There should be a new word, boganfreude – meaning the thrill you get from reading about bogans behaving badly.

Boganfreude arises after reading about anyone who gets really sick drinking arak in Bali, or arrested for sex on a beach after a boozy brunch in Dubai.

But the Big Kahuna of the boganfreude genre is cruise ship stories. Last weekend up to 23 members of an extended Italian family were reported to be behind brawls – or “bloodbaths” as News Limited called them – terrorising passengers onboard the Carnival Legend. Remarkably, some passengers were underwhelmed by Carnival Cruise’s offer of 25% off the victims’ next Carnival cruise.

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We love to read about cruise holidays gone wrong. Remember the Sick Ship – a massive gastro outbreak last year that affected 200 people on Ovation of the Seas? Or the hideous excesses of the cruise taken by the late David Foster Wallace, and explored in excruciating details in an 18,000-word Harper’s Essay?

Who hasn’t felt a spiteful shiver of delight in reading about people who spew non-stop for a week on a mega-ship, or who have raw sewage seep into their cabin as they sleep?

I don’t do cruises anymore. The first one I went on – a uni booze cruise along the Yarra when I was 19, resulted in me almost losing an eye. I danced too close to someone holding a cigarette and it was inadvertently – perhaps – put out on my eyeball.

Years later I can hear the sizzle of my right retina as the burning ember connected with the delicate, light-sensitive tissue.

I spent the rest of the term wearing a large eye patch; a sad, friendless pirate who had trouble reading the blackboard. The retina eventually repaired itself.

I didn’t set foot on a cruise ship until many years later, when I accepted a travel writing assignment to take a seven-night, 1970s disco-themed cruise around the South Pacific.

It was a strange experience. The inside of the ship was like an enormous shopping mall or RSL, filled with shops, dining rooms, a theatre, bars, nightclubs and poker machines.

Around us and below were the cabins, each level down as socially stratified as the Titanic (one shudders to think how dark and small the cabins must have been for the crew, the Dalits of the ship).

On the walls in the public areas there were many screens – always advertising the pokies (BE A WINNER), or that night’s concert, or the exclusive onboard restaurants, where you paid a “supplement” to dine. Even as a captive in this place – where the ship has a monopoly on your money – there was still the feeling of an aggressive market competition for your attention.

I asked the ewok’s owner if I could dance with the ewok. Photograph: Brigid Delaney

The first person I met on the ship was a genial farmer whose wife had cheated on him and, on a whim, he booked a cabin – an inside one, without windows. He barely saw his own bed, hooking up with a different woman each night. The ship was full of divorcees and, after the singers from the 1970s had packed away their wigs and makeup, the late-night bars heaved with drunken fumblings. In the dark, at 3am, the place resembled the uni booze cruises of my youth.

On a shore excursion, I didn’t watch where I was going and snorkelled – with some violence – into a member of the Village People.

Each day a strange man (was he as strange as me?) roamed the deck filming with an iPad everything up close and with intensity (the food, the empty swimming pools, the fingers of the keyboard players in the cheesy reggae band). At the conclusion of dinner each night, people sang: “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!”

There was a woman at my table (you get assigned a table and dine with the same people each night) who was travelling with a life-sized stuffed ewok. The ewok had its own seat and other people at the table spoke to the ewok as if it was a real person: “Is Ewok having a nice time? Does Ewok want dessert? Did the ewok meet anyone special at the disco last night?”

At the Leo Sayer concert Ewok was passed around, aloft and dancing and, by the last night, bloated and bored and as friendless as I’d been the year I wore the eye patch, I succumbed to the collective magical thinking. When a Bob Marley song I liked came on, I asked the ewok’s owner if I could dance with the ewok. And she said yes, and I did. I also got a selfie with the ewok.

Maybe the fault is in cruise ships themselves – the way they are designed for excess, they way you are all trapped in there together. A brawl in these circumstances is not so much a surprise as an inevitability.

On a cruise, out there the ocean is flat, beautiful and mesmerisingly monotonous. Inside the sensory load is overwhelming.

The playwright David Williamson gave a memorable lecture in 2005 that linked cruise-ship culture with a peculiarly Australian sense of entitlement that had developed under the leadership of John Howard.



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“Aspirational Australia will doubtless party on, playing deck games and comparing prices, but when the ship finally berths they may look out to see a destination much bleaker than they’d imagined … An obsessive focus on material acquisition, encouraged by governments who worship economic growth and little else, have locked us into a probable long-term disaster scenario for Cruise Ship Australia and for the planet as a whole.”

To be on the cruise ship was to be aspirational in that early 2000s sense: working class, but no longer Labor, in thrall to materialism but without bourgeois-approved taste, gorging on food and drink without moderation or restraint.



It’s a snobs’ view – a birth of this current strain of boganfreude. A more expensive holiday doesn’t make you a better sort of person. But it does mean there are fewer people around to film you brawl.