There's An Art To Being A Boof Head

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 2, 2003

Tim Dick

Artist Michael Lindeman speaks as someone who's accepted himself: ``I'm a boofhead and I grew up in the suburbs," he proudly confesses, while hanging his photographs for Penrith Regional Gallery's new exhibition, Boofheads and Scrubbers Revenge .

He looks nothing like what the Macquarie Dictionary says is a boofhead: a person with a big head or, alternatively, a fool.

His head appears to be normal-sized and he sounds articulate, but Lindeman's use of boofhead reflects a definition that is widening on the back of the new wave of ockerism.

Lindeman says boofhead is a description for ``the unselfish and laconic behaviour of an Australian." He lists his boofhead influences in the exhibition's commentary as: ``1968/69 XT GT Falcons, fishing, drinking beer, travel, Marcel Duchamp , Captain Beefheart , Dick Johnson and Rodney Rude ."

The publisher of the Macquarie Dictionary, Susan Butler , said the dictionary was expanding its definition from the cartoon character and ocker stereotype.

Boofheads and Scrubbers Revenge follows an exhibition in June at the Liverpool Regional Museum honouring the flannelette shirt, and some say it is representative of a fonder view of uncouth Australianism.

Fiona Allon , of the University of Western Sydney's Centre for Cultural Research, said Australians could now ``step back from the cultural cringe and look at those working-class cultures with a new sense of affection."

The increased acknowledgment of westie culture was partly ``a nostalgia for an egalitarianism of the Australia of the '50s, '60s and '70s, where everything did seem alright," she said.

Stephen Alomes , an associate professor at Deakin University's School of Social and International Studies, thought the ``reprise of ockerism is partly a response to globalisation and yuppies, but a similar thing happened in the 1970s when the new middle classes or trendies appeared".

He said it was also ``a fresh, no-bullshit response to a digitised, audited and bureaucratic workplace, full of high-sounding rhetoric about the world's best this and world class that".

Part of Professor Alomes's analysis is reflected in the proud boofhead artist's statement about his work When Indoor Cricket meets KB Lager. Lindeman says it could either be ``considered as an elevation of objects with a certain nostalgia, or a f--- you to fashion."