Fleeting bogan fame

By Elise Cullen

Police rampaging through Kings Cross on a Saturday night is nothing new to Gen Y’s: introduce a Nine Network camera crew and chk-chk boom, you have yourself a memorable weekend.

A witness to the drunken shenanigans myself, I was fascinated to see how the night unfolded and what events followed.

When police sirens and screams of drunken night-goers pierced our ears we immediately ran onto the street in the hope of witnessing a drunken brawl. Juveniles crowded the streets running toward the commotion, throwing their detective caps on and pushing through police tape.

My girlfriends and I only did what any concerned girls would do: respectfully snuck past the police tape looking for a journalistic scoop. An eyeful of the injured victim being wheeled into the back of an ambulance was more than we bargained for.

A short distance away, an ‘insightful’ account of the crime was dictated to police by none other than Claire Werbeloff, desperately scrounging for her 15 minutes of fame, and blissfully unaware of just how famous she would become.

A close friend of mine also shot to short-lived fame from the footage; Jake, now dubbed ‘Jake the reporter’, was dumbfounded by the media attention – A Current Affairs interviews, slogan tees with “Jake you’ve seen enough” and a Facebook group shadowing Werbeloff’s fan page with more than 27,000 followers.

I braved the Cross the following weekend, brushing shoulders with men wearing t-shirts with the slogan ‘Chk-Chk Boom’ sprawled across the front; bogan came to mind.

Three weeks on and the infamous term “Chk-Chk boom” remains on people’s lips but the fate of Werbeloff, the Kings Cross bogan, looks bleak, destined to follow a similar path to many a forgotten Big Brother ‘celebrity’.