Bourdieu,the boom and cashed-up Bogans

The mining man: from archetypal working-class hero to CUB

The CUB stands in significant contrast to traditional Australian and international representations of ‘the miner’ as the quintessential working-class man. In both academic and popular fields, the miner has been collectively imaged as a taciturn, resilient, unassuming and simple man, devoted to his work, family and community, dealing with the vicissitudes of nature in work that is tough, dangerous and difficult (see Mayes and Pini, 2010; Pini et al., 2010a). He has been portrayed as struggling against poor pay and conditions, as having a heightened sense of class consciousness, and a rebelliousness embedded in a concern with redressing exploitative working conditions. Across disparate contexts, including Australia, the types of positive characteristics and dispositions for which the miner has been idealised has seen him elevated as a representative figure of the nation (Pini and Mayes, 2013a, 2013b; Stratton, 2006).

It is against these historical imaginings of the Australian nation and the working-class man that the most recent iteration of the figure of ‘the miner’, that is, the CUB, emerges. Debates over the CUB are thus part of broader struggles over identity which have become embedded in changing social, political and economic narratives. Even those changes most readily identified with the specifics of ‘the (current resources) boom’ are noteworthy. These include the demand for resource sector labour, which has fostered comparatively high salaries for the highly demarcated sector of the working class who have the skills and capital required to be employed in mining (Goodman and Worth, 2008). Equally, the boom has been problematic for other sectors of the economy (e.g. manufacturing), as well as escalating the cost of living for all, including the majority of Australian employees not working in mining but in the service sector (Mitchell and Bill, 2006). Meanwhile, the mining sector has seen a decline of union membership and a transfer in the employment relationship from collectivism to individualism, as well as a shift to the use of temporary and contract labour (Pini and Mayes, 2011). The mining industry has also moved largely to fly-in fly-out (FIFO) operations, which involve mine employees working in relatively remote locations, where food and lodging are often provided for them at the work site, and where schedules dictate a fixed number of days on-site followed by a fixed number of days at home (McDonald et al., 2012).

The dominant tropes about the ‘mining man’ discussed above have not been completely erased in representations of the CUB, as illustrated in a 2011 article in the Australian Financial Review. In the article, journalist Deirdre Macken (2011: 40–1) identifies ‘new tribes’ of Australians. Along with ‘Toddlers with Tablets’, ‘Boomer Athletes’, and ‘Smiley Farmers’ ⁴ are ‘Bogan Miners’. She recognises that the label is not particularly ‘fair’ as ‘Bogans are not all miners’ but the ensuing text, along with the accompanying cartoon, suggests otherwise. The man is dressed in King Gees, ⁵ Jackie Howe ⁶ singlet, and steel-capped boots, and wears a hard hat with helmet light. He stands with stubbie ⁷ -in-hand in front of what is perhaps the most ubiquitous CUB signifier – the ute. ⁸ In an acknowledgement of the resonance of the figure of ‘the miner’ in the Australian psyche, Macken writes: ‘The Aussie miner might have been turned into a Bogan by big incomes but he’s always been part of our national character’ (Macken, 2011: 42). Despite this assertion, it is precisely the incomes of miners which render them problematic as a representational figure of working class/nation. Macken’s (2011) own ambivalence about the figure of the CUB is evident as she charts similar territory as others in contrasting the CUB’s economic capital against their assumed lack of institutional cultural capital. Thus she catalogues the wages of mine employees and notes the disparity between these earnings and those of ‘arts professionals’ and further asserts, ‘They’re getting more than their teacher ever thought they’d earn and they’re spending it now.’ This emphasis on a lack of cultural capital, set in opposition to the prevalence of economic capital, underpins the majority of texts. Illustrative is the following response to one iteration of Jimmy Dinnison’s story:

Ticks me off that I busted my guts at Uni for actual degrees and studied my rear off at school while this clown gets a free ride by being a dim bulb dropkick high school dropout reject who can barely tie his shoelaces. Wait till the boom is over.… A sad day when some cretin whose school years [were wasted] and gets rewarded for his efforts while the rest of us who busted our guts and struggled and fought to be somebody, get rewarded by being taxed to the hilt and job scarcity/insecurity. (Thomson, 2011)

The posting reveals the vitriol directed at the CUB, and the sense conveyed in this vitriol that ‘the game’ – Bourdieu’s commonly engaged metaphor – has delivered incorrect/or unfair results to players. Like all of us, the poster is engaged in the ‘games of society’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 241) and, as such, tells us that he has ‘struggled and fought’ with the aim of ‘rewards’. That is, he strategically invested time and other resources in obtaining valuable cultural capital in the form of educational credentials, but there is no (immediate) conversion into economic capital. In contrast, there is the CUB, whose habitus allows no ‘feel for the game’ to attain equivalent cultural capital, but despite this, the CUB is prospering economically (Bourdieu, 1998: 98). The shifting of the rules of the game or potential loss of the game expressed by the above poster may, as he recognises, be rectified when the resource boom ends. As a consequence, it is a time gleefully anticipated by many who express a loathing for the CUB.

The distinctions drawn between the CUB’s economic capital (as manifest in the reported salary of Jimmy Dinnison) and the CUB’s attributed impoverished cultural capital are often underpinned by both spatial imaginaries and by discourses of morality. In terms of the former, the CUB is associated largely with the states of Western Australia and Queensland. This not only indicates that the majority of the nation’s mining operations are located in these locations, but also represents the way class designations are spatialised (Gidley and Rooke, 2010). CUBs occupy a range of specific places beyond particular states, such as the outer suburbs, McMansions and gated communities. Along with the geographic markers used to characterize the CUB are discourses of morality which may either be implicit in texts (e.g. in relation to terms such as ‘rewards, ‘waste’, ‘struggles’ as above), but equally often rendered explicit as the following exemplifies:

I just do not believe people doing that job deserve $800 a day and it is not like he has skills as a doctor, teacher etc. Like I said it is disgusting…It’s about principles and morals which a lot of people have lost through greed or whatever. (Thomson, 2011)

Woodward (2001: 131) notes that in Bourdieu’s (1984) ‘model of taste and aesthetic judgement, morality and ethics play an insignificant part in strategies of distinction’. However, subsequent theorising on class relations that critically engages Bourdieu, emphasises the importance of morality in the process of establishing and mobilising cultural categories of distinction (e.g. Lamont, 1992; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 2005a). Collectively, this work exposes the way morality is invoked to create classed boundaries, and to provide a rationale for class-based inclusions and exclusions. This is echoed in representations of the CUB, not only to differentiate the CUB from the middle class but also to differentiate the CUB as ‘other’ to a more respectable ‘working class’, who are variously named ‘traditional Bogans’, ‘stereotypical Bogans’, ‘genuine Bogans’, ‘plain Bogans’, ‘good old Bogans’ and ‘old school Bogans’, in opposition to CUBs or synonyms such as ‘aspirational Bogans’, ‘postmodern Bogans’, ‘new age Bogans’, ‘Bogan made good’ (BMG) or ‘upwardly mobile Bogans’. For example, one poster celebrates the ‘old school Bogan’ who ‘stood for something’, and was intent on ‘challenging the middle-class order’ and, in contrast to the CUB ‘looked on consumerist shit with absolute disgust’. In this process, ‘the Bogan’ is rehabilitated from a long history of vilification to become a figure of decency, propriety and morality while working-class culture is appropriated as a ‘resource; fixed, fragmented and plundered for elements for others to authorise themselves through’ (Skeggs, 2005b: 66). This is revealed in a post to the website, Larvatus Prodeo, where a contributor repeats the well-rehearsed mantra that the poor working class has no culture ⁹ before turning to criticise the CUB:

Although there has always been plenty of jokes about working class vulgarity, or pretension, that was a bit cruel, because the poor working class didn’t have the opportunity to be much different, and the wealth differential made for a real power imbalance. But Cashed-up Bogans are fair game. They have the wealth, but not only do they prefer glittery toys, slobbiness and tasteless, trashy “fashions” – they’re proud of it! (comment XX on Bahnisch, 2011)

The final statement, ‘They’re proud of it!’ introduces another pervasive theme in negative representations of the CUB’s lack of cultural capital. That is, they do not express an appropriate sense of inferiority in their dealings with the middle class. It may be this presumed refusal to acknowledge the middle-class habitus as superior and one’s own as inferior that explains the ferocity of some posts. In other words, what Bourdieu (1984: 56) labels the violence of ‘aesthetic intolerance’ may be magnified for a group not demonstrating imitative behaviours or shame and deferential dispositions in terms of their supposed lack of appropriate capitals. As the following section will argue, this includes not only social, cultural and symbolic capital, but also spiritual and environmental capital.

Representations of the CUB and struggles over new forms of cultural capital: spiritual and environmental capital

Some scholars have extended Bourdieu’s rendering of terms such as ‘cultural capital’ to encompass new arenas of taste and competence (e.g. information capital; see Emmison and Frow, 1998) and/or suggest new modes of capital that are important to creating and sustaining contemporary social hierarchies (e.g. emotional capital; see Reay, 2004a). In examining the CUB texts we turned to this literature, particularly that which has identified ‘spiritual’ and ‘environmental’ capital – two types of capital that emerged as significant in definitions and characterisations of the CUB.

Theoretical discussions about spiritual capital began with the notion of ‘religious capital’ which Iannaccone (1990: 299) defines as the ‘skills and experiences specific to one’s religion, including religious knowledge, familiarity with church ritual and doctrine, and friendships with fellow worshipers’. While building on this and other contributions (e.g. Stark and Finke 2000), Verter (2003) coined the term ‘spiritual capital’ to designate a mode of capital not necessarily connected to hierarchical institutional religion, but which was more individualistic and personal. He views spiritual capital as ‘a form of cultural capital’ which, like other forms of cultural capital, can be transacted for other forms of capital. Again, however, this is dependent upon hierarchical struggles for legitimacy and value (Verter, 2003: 158). Such struggles for legitimacy and value around the CUB occur as they are described as ‘spiritually undernourished’ largely because they have ‘too much’ economic capital. A website, for example, documents ‘Adam’s story’ which is one of significant earnings, drug and alcohol abuse, and a relationship background. We are informed that this is a trajectory that is ‘a common one among Western Australia’s new rich, the army of workers in our booming mining industry’. Despite one lapse when he ‘started working again in the mining industry’, Adam has and is now clean with a ‘new spiritual side and new found emotions’. ¹⁰

In explaining the notion of ‘spiritual capital’, Verter (2003) turns to the three modes of cultural capital as outlined by Bourdieu. The different forms of spiritual capital, that is, as embodied state, as an objectified state and as an institutional state, are all seen as lacking in the CUB. Typically, as with Adam’s story, the CUB is largely depicted as having no interest in any form of spiritual capital. On the occasions when the CUB is associated with spirituality, it is of the wrong kind (e.g. a Buddhist statue from K-mart), producing a lack of embodied and institutional spiritual capital that renders any purchased spiritual objects meaningless as the following indicates:

The female bogan is then able to experience an increased sense of affiliation with thousands of years of leaning, sacrifice and suffering, conveniently distilled into a domestic decoration that will go well with the new cushions in the Grand Sitting Area. Fortunately for the household, the female does not expect the rest of the family to understand the philosophy behind the iconography, largely because she doesn’t either. ¹¹

A further demonstration of the connection between the CUB and a lack of spirituality, as well as the problematising of the CUB’s economic capital as inherently incompatible with spirituality, entails a posting to a newsgroup for orthopaedic surgeons. The discussion thread, which began around cricket, morphed into musings about the proliferation of tattoos in contemporary Australia with one contributor contending:

We now see a generation of people who have never read a book, gone to church or had any exposure to the Judeo/Christian liberal democratic values that underpin western civilization. These uneducated Cashed-up Bogans have no sense of cultural identity or spirituality so they steal from other cultures – hence the tatts. These people worship money and bling. They have no values, only money. ¹²

The CUB is inherently superficial – only able to ‘steal’ aspects of spirituality in a piecemeal fashion and then embellish their already problematic classed body with a tattoo. Meanwhile, middle-class spiritual capital is associated with authenticity. It is manifest in institutional churches or at least a knowledge and understanding of the traditions and background of the religions of such churches. Above all, while the CUB’s spiritual dispositions and preferences are judged as inferior and wrong, those of the middle class are ‘misrecognised as natural attributes, rather than socially constructed ones’, and are thus afforded privilege and prestige (Verter, 2003: 169).

Just as the CUB is castigated for lacking spiritual capital, so too are they attacked for what is characterised as a deficiency of ‘environmental capital’. The notion of a type of resource/asset connected to the environment, which is convertible with other forms of capital, is understood by Karol and Gale (2004: 5) as consisting of ‘primarily knowledge about the environment’, which, if accumulated, can allow one to ‘adapt to a habitus of sustainability’. In comparison, Johnson and Clisby (2009) offer a more useful perspective that attends to the dynamic social processes by which Bourdieu’s capitals are acquired, transmitted and valued. They write that environmental capital includes ‘the social values associated with talking and acting in ways deemed to be environmentalist, the processes through which that talk and action are recognized as legitimate and the power and prestige such talk and action accrues’ (Johnson and Clisby, 2009: 173).

It is perhaps not surprising, given the nature of mining and the highly contested relationship between mining and the environment, that CUB representations would focus on their environmental knowledge and practices. However, the uneasy relationship between the CUB and the environment is pronounced in representations of the CUB’s life well beyond the workplace. This is evident in the following 2011 post in response to the Boganomics blog:

The other classic thing to remember is the complete disregard for the environment. Forget carbon emissions from the coal mine where all the lolly comes from. These are the people who leave Maxtreme bottles and cans everywhere at the lake or beach, rip up fire trails ¹³ in the wet so they can’t be used, leave fishing tackle everywhere, chuck confetti round at the slightest excuse, shoot native wildlife if they can’t find pigs, release pigs into the wild etc. That’s just the tip of the (melting?) iceberg. ¹⁴

The above poster’s suggestion that the CUB is completely lacking in environmental capital is challenged elsewhere, such as on the thingsboganslike website. It suggests that CUBs may have certain environmental knowledge and engage certain environmental practices, but, like their spiritual dispositions, these are derivative, misplaced and superficial. This is a group that is said to have garnered their environmental politics from celebrities, and their environmental knowledge from viewing ‘Al Pacino’s’ ¹⁵ An Inconvenient Truth, while their environmental action has been limited to supporting dubious carbon offset tree planting schemes.

Though the above post does not mention it, a pervasive subject in discussions of the CUBs’ environmental capital is consumption. In a wide range of texts, the CUB’s consumption practices are derided for being excessive and vulgar. While this continues a long tradition of the demonising of working-class culture (Walkerdine 1997), a new development is to link this to a lack of environmental capital. The types of cars and houses bought, along with particular leisure items purchased (boats and jet skis) are all ridiculed for a lack of environmental credentials. Why the consumption desires and practices of elites, which may also be environmentally detrimental (e.g. frequent travel overseas and second homes) are not negatively evaluated in the same manner, is explained by Lawler (2000: 121). He draws on Bourdieu (1984) to explain that ‘tasteful’, middle-class consumer goods ‘can be coded as hardly material at all’.

As with other negative characteristics attributed to the CUB, those pertaining to the environment are put forward to back up broader narratives of decline in Australian society. Thus, the CUB is presented as illustrative of the lack of environmental capacity and concern among Australians. This was given artistic form in an exhibition ‘Bogan Proof Fence’ at the Substation Gallery in Melbourne, which had, as a centerpiece, a scale replica of an Holden torn apart and full of cigarette butts (Lee, 2011). The oversized ashtray was dedicated to the CUB. The CUB was therefore not just to be seen as polluter of the environment, but of the nation itself.

Conclusion

In this article, we have engaged with debates about the appositeness of Bourdieu’s theories for discussion of the CUB in a different national context to explore Skeggs’ (2006) assertion that Bourdieu’s theorising on class and culture may not be germane to a study of Australia, where economic capital is likely to be valued over cultural capital. In mapping the CUBs’ access to different types of capital, and how this positions them in social space, we demonstrated that a ‘classed relation to the aesthetic’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 56), and indeed, ‘disgust’ as the inverse of the aesthetic (see Lawler, 2005: 440), are critical to generating and defining ways of being in contemporary Australia. Even though CUBs may have a volume of economic capital, they lack the types of cultural competences and skills legitimated by the middle class to such an extent that they are unable to enhance their social status as a result of their material success. The types of cultural resources referenced in the textual material we examined included those well documented by Bourdieu (1984), such as a formal tertiary education and engagement in reading. However, it is notable that new forms of cultural capital are emerging in Australia to differentiate class factions, including spiritual and environmental capital.

As our analysis demonstrates, while the ‘culture quotient measure of class’, which Skeggs (2006) writes is so important in Britain, is constantly invoked in characterisations of the CUB, this does not suggest that traditionally defined high/low culture distinctions are always relevant in Australia. Indeed, in reviewing the ‘career highlights’ of the concept of cultural capital, Bennett and Silva (2011: 432) report that the types of aesthetic dispositions that Bourdieu used to characterize French class factions have not been evident in subsequent research across disparate contexts, including Australia. Across the texts analysed, we found only one reference locating the CUB against what is classified as ‘high culture’ (that is, opera and theatre). In fact, it was clear that the CUB and the CUB casualties, such as Adam, share many cultural practices with non-CUB Australians, but undertake them differently. Mention was made, for example, of the CUB acting inappropriately at cricket matches (swearing, racism, drinking) while the poster sought to ‘enjoy the finer points of the game’. In another discussion, attention focused on the beer-drinking habits of the CUB as inappropriate. It was not beer drinking or going to the pub that were cause for ridicule, but the type of beer drunk and the disposition while at the pub. This would suggest that what is at stake in terms of status is not necessarily which cultural practice one undertakes, but how one undertakes it.

The struggles over cultural capital that imbue representations of the CUB are thus complex and often nuanced. They are also, as the cricket and beer drinking references demonstrate, strongly masculinised. Media reports have suggested that some working-class women have been able to convert traditional feminised dispositions into cultural capital to obtain relatively lucrative work as dump truck drivers on mine sites. Employers assert that women’s ‘natural’ sense of caution and attention to cleanliness, along with their caring and gentle ‘natures’, mean fewer accidents and lower vehicle replacement costs (Corby, 2007; Goffet 2012; Kock and Walker, 2010). This shift, however, appears not to have feminised the CUB narrative, demonstrating that imaginaries of the working class remain deeply masculine and unequivocally white. ¹⁶ The intense symbolic struggles over identity that manifest themselves in representations of the CUB thus reveal a project that is both racialised and gendered, highlighting the arguments by Skeggs (2006) and Bennett and Silva (2011) that clarifying how cultural capital is differentiated not just by class, but also by ethnicity and gender, remains an important theoretical project.

A key limitation of this analysis is that it does not include the voices and perspectives of those marked as CUBs and/or those who identify as CUBs. Apart from Jimmy Dinnison, whose views were, of course, mediated by journalists, we located only one other text in which a person named themselves as a CUB and expressed an opinion about the types of issues raised in this article. This was a posting to the thingsboganslike website on the question of ‘What is a Bogan today?’ The contributor said they found the discussion and its largely derogatory comments ‘hilarious’ and then explained that s/he worked in mining as did a son and son-in-law, that they made a ‘fortune’, which they spent on overseas holidays, boats and ‘big fuel guzzling 4WDs that are great in the city for barging all the wankers in eco cars out of the way’. The parting comment was, ‘I say to anyone with any drive to join in and go for it.’ This contribution contrasts markedly with other research we have undertaken that has documented the sense of frustration, sadness and disempowerment of those marked as CUBs (Pini et al., 2010a, 2010b). There is consequently much more that needs to be known about CUBs, including the extent to which such an identity is taken up, embraced or resisted. For this to occur ‘the boom’ will need to be explored beyond the disciplinary fields of politics and industrial relations, and will need to be examined by Australian sociologists not simply as an economic phenomenon but one that is also fundamentally social and cultural.