[First filed: November 27, 2008 @ 10:58]
On a recent thread johnboy answered the question “what on earth is a booner” with:
- proto-bogan
much like a westie but wearing an iron maiden tshirt and tighter jeans.
mostly extinct.
As someone who came of age in Canberra during the heyday of the booner—the 80s and 90s—this got me thinking.
During these glorious years Canberra had heaps of booners, just as Sydney had its westies and Melbourne its bogans. Essentially they are the same thing, just living in different places. But now we are asked to believe that the Canberra booner is a dying breed. Indeed, my learned colleagues on the fiercely parochial RiotAct surprisingly insist on calling these good folk ‘bogans’ instead of the geographically specific ‘booners’.
So, what has happened to Canberra’s booners?
I put forward two possible reasons for the booner’s apparent demise:
1. It is just a matter of terminology – they are still around but everyone now calls them bogans; and
2. As johnboy suggests, along with watering your lawn, Raiders Lime flavoured milk and the Northbourne Avenue Summernats Super Cruise, booners are naught but another Canberra cultural relic. We Canberrans were fortunate to have booners back in the day, but that era is long gone and we now have to make do with the generic bogan.
I say no to both of these hypotheses! The Canberra booner lives!
Sure, he/she might now wear ill-fitting American sports gear and drive some half-sik ute instead of black Levis, an Anthrax t-shirt and brown desert boots, but he/she is still out there – swearing loudly on the bus, scribbling his/her name on playgrounds, smoking durries at the local shops and riding a BMX in the stormwater drains. That is, being a booner.
Canberra – am I right here? Does our fair city still have booners and we have simply lost the ability to identify them as such?
Or if booners are a fading memory from this town’s halcyon pre-self government days, did any of you ever identify as a booner or do you have a claim to booner heritage?
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