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

Introduction

In this article we engage with ‘new cultural analyses of social class’ (Reay, 2006: 289) in order to explore shifts and contestations in class configurations in contemporary Australia. The focus for our analysis is the figure of ‘the Cashed-Up Bogan’ or the Cub. The Cub is associated with the unprecedented demand from Asia for the country’s mineral resources and the associated widespread need for skilled labour across the country, which opened up opportunities for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to extend their participation in consumption. As the daily newspaper in the resource rich state of Western Australia (WA) proclaimed, ‘Love them or hate them, boom time in WA brought with it a new demographic – the Cashed-up Bogan’ (McPhee, 2009: 9). These ‘gilt-edged blue collar workers’, social commentator Bernard Salt (2009: 23) has claimed, ‘enjoy showing off their new-found wealth with flash city utes, top of the range home theatre systems and seven-bedroom, four-bathroom McMansions’.

We begin our discussion by reference to debates about class and the analytic usefulness of the term, drawing attention to the claim that even though the nomenclature of class may be muted or refuted in contemporary post-industrial nations, ‘the symbolic economy of class expression and conflict continues to pervade popular culture’ (Edensor and Millington, 2009: 104). We preface a discussion of the Cub with an overview of the identity of the Bogan and note similarities between this and the British figure of the Chav. The key difference between Bogan and Chav and that of Cub is, of course, economic capital, which we argue has provided them with the mobility to enter residential, leisure and professional spaces previously the preserve of the middle class. We contend that this has unsettled middle-class authority so that new and more pernicious forms of ‘moral boundary drawing’ are reinscribed (Sayer, 2005: 952), with Cubs constructed as uneducated, unproductive and undeserving as well as tasteless, superficial and pretentious. The emergence of the identity of the Cub is illustrative, not only of a new class nomenclature in Australia, but of the reproduction of class and, moreover, of class antagonisms and contestations.

Background

In reviewing Australian sociological literature on class, Western and Baxter (2007: 227) have noted that a tradition of significant and broad-based studies of class undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Western, 1981) was not evident into the 1990s. Martin and Wajman (2004: 180) discern a similar phenomenon, arguing that in contemporary Australian sociological scholarship ‘class is the central focus of relatively little current research’. Collectively, these writers suggest that, in part, this can be explained by the influence of broader proclamations of the irrelevance of class to postmodern life and identities.

These Antipodean observations have been echoed by British academics over the past decade. At the beginning of the millennium, for example, Smith (2000: 101) asked pointedly, ‘What happened to class?’ in geographical scholarship while Sayer (2002: 15) reflected later that ‘class has been a relatively neglected and unfashionable topic of late’ in the social sciences more broadly. Notably, however, by the end of the decade, Atkinson (2009: 896) was able to write that, ‘In recent years the sociological winds have changed direction and blown in fresh thinking on the dynamics of class in contemporary societies.’ Those associated with and influenced by the metaphorical winds to which Atkinson (2009) refers have refuted authorial announcements of the death of class and contended that the absence of class naming and identification is not suggestive of its demise. Rather, they have argued that to reveal and challenge continuing and virulent class-based inequalities, previously dominant theorizations of class focused largely (or solely) on occupational categories or income need to be augmented by attending to the social, cultural and psychic (Hey, 2006; Reay, 2003; 2006; Reay et al., 2007; Vincent et al., 2008). Importantly, as Hebson (2009: 30) argues and further demonstrates in her study of the employment aspirations and identities of working- and middle-class women, a cultural analysis does not rest upon ‘surmounting a polarization between the economic and the cultural’. Instead, she draws on Fraser (1995, 2000) to assert that the economic and the cultural are intersecting rather than oppositional domains. Similarly, Bottero (2004: 988) explains that ‘culturalist class analysis’ relies on ‘fusing economic and cultural elements’; while Parker (2010) stresses ‘continuities’ between economic and cultural perspectives, claiming both the material and the symbolic/emotional/social have always been important and intertwined in people’s experience of class.

The more recent extension of class analysis to include the cultural has been strongly influenced by Bourdieu (1990), whose framework ‘allows for an understanding of how capital positions individuals in social space and how the occupation of such positions generates and defines ways of being and feeling (the habitus)’ (Johnson, 2008: 71). This position is richly illustrated in interviews Lawler (1999) undertakes with women who have moved from a working-class to a middle-class position. She explains that ‘the habitus’ is naturalized rather than understood as embedded in social strata, leaving some of the women feeling inadequate or lacking in the move to the middle class (1999: 13–14). More recently, Hebson (2009) explores the employment aspirations and identities of working-class and middle-class women, noting differences in their access to various forms of capital. In echoes of Lawler’s (1999) work, the emotional dimensions of class such as pride, shame and guilt come to the fore in the narratives, as does Bourdieu’s (1990) insistence that class is dynamic, relational and embodied. The interviews from both studies reveal how class is continuously being made and reshaped by ordinary daily interactions, as well as deeply ingrained in one’s sense of self.

The turn to culture that has reinvigorated British sociological writing on class would seem to offer significant potential to an exploration of class in Australia. This is both a context in which people have repeatedly expressed an indifference to class and minimized its importance in terms of social identity (e.g. Emmison and Western, 1990, 1991), and a milieu in which mythologized discourses of egalitarianism continue to be privileged and reified (Hawthorne, 1999). ¹ Skeggs (2004) has argued that in an environment where class may not be named, we may learn a great deal by critiquing the increasingly prolific number of representations of the working class. She explains that representations condense ‘fears and anxieties into one classed symbol’, and, accordingly, critiquing representations is ‘central to any analysis of class’ (2004: 117). Lawler (2005: 431) adds to this, reminding us that depictions of the working class also ‘produce middle-class identities’. Thus, attending to representations of the working class opens up to scrutiny the ongoing efforts of the middle class to reinscribe boundaries and differences, and focuses attention on the way in which middle-class values, attitudes and tastes are normalized and naturalized.

In this article, we engage with cultural studies of class, taking as our focus representations of the figure of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’, and, by necessity, its antecedent, the ‘Bogan’ in the period 2006 to 2009. The term ‘Cub’ appears to have first enjoyed currency in 2006, with a weekly tongue-in-cheek ‘Guide to Modern Living’ in The Melbourne Age introducing it to readers (McDonald, 2006). By 2009, however, as a lyric from the song Miner Threat by the Australian band Clever Species screamed: ‘Cashed Up Bogans – are all over the news.’ We draw on a multitude of media, including websites, songs, advertisements, parliamentary speeches, letters to editors, television programmes, media releases, blogs and newspaper articles. ²

From ‘Bogan’ to ‘Cashed-up Bogan’

The Cub has a long lineage in Australia in terms of representations of the working class. Its most direct antecedent, the Bogan, still has wide currency as is evidenced by the over 100 references to the term and its derivatives on urbandictionary. Debates about its heritage are reminiscent of those which surround the etymology of the Chav, as is the fact that it has many regional variations (Barry, Boonie, Charlene, Charmaine, Feral, Bevan, Bev-chick, Bog, Booner, Chigger and Westie). ³ Most importantly, it has become in Australia, like the Chav in Britain, a ‘ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor’ (Tyler, 2008). ‘Bogans’ are seen to lack income and are welfare dependent and share with their British counterparts a ‘laziness and indolence’ in relation to employment (Raisborough and Adams, 2008: 11). The identity of Bogan is not one afforded to Indigenous Australians; in this respect they remain outside of the nation’s symbolic hierarchy. The whiteness of the Bogan identity is, however, like that of the Chav, not pure or unsullied, for it is contaminated, dirtied and tainted by poverty (Nayak, 2009).

In much the same way as the Chav, the Bogan is defined by geography and the spatial politics of inclusion and exclusion, with particular areas ‘banned’ to them and other areas their ‘haunts’ (Hayward and Yar, 2006: 20; Nayak, 2006: 820). The online Macquarie dictionary suggests ‘Bogans’ (which they label as ‘mildly derogatory’) generally ‘come from an outer city or town’ while urbandictionary posters suggest the Bogan inhabits the ‘outer/western suburbs as well as rural and regional locales’. Again, in a similar respect to the Chav (Hollingworth and Williams, 2009), there is an additional containment of the Bogan in terms of geography. Postings to urbandictionary citing derivatives of Bogan include, for example, ‘Bogandome’ as a shopping centre where Bogans hang out along with and ‘Boganburbs’ as suburbs where Bogans live.

Depictions of the Chav accentuate their appearance, speech, accessories, music, leisure practices, dress and deportment and, importantly, these are deemed gauche, rough and vulgar. It may be the way they walk (Nayak, 2009), their drinking habits (Skeggs, 2005), their jewellery (Patrick, 2005), their weight (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008) or even their preference for Christmas decorations (Edensor and Millington, 2009) – all are seen as morally deficient. As one of the young boys interviewed by Hollingworth and Williams (2009: 474) claimed, they are seen as the embodiment of ‘tacky’. Reflecting on this disparagement, Skeggs (2005: 907) uses the descriptor ‘too’ as a means of simply but powerfully demonstrating the ways in which the Chav is caricatured as excessive in all of the wrong ways – too primitive, too noisy, too sexual. A central overarching narrative underpinning these types of caricatures of the Chav is their consumption practices, for this is a group ‘seen to consume the wrong things in the wrong way’ (Morley, 2009: 498).

In much the same way as the Chav, the Bogan is associated with the consumption of particular clothes (such as flannelette shirts, tight black jeans), music (heavy metal, particularly AC/DC), alcohol (Victorian Bitter, rum), hairstyles (mullets) or cars (with V8 engines). The modalities of consumption may differ between the two groups but the significations contain the same message – in the ‘hierarchy of legitimacies’ what is aspired to and/or purchased by the Bogan is inferior (Bourdieu et al., 1990: 95). This is encapsulated in the following anonymous listing on the urbandictionary website, which, like so much of the writing about Chavs, engages a ‘pop-anthropological tone’ (Moran, 2006: 568) to delineate what are viewed as the key characteristics of the Bogan.

The woman Bogan has six kids to six different fathers, loves her alcohol and ciggies, has a different fashion sense, swears like a trooper, and is a general embarrassment at the supermarket but at least we can look on and have bit of a laugh. As for the bloke well he loves his VB, ciggies/dope, flannie, mullet, beanie, holden or ford car, and has possible missing teeth, but who is going to look at him sideways when he’s at the pub or he wants that car spot you want?

In further echoes of common and often strongly gendered tropes about ‘Chavs’, the above quotation positions the Bogan as potentially violent and aggressive as well as sexually degenerative and promiscuous (Hayward and Yar, 2006; Johnson, 2008). Overall, in this and numerous other designations, we come to know the figure of the Bogan through a set of dispositions, practices and proclivities which are coded as pathological and morally deficient. As ‘repositories of negative value, bad taste’, they are positioned as the antithesis of the absent but ever present normative middle-class subject (Skeggs, 2001: 298).

While concurring that the Chav is typically positioned as unemployed and occupying a lower class origin, Nayak (2009: 32) gestures to a newly emerging identity, that of the ‘upwardly mobile Chav’, who ‘constitute the moneyed working-class’. In a more detailed critique of an associated identity, Bennett and Tyler (2010: 275) focus on ‘the celebrity Chav’, whom they define as someone who ‘becomes rapidly and unexpectedly wealthy or publicly visible – typically through reality television’. Bennett and Tyler (2010) reveal that despite the considerable wealth and fame of those who are said to embody this identity, they are ascribed the same immorality as the Chav. They are constructed as undeserving of wealth, and derided and stigmatized for what is seen as impersonating the middle class and being unsuccessful in the process in terms of a range of symbolic and cultural markers such as dress, deportment and speech. There are clear parallels here in terms of the Cub, for this is a figure for whom economic capital has no purchase in terms of class conversion because it is sullied and there is limited symbolic and cultural capital. We take up these issues in more detail later in the article, but first focus on the spatial context of the Cub, arguing that it is their movement into middle-class spaces which has been crucial to the mobilization of middle-class invective.

The Spatial Context of the Cub

‘Bogans’, we have demonstrated, have been delineated according to space – where they meet, relax, shop and live. The Cub, too, has been viewed as predominating in particular spatial contexts. It is a figure that is most closely associated with Western Australia, which has 40 percent of the nation’s mines. The connection between the Cub and the state of Western Australia was highlighted in a feature on the state’s capital, Perth, in a magazine of the national daily, The Australian, in 2008 (Toohey, 2008). The article, which asked ‘It’s a fast-living city with money to burn, but does Perth really know where it’s going?’, was introduced by a cover photograph of the ubiquitous Cub signifier – a fluorescent blue Holden utility or ‘ute’. As is required by Australian law, the vehicle is registered by state – and so the number plate bears the inscription ‘Western Australia’ along with the designation ‘Cashed-Up Bogan 1’. This overt merging of the identity of Cub and Perth resident was further bolstered by the placement of two stickers on the vehicle; the first proclaimed ‘I love Perth’, while the second stated ‘I love AC/DC’.

While the Cub may be strongly associated with Western Australia, their economic capital has afforded them a mobility so that they are not so readily identified and assessed via geography. Indeed, in a column in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, a journalist suggests that the use of space is a key differentiating factor between the Bogan and the Cub. He writes:

Whereas once they (Bogans) occupied a single socioeconomic stratum, they must now be differentiated into at least two classes: the ‘unter-Bogans’ (who are born and bred in – and will never leave – struggle town) and the ‘uber-Bogans’ also known as ‘CUBs’ or ‘Cashed up Bogans’ who are moving into leafier suburbs. (Huynh, 2007)

The challenge and disruption Cubs have caused to class-informed spatial boundary marking is noted repeatedly as media refer to particular suburbs, seen as historically the preserve of the middle class, being ‘over-run’, ‘swamped’ and ‘bought-out’ by ‘Cubs’. Such depictions resonate with a sense of contamination and pollution as the norms and values of the Cub are mapped onto their surrounds, as the following entry from cartoonist and blogger Jason Chatfield attests:

I’ve lived in WA for 23 years … have seen it go from a beautiful, relaxed and enjoyably liveable city to a darkened, overpopulated and dangerous boom town full of Cashed-up Bogans with focus on only business and resources and no consideration for the arts or entertainment. (http://www.jasonchatfield.com/blog/category/Perth/)

Even the city of Melbourne is not immune, as an article in the daily newspaper The Age suggests. Melbourne is widely viewed as the cultural capital of Australia; it has been marketed as refined, sophisticated and stylish. Yet it appears that even here the Cub has made inroads as indicated by the headline: ‘The Cub is busy turning Melbourne into Boganville’ (Smith, 2006).

The encroachment of the Cub into middle-class environs is not just occurring at a residential scale. It is also occurring in the public realm. Again, this is widely reported in blogs and web-postings as discussions focus on Cub holiday destinations, shopping trips and school choices. Even the distinctly middle-class domain of the airport business lounge has become indicative of the challenge to spatial containment by Cubs. In a discussion on a website devoted to share investments, contributors reflected on the fact that, in the Perth Qantas club lounge, those employed on ‘fly-in fly-out’ mining sites and dressed in work uniforms of steel-cap boots, fluorescent shirts and ‘king-gees’ now sit alongside those bearing the more traditional marker of middle-class masculinity, the business suit. ⁴

The mining/construction boom created a new breed of Bogan. The Cashed Up Bogan. The suits in the Perth Qantas Club suddenly didn’t feel so schmick!

Yes. We were in the Perth Qantas club in January and the clientele definitely weren’t wearing suits, but they did have big heavy boots!

The exclamation marks at the end of each of the above postings highlight the juxtaposition caused as the spatial containment of the working class is interrupted in all sorts of unexpected ways. Different accoutrements of class are being paraded and legitimated and, consequently, the classed milieu of the business lounge is contested. As the commentators are keenly aware, this unsettling of class relations in Australia may be at the level of the symbolic but it is experienced materially by ‘the suits’ in terms of discomfort and unease.

The ‘Cashed-up Bogan’: Uneducated, Unproductive and Undeserving

The key feature that differentiates the Cub from the Bogan – that of economic capital – is afforded high priority by the media. In representations reminiscent of those depicting the ‘celebrity Chav’, given emphasis are the salaries of employees and their occupational status as well as comparative lack of formal education (Bennett and Tyler, 2010: 388). Importantly, the Cub refers, as a blogger explains, specifically to ‘big earning tradespeople and non-professionals’ and so excludes those working in managerial positions in mining or fields such as engineering, law or science. There is no questioning of the fact that the formally educated middle class – those Charlesworth (2000: 239) refers to as ‘the consecrated groups’ – should derive significant financial benefits from mining employment but this is not so for the working class.

As with all representations of the Cub, those which focus on education rely as much on what is absented as well as what is presented. In this instance, for example, what is dismissed is the fact that many of those who might be identified as Cubs because of their involvement in non-professional/managerial mining work will have a four year trade qualification, while another proportion may have two trades as well as post-trade education (Hannan, 2010). There is, however, a hierarchy of credentials and, relatedly, a hierarchy of educational institutions (Reay et al., 2005), each of which is embedded in social status. In such a ranking, the Cub’s vocational education and training is positioned on the bottom rung and accrues them no cultural or symbolic capital.

Even supposedly more reputable stories about the impact of the boom are foregrounded by references to education, remuneration and occupation. A 2008 edition of an Australian Broadcasting Commission current affairs programme, Four Corners, entitled ‘The Money Pit’, for example, introduced viewers to ‘19 year old Anthony’ who ‘came straight from school and now pulls about $10 000 a month laying asphalt’ (Carney, 2008). In the high-brow The Financial Review, a writer provides the annual salary of a young man, adding that ‘he’s not a derivatives trader, investment banker or real estate agent. He’s an electrician’ (Gray, 2006). A more recent 2009 edition of the populist A Current Affair focused on two men in their early 20s, Sean and Chris, who, we were told, ‘earn over $100 000 a year’, but have ‘avoided a Higher Education Contribution debt’ as they have no university qualifications.

One could read a narrative rejoicing in meritocracy, as the disjuncture between a Cub’s education and salary is constantly reiterated by the media. However, there is also a counter and more pernicious reading of the narrative. This is one which positions the Cub as undeserving of their remuneration as a result of their supposed limited formal education. Such a reading was brought to the fore in the controversy surrounding a 2006 advertising campaign by a vocational education and training college. The full-page newspaper advertisement featured a car park with three vehicles alongside each other. The titles ‘Dentist’ and ‘Lawyer’ were posted below two locally manufactured mid-range cars, while a Porsche in the final spot was labelled as belonging to ‘The guy who built their houses’. The tagline named the college as a place ‘where students don’t just build their trade skills, they also build lucrative futures’. The advertisement generated a wide range of internet-fuelled observations about the shifting attributions of value afforded to education of which the Cub is seen to be emblematic. Remarks elicited reflected a middle-class antipathy to any diminution of the widely entrenched connection between educational and occupational choices and classed hierarchies – illustrated by one lengthy commentary from a dentist who recalled that his sons had been teased about their university plans by a counterpart whose father was a welder and who planned to join him in his business. There is incredulity and animosity in the posting as it is acknowledged that, while one son now has a PhD and another has two degrees, ‘most recent graduates from university’ earn less than half of the money of ‘tradesworkers’.

In media representations, the Cub is not just positioned as undeserving of their pay because of their lack of educational credentials; they are also viewed as such because the work they undertake is presented as undemanding and unproblematic. For example, in one television segment a journalist told viewers, ‘These are the people we love to hate. Earning the big bucks for doing not much.’ Again, important to this depiction of the Cub is what is obscured; for example, the 12-hour shifts worked on mine sites, the demands posed by fly-in fly-out work, the routine and repetitive nature of much manual labour, the potential for danger in mining and the harsh and hot conditions in which much mining work is performed (Heiler and Pickersgill, 2001). Instead, attention is afforded to the fact that resource organizations pay for accommodation and food on site as well as provide other incentives for enticing employers, such as the provision of leisure facilities and the covering of travel costs. Fran Cusworth, a Melbourne author who moved to a small Australian mining community with her geologist husband in 2005, fuelled this mythology in a fictionalized account of her 18 months in the region. While promoting her book, Hopetoun Wives, Cusworth told a journalist:

You really had a sense of money rolling down the street … She was paid a ‘filthy amount’ for two short stints on the mine newsletter … That’s what was happening all over WA. People were giving up university courses, careers they’d worked in for years. Doctors, policemen, nurses were going to the mines because you just couldn’t resist that much money. (Cusworth in Cogdon, 2009)

Cusworth’s statement encapsulates a number of themes that echo across representations of the Cub. The money they earn is not about industry, skill or commitment. It simply needs to be picked up as it rolls ‘down the street’. As a character in her book opines, ‘If you’ve got legs and arms these days you can get a job in mining’ (2009: 132). As a writer, Cusworth says she was accustomed to a low level of pay. She is able to be dismissive of economic capital, perhaps because of her husband’s own financial position and her own cultural capital as a published writer. A final thread of the Cub narrative that is taken up by Cusworth, and one, as we noted earlier, which is a recurring motif in depictions of the Cub, is their polluting capacity. Their insatiability and indulgence begin infecting otherwise morally worthwhile and valued occupational arenas such as medicine and law.

The ‘Cashed-up Bogan’: Superficial, Fraudulent and Tasteless

Whether it is the names Cubs choose for their children, where they decide to holiday or the brands they buy – all are presented as being mimics or imitations of middle-class norms and ultimately inferior and lacking. While the middle class is authorized to play with working-class identities as has been revealed in studies of gay men’s engagement with Chav culture (Brewis and Jack, 2010; Johnson, 2008), working-class people are sanctioned for equivalent attempts to replicate the middle class. Even in matters of spirituality, Cubs are ridiculed for their supposedly imitative actions in pursuit of middle-class status and, despite their efforts, judged as inauthentic and derivative, as the website ‘Things Bogans Like’ contends:

What better way to announce one’s entry to the knowledge economy than by purchasing a Buddhism themed figurine statue or water feature from the garden section of Kmart? (http://thingsboganslike.wordpress.com)

The coding of the Cub as shallow and superficial is enunciated further by a blogger who relates a conversation he has had with a pastor from a church. Unlike the vast majority of references to the Cub in the media, this posting specifically raises the nomenclature of class, and positions the Cub as different both from the ‘middle class’ and from the ‘working-class poor’ whom the writer posits are more reflective in the face of struggle and deprivation:

He believes that Cub types are hard to make contact with the gospel because they are not asking the philosophical questions like the middle classes do, nor the existential questions as the working class poor do. In other words they are not going to ask you ‘But what does it all mean?’ Nor are they likely to wonder ‘Why has life dealt me such a difficult hand?’ (http://missioninaction.org.au/2008/05/11/cashed-up-bogans)

The oppositional construction of the Cub and a ‘deserving’ working-class subject enunciated in the above quotation is a familiar trope in writings on the Chav with implicit or explicit distinctions made between a ‘respectable’ and ‘rough’ working class (Edensort and Millington, 2009; Hayward and Yar, 2006) or, for young working-class men in the north-east of England, between the ‘real Geordies’ and ‘Chavies’ (Nayak, 2006). It is a theme developed further in a newspaper opinion piece in which the writer compared ‘the westies’ of his childhood with what he labels ‘the new Bogan’. The columnist is highly sympathetic to ‘the westie’ who, he says, saw ‘virtue in the rough, utilitarian and cheap’ and who ‘did have a culture’ in contrast to the new incarnation of Bogan who ‘unashamedly craves luxury’, is avaricious and lacks culture (Shanahan, 2010: 14). The Cub is thus like the celebrity Chav, signified by their dual ‘class Otherness’ to the middle class as well as to the ‘decent’ working class (Bennett and Tyler, 2010: 383).

Like many who lampoon and deride the Cub and in echoes of the derision afforded to ‘Chavs’ and their celebrity counterparts (Bennett and Tyler, 2010), Shanahan (2010) focuses on the consumption practices of the Cub. The poverty of their consumption choices and the rightness of those of the middle classes is highlighted, as a newspaper article tells us these are ‘people (who have) ignored champagne and Aston Martins, instead spending up on Holden Special Vehicles, Fords, Hummers, Jet Power and Yamaha power-skis, Honda bikes and home cinemas from Harvey Norman’. ⁵ These consumption practices, like the Cubs themselves, are polluting and relentless and changing an otherwise understated and refined Melbourne, a journalist reminds us, writing that ‘Victorians have caught a serious case of affluenza. And it’s proving contagious’ (Adamson, 2007).

The association between the Cub and disease/infringement/invasion is not only noteworthy for its connection to representations of the Chav (e.g. Tyler, 2006). It is also significant as it exemplifies the way discussions of the Cub segue into commentaries about an apparently broader demise of good taste and sophistication in Australian society in favour of crassness and vulgarity. Adamson’s (2007) article, for example, goes on to canvass escalating rates of debt, mass consumerism and the growth of individualism. In this respect the Cub performs a role similar to that of ‘the celebrity Chav’ in producing ‘metadiscourses’ about the (supposedly declining) state of society and community (Bennett and Tyler, 2010: 388).

According to the media, a further dimension to the immorality of the ‘Cub’ is that they are environmentally irresponsible. While this is a representation of the Cub that is also present in other negative imaginaries of the working-class (Raisborough and Adams, 2008: 17), the practices by which the Cub is seen to pollute the landscape differ in that they are directly related to their economic capital. It is their preference for large homes, and buying electronic goods, expensive cars and machinery which are disparaged by writers. It is a theme at the centre of a column in The Melbourne Age by Catherine Deveney (2008), who laments that her family’s own efforts with cycling, buying in bulk, shopping locally and reusing packing are futile against the environmentally degenerate practices of those who:

Build their McMansions an hour’s drive from where they work and then hop in their fuel-guzzling monster trucks every morning to pay for their five wide-screen televisions, air-conditioning to counteract poor design and petrol to fuel their lifestyle which is basically shopping.

A particularly vicious illustration of the way in which the consumption practices of the Cub are used to vilify them as simultaneously superficial, fraudulent and tasteless is a column by Elizabeth Farrelly (2009) in the left-leaning The Sydney Morning Herald, ⁶ in which the author describes a ‘game’ played while jogging with her daughter each morning around her suburb. The ‘game’ involves classifying houses they pass as ‘Life’, ‘Death’, ‘Double-Death’ or the most dreaded descriptor, ‘Life in Death’ – a categorization, she tells us, they gleaned from a newly illustrated edition of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ which ‘we had been reading’. Having so overtly signalled her cultural capital and subsequently her classed credentials for determining what constitutes taste, Farrelly (2009) goes on to explain that ‘Life in Death’ is reserved for ‘the McMansions’ for their ‘slavish ersatzing of the rich’.

Farrelly’s article (2009) does not mention class but her writing is infused with class politics. She seeks to reassert middle-class authority on a shifting class landscape, not only by highlighting the critical importance of her (supposedly pre-given and objective) aesthetic capabilities and competencies, but also by arguing that these are lacking in those inhabiting a ‘McMansion’. What Farrelly (2009) and her daughter deem tasteful – that is, their own consumption practices – do not need to be identified or assessed for they are legitimate. This is what Cook (1999: 101), drawing on Bourdieu, explains is the ‘tautologous logic’ which assumes that ‘“good taste” is what tasteful people decide is tasteful’.

In mocking the Cub as pretentiously masquerading as middle class in the pursuit of crass materialism and ultimately failing, Farrelly (2009) travails familiar territory in terms of negative representations of the working class and the use of humour to achieve her purpose (e.g. Lawler, 1999; Patrick, 2005; Walkerdine et al., 2001). Law (2006: 28) claims that mockery is a widely used device as it acts to ‘displace the symbolic violence of the hate discourse’ while others have argued that mockery distances elites from the working class via an expression of disgust (Lawler, 2005; Tyler, 2006). Raisborough and Adams (2008: 17) take this further, asserting that mockery emerges as a central device for ‘distinction work’ because it allows disgust to be expressed ‘within liberal, morally sensitive contexts that are those of normative middle-class’. Thus, Farrelly (2009) and other writers such as the television reviewer who called for people to laugh at ‘the greed of Cashed-Up Bogans with awful taste’ and their ‘lashings of consumerism, greed and aubergine feature walls’ (Craig, 2008: 29), can communicate their revulsion at working-class taste, assert and naturalize their own tastes as inherently good and authentic and not be labelled discriminatory or offensive. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that laughter has been successfully engaged as a form of resistance by the working class in attacks on middle-class pretentions (Skeggs, 2006), the maligning of Cubs in the name of ‘fun’ by elites masks much more sinister operations of power and social exclusion.

Conclusion

As those who have examined the phenomenon of the Chav have contended, there is nothing particularly new in the fact that there exist negative cultural representations of the working class (e.g. Law, 2006; McRobbie, 2009). What is new, they note, and can be extrapolated to the case of the Cub, is the perniciousness and castigatory intent of the representation as well as its ubiquity in everyday rhetoric. Importantly, the Cub emerged in a very particular economic context of a resource boom and skill shortage which allowed the seemingly impossible – that is, the opportunity to be financially well rewarded for manual labour. It is a context markedly different from the post-industrial environment against which so much of the contemporary class analysis in Britain has been undertaken (e.g. Bondi and Christie, 2000; Charlesworth, 2000; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Ward et al., 2007). At the same time, it is critical to highlight that the Cub was, and remains, a highly circumscribed group. To be a member of the working class and to belong to this category requires the possession of appropriate capital such as the required skills or networks and, indeed, masculinity and whiteness, ⁷ along with access to other resources which would allow employment in distant locations under fly-in fly-out conditions. This is little recognized in the narrative about the Cub, which suggests that the resource boom has afforded incommensurable wealth and opportunities for working-class people per se. In fact, as political economists Goodman and Worth (2008: 209) have argued, the impacts of Australia’s ‘boom’ of the past decade have been ‘highly uneven and divisive’. For example, Mitchell and Bill (2006) demonstrate that the spatial concentration of mining and the disinvestment from manufacturing to mining has further disadvantaged already vulnerable and highly populated areas relying on manufacturing (for example, the western area of Sydney). Other work has reported that women have been largely absent in high-paid skilled or semi-skilled mining work, but have nevertheless had to bear the burden of dramatic increases in the cost of living that have occurred with the boom such as in relation to housing (Jefferson and Preston, 2008).

In short, the contestation the Cub represents to class politics is highly delineated. This is a very distinct and limited group. Yet, as this article has demonstrated, the antagonism aroused by the Cub is pervasive and ferocious. This would suggest that what the Cub represents is incredibly powerful – that is, an unsettling and disruption of class relations even at a very minimal level. Perhaps the Cub would not have become such a cultural phenomenon in Australia – and a source of such disdain and angst – if this figure had remained fixed to/in/of Western Australia, and concomitantly far away and disconnected from the spaces and places traditionally reserved for Australia’s urban middle-class elite. As scholars have contended, geography is central to contemporary class distinctions (Butler and Robson, 2003; McDonald et al., 2005; McDowell, 2006), but Cubs have infringed and undermined this marker of social status. They have used their economic capital to transgress a multitude of middle-class spatial boundaries and consequently destabilized class-based ontologies of belonging and place. As ‘the distances that need to be kept’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 472) have been breached by the Cub, Australia’s middle classes have had to initiate and police new forms of distancing and distinction. Central to this has been the maligning and rejection of the Cub’s economic capital. This has involved a number of rhetorical manoeuvres such as the positioning of mine employment as unskilled and undemanding and of mine workers as lacking in terms of formal education. The latter is conflated not only with a lack of deservingness but also with spiritual and aesthetic deficiencies, along with an overall lack of morality. Further indications of the Cub’s moral questionability are, the media reports suggest, their consumption practices. These also highlight spiritual and aesthetic impoverishment which may potentially contaminate and pollute. Given their apparent inadequacies, the Cub’s claim to middle-class habitus is rendered not just fragile but preposterous. The type of media we have drawn upon as data in this article reminds them that, ultimately, their working-class habitus will betray them and render them ‘other’ and ‘out-of-place’. Thus, in a similar respect to the working class whose stories are told by Walkerdine et al. (2001: 43), there is to be ‘no easy or painless self-invention’.

Like all representations, that of the Cub is fluid and open to change; it may be resisted or recalibrated, parodied or subverted. Indeed, as we completed this article, a lifestyle travel programme promoted ‘Bogan Bingo Nights’ at hotels in Sydney and Melbourne, ⁸ while a national newspaper published a satirical piece railing against ‘Fauxgans’ or ‘Faux Bogans’, those otherwise wealthy elites (such as politicians) for whom there may be some currency in appearing ‘downwardly mobile’ and so portentously broaden vowels, use the word ‘mate’ excessively and profess a preference for beer when they prefer a merlot (Ruddingale, 2010: 43). While cognizant of the ongoing shifting nature of the symbolic and cultural landscape of class, this article provides support for further class studies which extend an occupational focus to include the social and cultural. It has demonstrated that whereas rationalist stratification indicators might reveal that the resource boom has seen some movement of the working class into more affluent suburbs or into wealthier cohorts, this would be a very partial reading of class and its associated struggles in 21st-century Australia. Cubs may have accessed some of the elite’s spatial terrain but this does not account for the efforts of the middle class to preserve and reassert classed hierarchies through reference to the cultural and the symbolic.