Class Contestations and Australia’s Resource Boom: The Emergence of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’

Abstract

This article examines the figure of the 'Cashed-up Bogan' or 'Cub' in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that 'Bogan', like that of 'Chav' in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, 'Cubs' have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub's emergence, is linked to Australia's resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to participate in consumption. We argue that access to economic capital has provided the Cub with mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption and anxiety to middle-class hegemony. As a result, the middle class has redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries, whereby, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark Cubs as 'other' to the middle-class deservingness, taste and morality.

Welcome to Bogan-ville: reframing class and place through humour

“…As Barbara Pini, Paula McDonald and Robyn Mayes argue, the wealth of such people threatens Australian middle-class hegemony, providing "a mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle-class". 17 The subtext of denigrating the poor is no longer sufficient, and hence "cashed-up bogan" has emerged as a linguistic and cultural response-a signifier to mark the newly rich as nevertheless incapable of escaping parochial working-class cultural traits, as "other" to "middle-class deservingness, taste and morality". 18 As David Nichols vividly puts it "talk about 'bogans' is a way for elites to talk about working class (usually but not always white) people as though they were an inferior species, a kind of monkey; it's racist language tweaked to ridicule a class or a culture".…”

‘It Felt Like a Little War’: Reflections on Violence against Alternative Subcultures

“…It is a widely used term in the UK that is commonly understood to be an acronym of 'council housed and violent' (or something similar). It refers to the contemporary 'underclass' of poor, marginalised and disadvantaged white working class people, and is used in a similar context to that of the label 'bogan' in Australia (Pini, McDonald and Mayes, 2012). It is, though, a derogatory expression as it carries implications of fecklessness, aggression, vulgarity, fecundity, ignorance and poor taste (Skeggs, 2005;Raisborough, Frith and Klein, 2013).…”

Equity, markets and the politics of aspiration in Australian higher education

“…Like certain fractions of the working class in post-industrial Britain, this group has avoided the most severe effects of the decline in manufacturing industries, but occupies an uneasy place between working and middle class cultures (for example, see Nayak, 2006, for a discussion of 'Real Geordies' and their positioning in north-east Britain). The 'cashed-up bogan' has been subject to considerable criticism in Australian popular culture and the media, focusing on their lack of education and thus perceived lack of entitlement to the considerable remuneration they receive, as well as their poor cultural 'taste' (Pini et al, 2012). This group is also now buying residential property in leafy urban areas that have long been the preserve of the middle-class, thus using 'their economic capital to transgress a multitude of middle-class spatial boundaries and [this has] consequently destabilized class-based ontologies of belonging and place' (Pini et al, 2012, p. 12).…”

“…However, it illustrates that demonstrating the 'spirit of enterprise' is not necessarily enough to be considered appropriately aspirational. The logic of market competition suggests that this group deserve esteem and imitation for successfully exploiting high demand for the skill-sets they possess and for their willingness to undertake shift-work at mine sites in remote locations; however, they are often popularly represented as greedy individualists whose crass tastes present a threat to middle-class values (Pini et al, 2012). The politics of aspiration seeks to cultivate economic desires, but at the same time these desires are policed according to class and cultural norms.…”