act which is likely to make the subsequent flight 45 minutes late. The bogans’ flat nasal yowl reverberates across the departure lounge, prompting other bogans to begin howling like a neighbourhood of cross-eyed dogs while the bogan children replenish their tear ducts with 500ml energy drinks. Due to incidents such as this, the Bali to Brisbane Jetstar flight on Sunday afternoons has come to be known as the “bogan bus”.

Secondly, the bogan has saved TWENTY SEVEN DOLLARS on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney at dinner time this Saturday, flying Tiger instead of Qantas at 9am Wednesday. Let’s break it down, shall we?

#49 – Faux Lesbianism

Almost everything the bogan does revolves around drawing attention to itself. Be it the highest hair, the most garish Ed Hardy t-shirt, the most fluorescent laces on its shiny new Dunlop Volleys, the biggest guns or the largest sunglasses, the bogan is living a constant audition to be a contestant on Big Brother. In particular, the bogan has a narrower focus on attracting the attention of the opposite sex.

As this sartorial and behavioural arms race continues to escalate, ambitious bogans are being forced to revert to ever-more outrageous activities in order to stand out. While the male bogan continues to embrace sheer muscular bulk and gaudy attire, his female counterpart has realised that the male couldn’t give two shits about what she was wearing. She had to stand out by emphasising her sexual availability.

This is not as easy as it once was. In the early days, it was a simple matter of wearing revealing clothes, which is harmless enough. Then came the commodification of Playboy, entrenching in the bogan mind a notion of the feminine ideal that spawned from the syphilis-ridden mind of an 83 year old lothario. But shortly thereafter, bogans discovered internet porn, and Pandora’s box was well and truly opened.

Suddenly, the male bogan’s definition of ’sexy’ devolved to one of two definitions: “fake-tittied blonde copping a tag team from a pair of oversized bouncers/porn stars” or “chicks making out/strapping on.” In the absence of societal acceptance of breaking out sex toys in public, bogan girls began slamming their tongues down each others’ throats with an enthusiasm that their potential paramours found all the more intoxicating for its insecurity and desperation. It gets even better as it allows the bogan to promote the appearance of the acceptance of homosexuality without ever having to condone two guys, you know, doing it. Or ugly chicks.

Today, the faux-lesbian encounter tends to happen about five cruisers into a 10 cruiser and half-bottle of Jack Daniels night. The bogan male, stalking its appealingly tandem prey, waits until many more of those 10 cruisers have disappeared, before making its move. Gently, wordlessly, he guides the now-malleable faux-lesbian femme bogans to an upstairs bedroom, before attempting to perform an (albeit confusing) one-man Chinese finger trap on one or both. All too often, the evening ends with the male bogan covertly performing The Stranger on itself in a nearby carpark.

#48 – The Corbys

In 2004, Schapelle Corby was a blue eyed, moderately attractive Gold Coast TAFE student. A 20-something girl with a remixed name, dodgy family, and a tendency to go to Bali for holidays. An exemplary new bogan. Things went badly wrong for her when she was convicted by Indonesian authorities for smuggling 4.2kg of cannabis into Bali. Bogans back in Australia were outraged, and Today Tonight/ACA realised that a major meal ticket had arrived. The other thing that arrived was a white Mercedes with an oversized front grill and a high pitched screech emanating from its throat.

The bogan is a fiercely tribal creature, neatly tucking its selective disregard for truth into the pseudo-noble Australiana slogan of “standing by your mates”. This egocentric “us versus them” mentality permits the bogan to violate the laws of other jurisdictions whenever and however it wants, declaring foreign countries “un-Australian” whenever problems occur.

At these times, the Australian Government is supposed to spring into diplomatic overdrive to extricate the sullen bogan from the consequences of its willfully ignorant alleged actions. An opportunistic celebrity lawyer will work pro bono to coach the bogan on crying, temporarily converting to Islam, or other methods with a chance of perverting justice. The fortunate bogan eventually comes home to a hero’s welcome and a lucrative “tell all” ACA interview, having not learned a single thing (aside from the crying). All of this overrides the simple fact that the bogan in question in all likelihood traveled to a foreign country with draconian anti-drug laws while importing or taking illicit drugs.

The bogan regularly gains self-esteem from loudly declaring a stance on topics that it knows little about, and the idea of a healthy bogan female of reproductive age being imprisoned on a drug-related charge in an Islamic country represented the convergence of a number of its fears. It demanded that the Australian Government “do something” to bring Schapelle home.

The fact that her father and two of her half-brothers all had prior drug convictions was deemed by the bogan to be unrelated to Schapelle’s certain innocence, along with piles of other information. It just knew. Meanwhile, Schapelle’s sister Mercedes used her new fame to pop up and net $50,000 for stripping down for bogan bible Ralph magazine, airbrushed and spray tanned to within an inch of her life. This allowed the bogan readers to remark that “I’d take that Mercedes for a spin”, to the laughter of their similarly braindead mates.

While there are thousands of people imprisoned on drug-smuggling charges around the world, and hundreds of medical and social problems that cost the lives of Australians every year, the bogan saw no inconsistency in ignoring them all, save for Schapelle. It proudly participated in newspaper and television polls to “confirm” Schapelle’s innocence, vehemently maintaining to this day that a great injustice has been done.

#47 – “Fuck Off, We’re Full” Stickers

The Bogan loves its car, and the Bogan loves putting bumper stickers on its car. A sentiment that has been distilled into a few short words appeals to the Bogan’s belief that the universal order is fundamentally simple to grasp, which is convenient since its past experiences of thinking about things too hard have proven frustrating and ultimately unrewarding. Perhaps this explains why the Bogan can sustain the conviction that Australia’s landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres cannot physically accommodate any more than its current population of just over 22 million people.

This idea is perplexing, but the Bogan appears to believe it firmly enough to plaster it on the back of its beloved car. Believing Australia is fatally overcrowded, one does wonder why the Bogan pumped out three kids in the last two and half years, and this is yet another example of the kind of fascinating contradictions constantly thrown up by the phenomenon of Boganism.

At the risk of doing TBL readers’ work for them, the sticker makes a lot more sense when you look at it this way: Australia is not ‘full’ as far as the Bogan’s own kind is concerned – the message is intended for foreign immigrants, particularly asylum seekers. The Bogan is not racist, but believes that immigrants (only the brown ones, of course,) don’t ‘assimilate’, by which it means they don’t become Bogans. Naturally, the Bogan has never actually met a refugee before, and bases this opinion solely on something Aaron was saying in between mouthfuls of beef and black bean the other night. One of the most illustrative insights into the Bogan’s confounding pathology is that the Bogan claims to like each and every brown person it has ever chanced to meet, yet continues to maintain the opinion that every single other brown person is some kind of hybrid of Osama Bin Laden and Idi Amin.

To its marginal credit, and despite the fact that the Bogan drives about with a racist statement on the back of its car, a true Bogan is unlikely to be a member of an active white supremacist hate group. That would mean straying too far outside of the warm, cradling mainstream, and besides, their meetings clash with Two And a Half Men. Also to its credit is the accurate grammar and syntax of the printed sentiment.

No, the “Fuck Off, We’re Full” sticker is racism-as-automotive-adornment, a nod and a wink to other racist Bogans – “yes, I’m a racist too, it’s OK, you belong. Now please admire my sick rims”.

*UPDATE*

There have been some expressions of doubt that these exist. Doubt no longer.

#46 – Weddings: Photography

In the interim stage of the wedding day, as the guests trudge across country to attend the winery in rural NSW to get drunk on someone else’s dime, the bridal party head off to be photographed. For several hours. In several locations.

Because, in typical nouveau bogan fashion, paying a professional photographer to capture the special moments when the beautiful bride walks down the aisle, the new husband and wife have their first kiss or share their first dance are not enough. Oh no. The bogan couple to be want another 927 photos of them and their bridal party, taken in a variety of scenic and urban locations, featuring a dizzying array of poses and facial expressions and featuring every possible permutation of groomsman and bridesmaid.

After waking sprightly to apply industrial grade foundation and ‘product’ for the day ahead, the bogan wedding party’s first port of call is a non-descript, inner city beach. Flutes of Yellowglen Pink and golden microphones in hand, the party awkwardly pose for the two hundred photos, Juan the photographer capturing the bride’s Christine Aguilera pose and closeups of her gem encrusted hand and plunging neckline while the bridemaids frantically try to save freshly straightened hair from the marauding sea breeze.

Posing in the midst of a graffiti-lined inner-city alleyway lends the bogan couple urban grit and credibility, before they retreat to their neatly sterilised, graffiti-free apartment block of four-bedroom abode nestled comfortably at least 20kms from the nearest train station.

Waiting to snap the bride draped over the bonnet of the vintage Mustang, the wedding party make a quick stop at an inner city graffiti laden laneway normally derided for being full of ‘goths and fags.’

Next stop on their pictorial odyssey is the botanical garden. Here the couple play ‘hide and seek’ behind the 300 year old elk tree and the groomsmen don Ray Bans and adopt tough guy poses in imitation of their favourite action flick.

The final destination on the bogan’s filmic expedition is a building, preferably old looking, where the budding Aaron and Erin can pose in doorways. Here the bogan couple can also demonstrate their artistic bent, with the bride opening the curtains in a dark room to reveal the daylight –presumably symbolic of something, the groom ponderously staring out a window as if contemplating their future lives together (whilst actually wondering how best to consummate his marriage – doggy or missionary) or the Pièce de résistance of bogan wedding photography, the juxtaposition of a black and white portrait with a red inanimate object – the absolute ultimate in bogan Facebook profile images, until they have kids and can use them instead.

Although exhausted and $7500 out of pocket, the bogan couple are now ready for their special day… when friends and family descend on their new, outer-suburban display home to in two weeks time to view a slideshow of all 927 photos in all their excruciating glory.

Here are some others – sometimes words just don’t quite cut it.

On a final note, the staff here at TBL are heading off for the weekend to a particularly non-bogan music festival, and may or may not be in a proper state to post on Monday. Stay tuned!