It’s a pleasant Sunday afternoon, and the good citizens of Australia are out on the freeways. Some are on the way to or from visiting family, some are coming back from the beach, or from doing a grocery shop. In the stream are trucks and taxis, sedans, hatchbacks and SUVs. A driver sees another car indicating, and then eases off the accelerator to give them space. The other driver gives a friendly wave as she changes lanes. The children in the back seat natter and coo, and the Garfield doll on the rear window swings whimsically to and fro. The tiled rooves of suburbia dash past in the afternoon glare. All is well in the world.
Enter the bogan.
Ambulances, fire trucks and police vehicles have sirens to warn other motorists that they are coming. Today, the bogan is using its own special siren. It goes “unce, unce, unce”. 1.2 tonnes of steel, glass and racist bumper stickers swerve erratically. The bogan at the wheel sucks on a ciggy, and in its mind, it is the most maxtreme stunt driver ever. It sees a sliver of sunlight appear between two cars, and veers unannounced through the gap, tyres howling, aiming for the statistically negligible possibility of arriving two and a half minutes earlier than it would have otherwise. In the bogan mind, every road object presents a driving challenge: a pair of cars become a chicane, a red light a game of chicken. And when a bogan is unable to run the red light due to a line of perpendicular traffic, it will quickly assess the car next to it for a potential drag race when the light goes green. This sort of behaviour ensures that when the bogan is behind the wheel, its first priority is the endangerment not only of itself and its passengers, but also every other road user and stray marsupial in the vicinity.
The bogan will tell you that it is a good driver. As evidence for this, it will offer up its ability to depress its accelerator pedal. As such, the needle of its speedometer serves as an exact gauge of its driving expertise. Whether picking up the kids, doing the shopping or coming back smashed from the glassing barn, the bogan will channel the only stunt driver it considers to have the requisite mad skills, The Stig, and imagine it is one of the famous people who have graced Top Gear’s celebrity wall. Unable to contain its need for maxtremity, the bogan sees any road as its own elaborate race track, designed solely for its clumsily executed, life-threatening manoeuvres.
Of course, such behaviour often puts the bogan on a literal and metaphorical collision course with other road users and, inevitably, the police. Rarely one to take responsibility for its own actions, the bogan is nevertheless highly critical of others’ actions, and is sure to engage its horn at the slightest provocation. And naturally, the bogan is only ever seconds away from an episode or road rage. But when it is booked for speeding, road raging, or going around roundabouts on two wheels, the bogan will engage its outrage gland and fulminate about such high-minded political subjects as “revenue raising” and “the nanny state”. The Trashmedia Kraken is behind the bogan on this.
In defence of the bogan’s perceived right to drive like an idiot, the Kraken has decided to reveal to the bogan the exact location of every single speeding camera, going so far as to give it regular updates throughout the day via one of its multitudinous tentacles. Thus, it can provide the bogan with fair warning on when to momentarily observe the road laws, before careening off into the distance. In what is a testament to the bogan’s impulsiveness and endemic stupidity, the speeding fines continue to appear in its letterbox.
It used to be so easy. In recent decades, controlling the bogan’s retail habits was as simple as spending a few million dollars on an advertising campaign on commercial television, and inviting television cameras to film other bogans trying to kick the front door of the shop in at 5am on Boxing Day. Even the advent of discount airlines and the associated rise in Phuket-sourced fake clothing and DVDs didn’t crack a mention at the boardroom tables of Australia’s largest retailers. But things have indeed changed.
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