Let’s talk about Russell Crow.

Is Russell Crow a bogan? He wears flannel, he fights, he doesn’t shave very much. That’s bogan. He plays in a crappy rock n’ roll band. A bit proactive, but yeah, that’s bogan. He’s famous and filthy rich. Um… not so bogan. He’s got a thriving career. Not bogan at all.

See, Russell Crow is a man of contradictions. He believes in being a dickhead when it suits him (and don’t we all?), but he manages to get away with it and scrub up for the women’s magazines when the come to take his picture on the red carpet. He’ll go a little biffo with the reporters of course, and anyone else who happens to be standing around, but this isn’t a source of national shame (unlike boganism which, when taken overseas, is strictly contained within Kontiki tours and the Australian cricket team to prevent international embarrassment) - in fact, we like the idea that Russell Crow is out there being an unpredictable idiot because we have no other weapons with which to face US military might.

Yes, he displays many of the *superficial* aspects of boganism - the flannel, the rock music, the propensity for random violence - but none of the requirements for being a real bogan. They are:

a) No job, or a crap job.
b) No money except for smokes, petrol and booze.
c) Only bogan friends.
d) No talents or abilities.
e) No prospects.
f) A veneer of confidence that hides a deep-seated lack of self-esteem.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Russell Crow is to bogans what hippies were to the protest culture of the fifties and sixties - normality with a new wardrobe.

To boag or not to boag?

wearing flannel, listening to ACDC and daydreaming about cars and lesbians… this culture of ours, which is so much the product of millennia of appropriation, should find no difficulty in seizing upon these things and nicking off without having to take participate in the milieu of socioeconomic depression in which they were born. Every time you pull on your jeans, you are drawing on an aspect of colonial America, but that doesn’t make you an American colonialist, does it? It may be La Dolce Vita listening to Acca Dacca and swearing like a pirate, but it ain’t necessarily bogan.