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The term " ocker" is used both as a noun and adjective for an Australians who speaks in Strine, a broad Australian accent, and acts in a rough and uncultivated manner. Australian National Museum Richard Neville defined the ocker positively as being "about conviviality: comradeship with a touch of good-hearted sexism". Although Australians would say thongs, and not flip-flops. However, the term is mostly understood to be pejorative compared to other terms, including larrikin, mate, cobber and bloke.C. J. Coventry, "Sedimentary Layers: Bob Hawke’s Beer World Record and Ocker Chic"
pg.18. In the 1980s, Carol Thatcher (daughter of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) was said to have been met with a hostile reception when she attempted to write a book comparing "ockers" with "poms".Peter Tory, “Something Cuckoo in Hawke’s Nest?,” Daily Mirror, 14 April 1983, 15. John Richard wrote that the "awful ocker" juxtaposed with the "loveable larrikin".John Rickard, “Loveable Larrikins and Awful Ockers,” Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 56 (1998): 78–85.
"The ocker" was in popular use in the 1970s and 1980s, although was seen by cultural commentators to have dissipated by the 1990s. However, a number of commentators observed the emergence of an ocker chic in which middle-class people, predominantly males, took on the style, accent, mannerisms and backstory of working-class people or other mythical "national types", including the ANZAC soldier and the stockman, but without the vulgarity of the ocker. The idea was first raised by Donald Horne and Max Harris in the mid-1970s but was not conceptualised until Diane Kirkby's work in the 2000s. The larrikin is the positive term used by people engaged in ocker chic to describe themselves or others and is seen in favourable contrast to the Bogan, which is thought of as being neither sophisticated nor reflective of Australian values.Coventry, (2023).
Ocker depictions in cinema rapidly faded in the mid-1975s with softer characters emerging, played by actors such as Jack Thompson, Paul Hogan and John Hargreaves. From 1977, politicians began ocker-ising their image with Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser being seen in public drinking beer. The rise of Bob Hawke is seen as a key example of how widespread ocker chic had become by the 1980s. Hawke had cultivated an image as a typical union man that was very popular with middle-class voters as early as 1972 that carried him all the way to the prime minister's office. The central part of this image was his "world record" beer skol (scull) which was "at best apocryphal, at worst fabricated" with no evidential basis beyond its appearance in a beer pamphlet called the Guinness Book of Records.Coventry, (2023). Prime Minister Paul Keating, who had come from a family that owned a large business and chose to live in an affluent part in an Australian Labor Party area, exhibited ocker chic by projecting a working class persona (drinking cans of beer in public and using tough talk) while also listening to classical music and collecting antique clocks.Coventry, (2023)David Day, Paul Keating: The Biography (Sydney: Fourth Estate, e-Book, 2015).Lech Blaine, “Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power,” Quarterly Essay 4 (2021).
Coventry cites numerous examples of ocker chic outside professional politics among businessmen, journalists, sportsmen, singer-songwriters and professionals. R. M. Williams manipulated his backstory to make himself seem to be a rough outdoorsman, even though his fortune was made in gold mining.Coventry, (2023). The National Farmers Federation repurposed the working-class/union concept of the "fair go".Rory O’Malley, “The Eclipse of Mateship: The ‘Wide Comb Dispute’ 1979–85,” Labour History 90, no. 1 (2006): 155–76. The historian Manning Clark cultivated his image to appear more like a farmer.Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, e-Book, 2020).
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