The word bogan is now associated with flannelette- and ugg-boot-clad outersuburban throwbacks who sport bleached mullets and tattoos of Peter Brock on their arses (men) or breasts (women and men). Bogans subsist on a diet of Bundy and Coke (men) or Bundy and Diet Coke (women and poofters) and are noted for their interesting teeth. Their favourite colour is Winfield Blue and they hate the arts (except anything written by Barnesy). In 2015, the good folk of the Bogan Shire, on the Bogan River charted by Sturt and Hume, unveiled the Big Bogan, a five-metre statue of an overweight male wearing a singlet, thongs, stubbies and Southern Cross tattoo (bogan summer wear), standing beside a big Esky, and holding a big fishing rod, complete with a big dead fish. They hope this will encourage other bogans to visit them, as building and visiting big things are popular bogan pastimes.
The Life and of William Buckley …
The book’s description of a beast “covered with feathers of a dusky grey colour … about the size of a full grown calf” popularised the myth of the bunyip.
Yakka is the Jagara word for “work” – it is one of only a handful of Aboriginal words (other than place, plant and animal names) to have been incorporated into the Australian lexicon.
We have taken a vast portion of God’s earth, and made it a cesspool … we have poured down scum upon scum, and dregs upon dregs, of the offscourings of mankind, and … are building up with them a nation of crime, to be, unless something speedily is done, a curse and a plague, a by-word to all the peoples of the earth. The eye of God looks down upon a people, such as, since the deluge, has not been. Father William Ullathorne, The Catholic Mission in Australasia, 1837
“Bold Jack” Donohue … He was also always nice to the women he robbed and never tried any funny business, even though many of them would have wanted him to because Jack was a total studmuffin.
Bushranging didn’t just appeal to nudists, but to other marginalised groups too. Coffee was Aboriginal.9 Mary Ann Ward, doubly discriminated against, was an Aboriginal woman. Sam Poo was Chinese and had a silly name. Robert Cotterall was visually impaired, with the blue eyeshade he wore to protect his failing vision earning him the sinister moniker of Blue Cap. Johnny Gilbert was a cross-dresser. Captain Moonlite was gay. Mad Dan Morgan was mad. And Edward Davis, better known as Teddy the Jewboy, led the Jewboy Gang in terrorising the Hunter Valley between 1839 and 1841, except on Saturdays.
Bushranging allowed poor marginalised dreamers to build themselves a better world, in which they were champions of justice, warriors against tyranny, protectors of the weak and enemies of convention. And they got to shoot people – that was the best bit.
Bentham believed happiness could be mathematically determined by calculating the pleasure and pain arising from an action, and subtracting the latter from the former. Bentham’s formula did not account for sadomasochism, resulting in little support for utilitarianism among Tories.
Only South Australia took a different view. Sure, the Irish girls were short, ugly and mostly Catholic, but liberal South Australia welcomed the vertically, fuglyly and religiously diverse.
The most notable attempt was made by Giuseppe Fieschi, who tried to shoot the king with an ingenious weapon of his own devising – a wooden frame holding twenty-five simultaneously firing guns. The Machine infernale, as it became known, only grazed Louis’ forehead but killed eighteen bystanders and injured twenty-two more.
Lord Robert Cecil … is reputedly the source of the phrase Bob’s your uncle, meaning “everything’s worked out nicely with bugger-all effort”, for his habit of giving plum government jobs to his nephew, Lord Balfour.
A traveller would be unlikely to sight an Aborigine on the coach ride from Melbourne, with merchant Robert Caldwell observing, “the wild animals and native inhabitants seem to have almost melted away”.
Mate, a convict contraction of shipmate, was a friend or associate in Australian goldfields-speak, in contrast to the Californian gold rush partner – the Australian term was comradely, the American commercial.
Karl Marx, almost wetting himself with excitement, wrote that Eureka was “the symptom of a general revolutionary movement in Victoria”. The socialist revolution would begin in Melbourne, where the proletariat would rise up like the froth on a Brunswick Street cappuccino to smash the small wine bars and beard-grooming salons of the Collins Street bourgeoisie.
Mark Twain wrote of Eureka and the democratic reforms that flowed from it: I think it may be called the finest thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution – small in size; but great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression … It is another instance of a victory won by a lost battle.
But all explorers were also motivated by something far more mystical – the desire to know the unknown. And nowhere was more unknown than Australia’s vast interior, described by the Argus in 1842 as “a hideous blank”.
Ernest Shackleton, after heading for home only ninety-seven miles out from the South Pole in 1909, said to his wife, “A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?” Shackleton, who was something of a philosopher, also wrote, “the line between death and success in exploration is a fine one”.
Intellectuals, rather than serfs or oppressed workers, led the 1848 uprisings in Germany. After the aristocrats regained control, German nerds fled for the United States, Britain and Australia.
Hegel would argue that the centre of Australia would only be discovered when enough people were ready to discover it. Nietzsche would argue that the centre of Australia would be discovered by the person who wanted to discover it the most. And Schopenhauer, if he could be arsed, would argue that discovering the centre of Australia was pointless.
Wills was an Englishman of “slow and hesitating speech”, the legacy of a childhood fever. He was dutiful, methodical, stoic, committed to science and, unusual for the age, an atheist.
Many poor rural families, Ned’s included, hated the squatters, who they believed were denying them land to maintain their economic, political and social power and supply of cheap labour. Stealing their horses and cattle seemed a fair way of redistributing wealth.
Although he committed comparatively few crimes, he made up for this through sheer bloody-minded brutality. Dan was not known as Slightly Odd Dan Morgan or Mildly Disturbed Dan Morgan, but as Mad Dan Morgan.
He also took the time to talk to the fourteen-year-old son of the town’s Jewish storekeeper, who later recounted, “A Sunday school superintendent couldn’t have given me better advice as to human conduct.” That boy would become General Sir John Monash, Australia’s most accomplished military commander. Monash later recounted the two greatest moments of his life were cracking the Hindenburg Line in 1918 and “when I had a yarn with Kelly”.
While every self-respecting bushranger had a beard, Moonlite had a BEARD. An echidna weaned on Ashley & Martin’s secret formula had been Araldited to his chin, while a wild protuberance of bristles that would shame the Lorax capered gaily atop his lip.
But neither Parkes nor any of the other nation-builders commanded the affection of the Australian public like the poor, thieving, magnificently bearded cop-killing terrorist with a penchant for fetish-wear who patiently waited for the prison clock to chime his last. Australians love the plucky underdog, the brave but doomed hero who transcends his limitations, the voice that cries out against injustice, the stubborn bastard who refuses to bow to the state, the tough guy who loves his mum.