An Australian term for someone displaying working-class cultural markers — fashion, music, speech — regardless of how much money they actually have.
Bogan is what Australians call someone who wears their working-class culture openly — the flannelette shirts, the mullet haircuts, the V8 cars, the heavy metal music. It's not about being poor. You can earn six figures in the mines and still be bogan if you keep drinking VB and driving a Commodore. Cultural belonging and money operate on completely separate tracks.
The word emerged in the 1980s as an insult — a way to mark someone as unsophisticated, lacking refinement. But something shifted during Australia's mining boom in the 2000s, when suddenly working-class people had serious money but didn't change their ways. The 'Cashed-Up Bogan' became impossible to ignore: wealth couldn't buy you out of the identity.
Now the word lives in two worlds at once. Say it in a corporate office and people hide their background, code-switching into respectability. Say it among friends and it becomes a badge — authentic, anti-elitist, refusing to perform middle-class manners. Younger Australians increasingly claim it with pride, rejecting the idea that working-class culture is something to escape. The tension reveals Australia's uncomfortable relationship with class in a country that insists it doesn't have one.