More On Sharpies & Bogans

I've seen footage of Sharpies so many times in my life, it never occurred to me it might actually be of interest to anyone outside of Melbourne or the state of Victoria. The national broadcaster the ABC has trodden these images out ad nauseam throughout my life so now it's uniqueness is totally lost on me. The music part of it remains of interest but the sharpies kinda attached themselves to those bands. I'm sure those bands wanted an audience and I guess beggars can't be choosers but the bands probably didn't want the ugly controversy & media campaigns that came with it. The Coloured Balls, Australia's finest rock band of the time broke up because of the trouble surrounding the band, not any kind of musical differences or anything. This of course left a huge opening in the pre-punk era for someone to come in and fill that spot. AC/DC were that band and hey they didn't just fill that spot, they filled every nook and cranny throughout the world with their minimal driving guitar rock.

*Simon Reynolds points out similarities to sharpie dancing and the shoulder dance performed here by Mud here

At Coloured Balls shows towards the end of their existence there was just too much violence between Sharpie gangs and a new element that had entered the fray Skinhead Boot Boys. Previous to that the Sharpies had been a cool subculture to play to according to Loyde. The media got themselves an angle and the band were accused of inciting the violence, even participating in it themselves. A writ was even issued to one newspaper for their preposterous lies. I think we can all guess which gutter press paper that was er...there was only one.  So Lobby got fed up, as the shows became a pleasureless experience for the band, and walked away.

I guess the natural progression from the Sharpie was the Bogan. This was more of a loose generic term for a subculture like indie or something like that and it wasn't a gang thing. The hairdo turned to your more traditional mullet ie. shortish on the top and sides (longer than a Sharpie) with much much more business at the back. AC/DC, Cold Chisel, The Tatts and The Angels were the bands that were followed by this lot.

I guess ex-Sharpies who had the gang mentality deeply ingrained in their souls would have later joined some of those skinhead gangs or biker gangs once they were old enough. Gang culture usually leads to some kind of life of crime. A fine example of this would be that Australia's most loved and successful criminal Mark 'Chopper' Read who claimed to have been a Sharpie and is perhaps glimpsed in the above short film. Other international subcultures would have attracted some of the other ex-Sharpies like punk, anarcho-punk, hardcore etc. Then I suppose the rest of the ex-Sharpies would have just grown up, got jobs and started families. But on occasion after a bit of booze on a Saturday Night some sharpie dancing would have ensued, like that scene in the film Mallboy (2001), which I can't seem to find on youtube. The ephemerality of it all (Sharpie culture) is a bit of a mystery though. As far as I know there haven't been any younger generations taking up the lifestyle as a revival. That could be ripe for the picking now! There have been comedy sketches on Sharpies on television's D-Generation, Fast Forward and the like.

Sharpie culture was very white, as white as you could get so it definitely fits parallels with Gabber, Skinheads etc. Although I have read that other ethnicities apart from those from the British Isles were also included in some Sharpie gangs. It was predominantly white though. This could be a reason why it hasn't been revived as Australia became way more multicultural from the 80s onward. Take a very popular underground band from the 80s like The Hard Ons. They were a punk/thrash/pop band that had no members with their roots in Anglo-Saxon culture. The original three piece had backgrounds from Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia and Korea, I think. This was the face of 80s youth culture.