FIRST IMPRESSIONS - Column

Struck by urge to bolster Mount's bogan population
I saw something beautiful the other day. There, in the white sand at Mount Maunganui, amid the usual display of board shorts, bikinis and Havaianas, it stood clad in ragged black from head to boot.
It was graceful. It was magnificent. It was a bogan.
The sight was one that almost brought tears to my eyes, given how few of these creatures I've recorded in Tauranga so far.
Closer inspection confirmed this bogan was veritable, and not just one of those little imposters who bike around The Strand in Iron Maiden T-shirts but wouldn't know Run To The Hills if Bruce Dickinson wailed it to them.
No, this specimen was genuine - it sported a long-sleeved Slayer shirt, possibly dated 1992, its left arm bore a Lamb of God tattoo, and its matty, chestnut-brown mane harked back to that halcyon era of Wayne's World and black jeans with real rips in them.
I wanted to take a photograph of it but I was worried I'd scare it away. In beachy, fashionable Tauranga, the only other bogan I've ever seen was one who almost knocked me over while storming out of a Cameron Rd bottle shop.
I turned to catch a fleeting glimpse of a box of Waikato Draught and a pair of steel-cap boots but the elusive bogan was soon gone again in a whir of diesel exhaust and death metal that faded off toward Greerton.
Both sightings were special to me as they reminded me both of my native Taranaki - still up there alongside Hamilton and Christchurch as a thriving bogan habitat - and of my metal-mad adolescence.
At the age of 14, I forfeited any chance of a normal high-school experience when I embraced the way of the bogan, putting a sudden end to my days of girlfriends and Saturday morning rugby.
Invites to parties also vanished, but that didn't matter - I was more content spending my weekends swilling cheap rum and stomping around to Sepultura.
Like Ponyboy Curtis in SE Hinton's The Outsiders, I was the youngest of an obstreperous gang of smelly munters - but instead of a 1950s drive-in, our hang-out was a rural cottage adorned with empty stubbies and Metallica posters.
On certain evenings, after a steady head-banging session, we'd set out in a convoy of tinny old sedans and crash whatever party was going.
By the time we'd assaulted the booze supply and commandeered the stereo, most of the partygoers had staged an exodus toward another bogan-free gig elsewhere.
Wikipedia defines the bogan as an individual who is "recognised to be from a lower-class background or someone whose limited education, speech, clothing, attitude and behaviour exemplifies such a background".
That's not entirely true. Many of us came from reasonably well-off families and some of us even went on to tertiary studies - even if it was just a polytech automotive course, an agricultural training centre, or journalism school.
While there's not yet a working collective noun for bogans, some have suggested a murder of bogans, a mullet of bogans, a Torana of bogans or, my favourite, a tempest of bogans.
That was the best term to describe our gang when we reunited for a boisterous stag night one year ago in Wellington. We moved like a grunting, sweaty, squall down Courtenau Place, enveloping everything in our path, including two poor girls who came out the other side feeling like they'd just been in a mosh pit.
On another weekend a few years' earlier, the tempest was rolling through the bush toward a hut at Mt Taranaki for an evening of sub-alpine bogan rowdiness.
We opened the hut door to find a hapless young foreign couple mid-way through what was an intimate dinner, complete with candles and red wine.
They fared worse than the girls in Wellington.
It's sad to think that the bogan is a particularly rare breed here in Tauranga.
I'm at a point where I'm almost inspired to dig out my old Pantera T-shirt just to bolster the population.
Then I'd stand there at Main Beach with that other head-banger, bogan-proud and grunting among the sunbathers. We few, we happy few ... we band of bogans.