Wog Boy” Moves

Chapter 6 “Wog boy” moves Since the mid-1980s, Greek-Australian actors have led the cultivation of a transnational style of masculinity in the theatre and on the screen. This transnational masculinity is recognisable in performance as an energetically assertive style of wog boy attitudes and expressions. The style draws on the experience of men born in Australia to parents who migrated from Greece and other parts of southern Europe. We trace its emergence to the period of post-war migration and to concerns about migrant men disrupting the gender order of Anglo-Australian life. Indeed, performances on screen by actors such as Alex Dimitriades in The Heartbreak Kid (1993), Head On (1998) and La Spagnola (2001), Nick Giannopoulos and Vince Colossimo in The Wog Boy (2000) and Paul Fenech, Paul Nakad and Tahir Bilgic in Fat Pizza (2003) are only the most recent mediations of a masculinity which has been cultivated in contexts of live performance for some time. On the stage, the wog boy style came to prominence in comedy shows like Giannopoulos’s Wogs Out of Work from 1987 and its sequels, and in plays like Richard Barrett’s The Heartbreak Kid (1988) and Greg Andreas’s Milk and Honey (1992). Yet even in the 1960s, concerns about the transnational masculinity of migrant men were animating the performance of some new Australian plays such as Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart (1960), Theodore Patrikareas’s The Promised Woman (2000) and David Martin’s The Young Wife (1966). In exploring the emergence of a wog boy style of masculinity in Australia, we trace its migratory departure from the patriarchal masculinity of the homeland. We also consider how an erotic interest in the masculinity of migrant men from Mediterranean Europe encountered an Anglo-Australian investment in the classical aesthetics of Greco-Roman culture. In Australian vernacular, the term wog was once—and, in certain circumstances, still is—a denigrating term of ethnic designation used “Wog boy” moves 109 by Anglo-Celtic Australians to mark migrants’ cultural difference from the hitherto predominantly Anglo-Celtic mores of Australian life. Initially the term applied to migrants of non-Anglo-Celtic origin, although in the post-war period its usage focused in particular on those migrating from Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia. Following a pattern which saw the transformation of other terms of denigration into identifiers of difference, the term was subject to strategic reclamation in the 1980s. Researching the cultural politics of Australian comedy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony Mitchell describes the transformation of the term wog into a “defiantly positive” term of “self-description” (1992: 130). Mitchell cites Hilary Glow’s review of Wogs Out of Work as pivotal to this transformation: “It is no small part of this show’s success that ‘wogs’ become the subject of celebration rather than denigration” (quoted in Mitchell 1992: 131). Indeed, Jane Warren, conducting research into the socio- linguistic phenomenon of wogspeak in Melbourne in the 1990s, attributes this reclamation in large part to “the success of stage shows such as Wogs Out of Work, Wogarama and […] Wogboys” and the work of “wog comedy” performers Giannopoulos, Mary Coustas (“Effie”) and George Kapiniaris (1999: 89–91). Likewise Pieter Aquilia, in an essay on the “exploitation of ethnic elements” in Australian film and television drama, observes how Alex Dimitriades’s successful career switch from film heart-throb [in The Heartbreak Kid] to prime-time commercial television [in the spin-off series Heartbreak High] had a significant impact on teenage attitudes to non-Anglo protagonists, and his popularity saw a new breed of adolescent take up the banner of ‘wog’ pride. (2001: 105) The sociology of the term reveals a more complex pattern of usage than the notion of proud reclamation implies. Scott Poynting, Greg Noble and Paul Tabar conducted a study of masculinity and ethnicity among young men and women living in suburban south-western Sydney in the 1990s. A group of young men of Lebanese background interviewed in the study reported that wog was simultaneously active in their social world as a term of solidarity and abuse—as is evident in one young man’s claim: “if anyone called me a wog, they wouldn’t be speaking to me alone” (1998: 79). For these young men, “wogs” was what they had “in common” with an extended group of friends which included others from Lebanese, Greek, Italian and Arabic back-.

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