#82 – Nike Shoxmax

Nike just knows. It knows that despite its sporadic or entirely absent dedication to cardiovascular fitness, the bogan requires a pair of high performance running shoes. And not just a pair of sleek, low profile running shoes – the bogan wants to obnoxiously trumpet their purchase to anyone within a 10 metre radius. For this reason, like some sort of conscientious lyrebird, they are drawn to running shoes with bright colours, jagged lines, shiny bits, and gimmicks.

But Nike already knew this. Way back in 1987, they released their first Air Max shoe. Coupling a highly visible cushioning technology with the use of letter X proved to be a lasting winner with the bogan, who does very much enjoy taking things to the max. Despite being many kilograms over an ideal running weight, the bogan was, and is, willing to fork out well in excess of $200 for a shoe that is 50 grams lighter than a shoe $100 cheaper. Using this reliable mathematical formula, the heavy set bogan is willing to pay $20,000 for the honour of losing 10kg by running around a local park three times a week for 6 months. It even has the ideal shoes for the task. Even better, some of these shoes come with what appear to be very large springs attached to the heel – a clear indication of the shoes’ ability to add to the bogan’s ‘mad hops’.

But alas, the bogan is rarely seen running around anything, with one exception. In 2007, British police data revealed that 5 of the top 6 footprint patterns left at crime scenes were those of Nike Air Max shoes. Just as the British tiprat favours taking things to the max, its Australian cousins at the criminal end of the bogan spectrum are also regularly seen sprinting their Air Maxs up the street with an Xbox under one arm, and a DVD player under the other. You see, after spending $250 on its athletic shoes, the thieving, wheezing bogan sees itself as too cash-strapped to instantly purchase its own DVD player.

Like all truly great companies, Nike was not content to rest on its laurels. In 2001 it pioneered a new method to vacuum new dollars from the bogan. “Nike Shox” contained the requisite X, and added a misspelling to up the x-tremeness level. The Shox themselves are rubbery cushioning columns in the sole of the shoe, with unenclosed gappy bits around them for max x-treme visual impact. The new technology allowed Nike to charge a higher price, one which the bogan was quite content to pay. There has been a gradual increase in the use of Shox technology in Nike’s high end sports shoes, making its entry into a) the criminal’s most-loved list, and b) the local Fitness First, all but certain.

#81 – Ministry of Sound

While the bogan can’t always decide whether its favourite country is Bali or Phuket, it knows that come Sundays, its favourite techno band is Ministry of Sound. Just like commercial radio, the Ministry of Sound corporation acts as a filter for the bogan, packaging the world of music into glamourously-branded compilations so that it doesn’t need to think, search, or be faced with the confusion of choice. The full spectrum of the bogan’s moods can thus be catered to, by MoS compilations like Maximum Bass Overdrive (fighty), Clubbers Guide (fighty/strutty), Chillout Sessions (fighty/strung out), and the MoS Annual (fighty/nostalgic).

While the bogan is unaware of the origins of Ministry of Sound, it knows it’s something to do with Ibiza in the Greek Islands, which is probably full of hot sluts. If a song is too slow for the club, the bogan knows that Ministry can be relied upon to staple a programmed kick drum and a pneumatic buzzing synth sound to it. If a song is too frenetic for a Sunday afternoon, the bogan knows that Ministry agrees, has removed the kick drum, and called in some chick who sounds like Enya to sigh it over a sample of breaking waves and wind chimes. The bogan is safe from harm in its ministerial cocoon.

By fencing off the galaxy of music into a small pen, Ministry of Sound also enables the bogan to confidently participate in conversations about dance, electronic, and ambient music with its friends. Even better, the range of MoS branded apparel allows the bogan to physically affiliate itself with the logo, and then strut around like a DJ/celebrity. It feels at home near velvet ropes. The male bogan knows full well that an uptempo Ministry compilation is the correct mating call to pair with its plumage of large biceps and personalised numberplates while it competes for turf up and down popular nightclub strips.

Many a new bogan has heard the urban legend about the time that a bogan was in a metal club for its cousin’s birthday, unhappy with the confusing music that it didn’t know how to dance to. It approached the DJ booth, demanding that the DJ play some “fucking Ministry or something good”. Unexpectedly, the DJ nodded enthusiastically, and started playing an industrial metal song called “Jesus Built My Hotrod“. Few modern bogans have yet realised what went wrong, but many now cautiously add the “…of Sound” suffix to their request, just in case.

#80 – Fashion Statements

The term “fashion statement” is an interesting one. It suggests that a person’s choice of clothing says something about themselves, what they think, and how they see the world. Basically it’s a speech bubble connected to your body all day long, and visible to all. So it makes perfect sense that people should wear clothing that they understand. The bogan does not make perfect sense.

Bogans are particularly fond of wearing clothes with large numbers printed on them. One possible explanation is that it’s an intellectual statement about what the bogan feels to an excessively competitive culture, where everyone is made to feel as though they are in a race. This possibility can safely be eliminated, as the bogan does not think in abstract metaphors such as that. After careful thought, TBL can conclude that no other explanation can possibly justify this behaviour. It is therefore just baseless trend-trotting and a desire to wear something written in a large bright font.

The confusion does not end there, though. The bogan also enjoys wearing clothing that randomly pairs a foreign city name with a random noun, and a random number. If you ask a dilettante bogan why it is wearing a yellow t-shirt with “San Francisco Bears 74” scrawled across it, do not expect to get an answer that contains actual insight. If you press further, and ask it what its favourite spot in San Francisco is, the poorly travelled bogan will likely become agitated. Any further suggestion that San Francisco is America’s leading gay town, and that “bear” is slang for “overweight and hairy gay man” is certain to create a punch-on.

This trend of boganic fashion non-statements is happening on streets and dancefloors near you. Even in the hipster district of Melbourne frequented by TBL authors, a bogan male was recently sighted at an indie pub wearing a “Fretilin” emblazoned fitted t-shirt made by mid-price disposable 16-25 fashion brand M-One-11. The bogan was confronted, and asked whether he thought Xanana Gusmão had been a good president for the Timorese. It took a good 30 seconds to explain to the irritable bogan that he was wearing a politicised t-shirt relating to a country that he could not have pinpointed on a map, and knew nothing about. The bogan’s fashion statement can be summarised as “duh”.

Ed Hardy.

#79 – Big Things

To incite jealousy or admiration in a bogan, you don’t need to do something better than them, you just need to do it bigger. Bill Taylor realised this in 1971, when he purchased a modest 23 hectare pineapple farm. Rather than figuring out a way to grow a better tasting pineapple, he erected a 16 metre high fibreglass one out the front. 30 years later, it’s listed by the National Trust for its services to roadtripping bogans.

The Big Pineapple is not a one-off, it is part of a curious set of oversized objects scattered around the nation. They include big oranges, big Merinos, big bottles, and big barramundis. Devised by clever businesspeople as a lure for bogan bucks, installing a big thing outside a place of roadside commerce has proven to be genius. Indeed, the bogan has come to see these big things in a similar light to the Egyptians with their pyramids – majestic and mysterious monuments to their ancestors. In the case of Australia’s big things, however, it is usually a tribute to a bogan 20 or 30 years their senior, who is an old fag because they don’t have a Southern Cross tattoo.

Typically, a local district’s big thing relates to a local crop or industry. The visiting bogan has no interest in sampling the local delicacy massively immortalised in concrete and fibreglass, for it filled up on an upsized Quarter Pounder meal out on the freeway 30 minutes prior, and is suspicious of unprocessed food. It will, however, insist that one of its friends take a witty perspective-based photograph that gives the illusion of the bogan holding, pushing, humping, or devouring the big thing in question. The bogan rarely misses an opportunity to visit a big thing, and is convinced that the more of them it sees, the better it will understand itself and its country. The bogan is not interested in the fact that big things are not a uniquely Australian phenomenon, and is likely to regard anyone suggesting so with a combination of confusion and loathing. Australia’s first big thing (the Big Banana) was inspired by a big pineapple in Hawaii in the early 1960s.

With this patriotic ritual concluded, the bogan is now ready to spin its Chevrolet’s wheels in the carpark, and blast the newest Ministry of Sound Annual out of its open windows until it finds the nearest freeway onramp.

#78 – André Rieu

André is not the first of his kind, indeed the bogan was charmed 15 years ago by Vanessa-Mae, an attractive young violinist who plonked techno beats over Bach, Classical Gas, and some other stuff. She went on to cultivate x-tremeness by playing on a Prince project titled “Xpectation”. Her ability to cater to the ADHD market’s desire to seem sophisticated was successful, setting her up for life.

In a provincial town in the Netherlands, a middle aged man was surfing the internet, and saw what Vanessa-Mae had done. “I wish to extract much cashmoney from the bogan also”, he said to himself, “but how can I do this when I am not a sultry young woman?” André pondered this further, and clicked his clogs together with glee when he realised that there might just be a way. “Am I not a slightly rogue looking, well dressed gent with a regional orchestra and a cynical mind?” André muttered to nobody in particular. With no responses forthcoming, he interpreted the answer to be in the affirmative.

And, for better or worse, right he was. After a few years of flitting here and there, André Rieu became aware of how to charm the Australian bogan female into revealing to him the soft, pink lining of its purse. He pairs his own appeal to middle aged bogan females with that of an attractive young female soprano singer in his live performances, reducing the resistance of the bogan male to grant his wife the expensive wish of attending one of Rieu’s stadium shows. André depicts his critics as members of a stuffy musical elite with narrow aesthetic tastes, which the bogan gratefully assimilates into its own resentment of ambitious people who do not wish to be bogans.

Being aware of the bogan’s reluctance to dwell too long on foreign music pieces it is not already familiar with, André intersperses his Australian shows with singalong favourites such as Burke’s Backyard, Bananas in Pyjamas, and Neighbours. Indeed, he even guest-starred on Neighbours in April 2009, bringing his brand name to the unwashed masses when they least expected. He released a schmaltzy localised appeal to the bogan female in the lead-up to Mothers’ Day 2008, with “Waltzing Matilda” getting to #1 on the album charts.

While a competent musician in his own right, Rieu is not the superior of dozens of other less acclaimed Waltz violinists around the world. What he and his record label (Universal) have done better than anyone else, however, is to simultaneously allow the bogan to see itself as sophisticated, while pandering to its short attention span, need to be validated, and latent xenophobia. He’ll even perform in a suburban megamall foodcourt, for those bogans who grow anxious when their pop-classical music consumption becomes  separated from their Boost Juice and Krispy Kreme consumption.

#77 – Poker Nights

While the bogan is generally characterized by its mindless consumerism and ill-informed gambling, it does face one significant problem; scarce income. The bogan, despite having increased its earning capacity significantly over recent decades via interest-free education loans and a booming economy, still has an extraordinary ability to live beyond its means. This includes going so heavily into debt that credit cards cease to work properly.

At this point, the bogan, unable to buy the clothes it wants, or go to the bars it wants to colonise, or gamble during the Spring Carnival of horse racing, needs some other form of entertainment. While house parties can go some way to dealing with these problems, they can greatly diminish the chances of attracting a bogan of the other gender. There tends to be the need to speak to other people at house parties, as distinct from the occasionally muffled yell at one another before subtly groping each other in a darkened, cavernous room.

Suddenly, with the advent of pay TV – and later digital TV – a new bogan paradigm began to emerge: poker. The Poker World Championships were aired on ESPN and later Channel One, a delicious slice of the tension that exists during professional poker matches. As the bogan male has a preternaturally created belief that it is the greatest gambler on Earth, there was an automatic swarm of bogans to the casino – which had handily been built in the past decade or so – where they could embrace a game they felt they could ‘beat the house’ at. Despite the fact that the house doesn’t really play.

Upon realizing that poker at the casino tended to last about thirty minutes before their coffers were empty, the bogan quickly realised that its $300 could be better invested in a 1,000-chip poker set that comes with playing mat, chip rake and dice (bogans have not, to this day, figured out what the dice are for). This way, the bogan can embrace playing poker in the safety of its own home, can buy foreign-label beer at a far lower cost, and live out the dream of luxury, James-Bond style debauchery (without the luxury, women or sex) – all for about $40 each.

Even better, the bogan love of celebrity can be catered to via this manner also, as Joe Hachem, former World Poker Tour Champion, was just an ordinary guy from the working class northern suburbs of Melbourne who now has his own TV show. That he had to win an international tournament is, to the bogan, a minor bump on the path to national television stardom. All starting in the loungeroom of Andrew’s house up the road. However, being ‘x-treme‘, the bogan manages to lose all his money within 20 minutes (and five Coronas – with lime), as only pussies and fags fold when they have pocket cards of 6 and 2 off suit.

#76 – McMansions

Bogan visionary John Landy was one of the first to tap into the its brain stem and recognise the bogan’s need for sheer size. When he had the Big Banana built next to his fruit stall 1964, bogans gravitated to it like single mothers to a stockbrokers’ Christmas party. Soon, it wasn’t enough for the bogan to just visit big things, it wanted to live in one.

A couple of decades ago, the McMansion arrived, an answer to bogan prayers. It wasn’t better than the houses that came before it, but good heavens it was bigger. The average size of new homes in Australia has gone on to grow by 40.3% between 1985 and 2003, as the bogan became aware that it “deserved” a formal living area, a rumpus room, a parents’ retreat, an ensuite, a study, a formal lounge, and a large void near the stairs that allowed it to view different parts of its McMansion without moving its feet. A home that, at first glance, looked reminiscent of a celebrity home.

Of course, the ballooning size of the bogan’s domestic ambitions meant that such dwellings could not really be situated on small blocks. Unwilling to make any compromises in this respect, the avalanche of poorly serviced cut-price housing estates continued across the outskirts of cities nationwide. These estate names uniformly contain misleading words such as springs, meadows, gardens, and park. Bogan families in these estates become entirely reliant on cars for transport, and bleat angrily when the petrol price is not to their liking. They do not pause to consider that the price is high partly because bogan families are using so much of it due to their housing decisions.

Pesky laws about how close a dwelling can be to the edge of the block of land threatened to derail the bogan’s desire for crassly immense housing size. This was solved by constructing a neo-Georgian cube with no eaves, allowing the house to loom over the fence. The bogan’s noble battle against the extremes of the Australian climate is then won by the constant use of heaters and air conditioners to overcome the atrocious inefficiency of the architecture. Upon receipt of its massive energy bill, the bogan will complain that the power companies are ripping it off.

In order to put a 43 square house within reach of the financially impulsive bogan, builders take phenomenal amounts of shortcuts on the shoddily fitted out McMansion. Once the flashy silver oven breaks, and the paper thin feature wall cracks, it becomes clear that the housing estate is 10 years away from being a generic and unserviced bogan ghetto. It’s the great Australian dream come true.

#75 – Velvet Ropes

Despite its loud, yowling denial of this fact to any bouncer who glances in its direction, the bogan loves to queue. Nightclub operators have been aware of this for many years, and prime bogan clubbing localities are famous for creating 10 metre queues at the front door of a half empty bar. The queuing process creates anticipation in the bogan’s mind, like a particularly diligently wrapped gift.

Often though, a queue of bogans will become unruly. Forced to arrange themselves in a logical sequence, squabbles and yelling matches regularly erupt, creating a public nuisance and causing the venue operator to worry about being placed in a “high risk” liquor licence category. The solution for this problem is a velvet rope.

Put a velvet rope anywhere, and the bogan will line up behind it. It will queue for longer periods, and with less complaint, than it will behind a rope of any other fabric, alloy, or fibre. The presence of velvet is almost soothing to the bogan, and brings forth some of its best behaviour. But there are other motivators behind this improved etiquette, for the bogan is a complex beast.

Because the rope is velvet, the bogan will assume that whatever it is excluding people from is VIP, and likely to contain a DJ. OR CELEBRITIES. There could even be x-treme danger. Either way, a velvet rope makes the bogan strangely docile when it eventually gets to the front of the queue and is informed that it will cost $50 to proceed further. It will obediently hand a pineapple to the cosmetics-smeared door wench operating the till.

Once inside, the bogan will eagerly scan the room, searching for more velvet ropes. There is one by the cloak room, so the bogan joins this queue. 15 minutes later, jacket offloaded for $5, the bogan is ready to queue for a $9 bottle of locally produced foreign label beer, or a $10 Breezer. It will spend the remainder of the night switching between the bar queue and the velvet rope in front of the DJ booth, where it attempts to grind hips with inebriated bogans of the opposite sex each time the smoke machine creates enough haze to lend the air of initial mystique.

The bogan emerges from the club at 4am, $200 poorer, and visibly irritated due to the queue at the cab rank being framed only by a sticky steel rail.

#74 – Border Security: Australia’s Front Line

The bogan is not racist. It is, however, very much not in favour of crime and criminals, so long as they are not nicking street signs and bar mats, or exporting illicit substances into Indonesia, which, after all, are harmless pastimes. People importing illicit substances into Australia, on the other hand, are despicable scum – this perception being reinforced by our very own Prime Minister. Is it the bogan’s fault that these uniquely disgusting criminals are from another country?

Channel 7, realising the awesome spending power of the bogan, the awesome cost-saving power of reality TV, and the awesome bogan love of catching (foreign) criminals, combined them all in the greatest bogan programme of all time: Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. After all, even though the bogan is not racist, what better way to catch these abominable criminals than to whack a camera or two in a large room replete with suspicious-looking foreigners?

Despite the fact that the customs queue at Australia’s major airports are overwhelmingly full of white, returning Australians, tired and emotional about having to wait in a queue in order to be told to pay GST on the watch they bought in Switzerland, the bulk of Border Security: Australia’s Front Line is entirely devoted to filming shifty looking visitors from South East Asia or the Middle East having their luggage rifled through.

Even better than this, the show is portentously narrated by Grant Bowler, who most bogans remember as playing Constable Wayne Patterson in Blue Heelers: Mt Thomas’ Front Line, where he was living the bogan dream by engaging in PG-rated heavy petting with Lisa McCune.

Settled in its interest free lounge suite, the bogan is able to vicariously enjoy the act of keeping Australia safe from people it steadfastly refuses to understand. Its endorphins gush on each and every occasion that such a person is not able to move about in the manner that it hopes to. At the completion of the show, the bogan is reassured that it has done its part to defend the nation that it has done so very little to create.

#73 – M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes’

Mathangi Arulpragasam is a 34 year old woman of Tamil origin, who spent 9 of her first 11 years in Sri Lanka and Southern India, on the run because her father was involved in Tamil militancy and civil war. In 1986, she arrived in England as a refugee alongside her mother and brother, and Mathangi learned English while living on a council estate in South London. Bogans would not approve of this story.

Whether it’s beating them up at train stations, running out of their taxis without paying, or just general derision, there is a significant number of bogans who simply do not like “curries”. It believes that curries smell bad, want to steal its job, and listen to stupid high pitched music that isn’t their own stupid, high-pitched music. When the white bogan is in the club, it would rather be surrounded by other white bogans, and listen to sick songs like M.I.A’s ‘Paper Planes’.

As evidenced in the video, the bogan appeal of the song is clear. While the repetitive melody and lyrics make things easier for the bogan when it is on the dancefloor, by far the most important thing that Paper Planes provides the bogan is the chance to shape its hand into a pistol of some sort, and pretend that it is firing a gun. And not just once or twice, but the bogan can fire its imaginary gun 48 TIMES during the song. This appeals to the bogan’s desire to feel close to Underbelly. Now that it’s firing its gun 48 times in the club, it is more like Underbelly than ever before. The bogan feels empowered, dangerous, and desirable.

With its focus exclusively on waiting for the next chorus – and certainly with no intention of listening to anything else M.I.A. ever recorded – the bogan’s attention strays during the parts in between. The bogan does not realise that Mathangi Arulpragasam’s lyrics during this time include phrases such as “third world democracy”, and that Arulpragasm’s music is highly political. To quote the lady herself, the song is “about people driving taxicabs all day and living in a shitty apartment and ‘appearing’ really threatening to society. But not being so…I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.” Indeed, the bogan is utterly oblivious that it is being entertained by an activist curry refugee.

A group of bogans later exit the club, they are feeling strangely energised from the dozen Jager bombs, and also from animatedly discharging their dancefloor weapons 48 times in the space of three and a half minutes. They need an outlet. Up ahead, they spy an Indian student who appears to be carrying a laptop bag…