Until the middle of the twentieth century the Australian term
larrikin was highly pejorative, and was synonymous with
hooligan. The connotations of
larrikin changed, and the word came to be used to describe a person who acts with disregard for social or political conventions. Australia needed a replacement for
larrikin. In the 1950s there emerged the
bodgie, a male youth distinguished by certain fashions of dress and hooligan behaviour. The
sharpie was his successor in the 1960s. These Australia-wide terms did not survive, and there emerged some regional terms for the old-style larrikin: the
westie in Sydney and later in Melbourne, the
bevan in Queensland, the
booner in Canberra, and the
chigga (from the name of the suburb ‘Chigwell’) in Tasmania. There also emerged a new Australia-wide term—the
bogan.
The earliest evidence we have been able to find for the term
bogan is in the surfing magazine
Tracks in September 1985: ‘So what if I have a mohawk and wear Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)?’ At this stage,
bogan was (especially teenage) slang for someone who is not ‘with it’ in terms of behaviour and appearance, someone who is ‘not us’; hence, someone ‘horrible, contemptible’. The term became widespread after it was used in the 1980s by the fictitious schoolgirl ‘Kylie Mole’ in the television series
The Comedy Company. In
Dolly Magazine, October 1988, ‘The Dictionary According To Kylie [Mole]’ has the following Kyliesque definition of
bogan: ‘a person that you just don’t bother with. Someone who wears their socks the wrong way or has the same number of holes in both legs of their stockings. A complete loser.’
At about the same time, a second meaning for
bogan emerged, represented by the following passage from Judith Clarke,
The Heroic Life of Al Capsella (1988):
Beyond these the landscape changed suddenly. It was still flat, and the houses all the same as one another, but they were poorer houses, small shabby fibro ones with their paint all washed away, their scraggly yards full of dust and weeds and rusting pieces of iron. I was nervous; it looked the kind of place where you might find Bogans hanging about, the kind of place you could get bashed up. ... Sure enough, in the yard of a house across the street, I saw a gang of Bogans in tight jeans and long checked shirts, mucking about with a big fancy car, vintage model, complete with brass lamps and running-board. I felt sure they’d ripped it off: for one thing, they were taking off the number plates.
This second
bogan is uncultured, boorish, and associated with a lower socio-economic class. The
bogan is usually male, although a
boganness occasionally appears. No doubt many
bogans are ‘aspirational’, but an article in the
Courier-Mail in January 2001 warns ‘once a bogan, always a bogan’:
I cannot fault my upbringing in Brisbane's outer suburbs—but when you hit your early 20s the pressure is on to bury your bogan past and go for a classier image. ... But no matter how well you conceal your inner-bogan, there will always be people ... out there ready to blow your cover.
The origin of
bogan is unknown. Some have argued that the term may derive from the Bogan River and district in western New South Wales (‘a person who is further west than a westie’?), but this is far from certain, and it seems more likely to be an unrelated coinage.
