The Book of Bloke Read Free Page B

aggression, and, if spotted during football season, should not be approached, as the most seemingly innocuous turn of events can set off a ferocious attack. One should especially never agree to attend a game with a Bootsniffer, or even to watch one on television, as on 50% of such occasions there will be an act of violence.
    The Exhauster is a breed of Bogan who has a lot in common with the Bootsniffer – in fact, the two subspecies’ herds often co-mingle with each other, and many of the Exhauster’s habits are also identifiable in the Bootsniffer. However, although these Bogans can also be found drinking and roaring at sporting events, and their emotional state is likewise fragile and entirely dependent on external events, there is a crucial difference between the two, in that the Exhauster’s passions are directed more towards machinery than athletic endeavour.
    Although they, too, will gather on occasion to collectively urge cars to crash, the Exhauster is on the whole a less pack-oriented variety of Bogan, spending much of his time alone or in smaller groups, engaging in long and intense discussions on the merits of different vehicles and occasionally sliding underneath them. The purpose of these actions is unclear, although it seems to have something to do with making the vehicles go faster, or, in many cases, at all. Indeed, one of the Exhauster’s more curious habits lies in his nesting behaviour: he will bring back to his home numerous cars and pieces of cars and scatter them around the house and yard, where they will sit, forming a sort of large avant-garde sculpture, until the day when, by pure chance, the Exhauster finds a way to make them operational, or else he moves away and the new occupants are forced to pay someone to remove them.
    One of the truly unique features of the Exhauster as compared to other Bogans is a cultural quirk which leads them to fervently believe that one major multinational automotive corporation is inherently superior to another. Opinion is divided regarding how this got started, although recently discovered documents dating from the seventeenth century have been suggested by some to be evidence of early Exhauster culture, in which an anonymous author declares the East India Company to be ‘poofters’.  Certainly, the eternal struggle between the cults of Ford and Holden provide a focal point around which the social and family lives of Exhausters revolve, without which their community might well fragment and collapse, or start following Ferraris or something.
    The Exhauster is also notable for his unusual mating dance, which involves parading himself in front of female Bogans to demonstrate how ineffective his muffler is. Some Boganologists have speculated that Exhausters, unique among Bogans, actually prefer to mate
with
their cars, and much time and expense has been devoted to persuading a Bogan and a car to mate in captivity. One research group in Adelaide recently claimed success, but has yet to publicly release evidence of the alleged offspring, what they are calling a ‘Bocar’, which has been described in informal reports as a large, slow-moving, and infertile mammal, with the head and mullet of a Bogan, but the torso of a Ford Fiesta.
    A subspecies of the Exhauster is the Bi-Tyre Exhauster, or Wheelie. These Exhausters travel on two-wheeled rather than four-wheeled vehicles, and dwell in large social groupings. Notable for their long, luxuriant coats and hard outer shells, the Wheelie is fiercely protective of his territory and will fight ferociously if anyone tries to encroach upon it, or steal his pill press. Exhausters are sometimes pilloried for their aggressive nature and pornographic magazines, but are widely acknowledged to have the coolest soundtrack of all Bogans.
    Closely related to both the Bootsniffer and the Exhauster, to the point where they can be indistinguishable to the untrained eye, is the Guzzler . The difficulty in distinguishing the Guzzler from