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“Security, will you let me in your pub?” pleads Amy Taylor in the opening lines of the song Security. “I’m not looking for trouble, I’m looking for love.” The request is made in her signature Aussie drawl, something that musicians attempting to break into the international market would attempt to disguise in decades previous. Yet for the Amyl and the Sniffers frontwoman, everything from her peroxide mullet to proudly “bogan” background has become an important hallmark.
And she’s not the only one. Although Taylor is singular in her tendency to chuck a squat in promotional art or declare that “the dole’s going up and every pub gets a million dollars” in Aria acceptance speeches, she’s just one of a wave of Australian pop cultural figures helping to reclaim the sheila archetype. Think world champion surfer Molly Picklum, the queen of stoke, who drops f-bombs as frequently as she drops into the gnarliest waves on the planet. Or groundbreaking Indigenous rapper Barkaa, whose line “I ain’t cryin’ over budoo unless that budoo makes me money” from King Brown is now shouted like a battle cry at her sold-out shows.
Sheila was once a derogatory term that was popularised in the 70s and 80s as a way to describe the female equivalent of a male bogan, but Melanie Milne, a tattoo artist, says the meaning of the term is changing.
“I think a while ago if someone called you a sheila it would have been derogatory. Whereas now, it’s more of a badge of honour and a fuck you to the patriarchy. It’s a new wave of bogan feminism. Like, yes, we are sheilas actually.”
Success in stereotypically male-dominated fields like tattooing is a defining trait of the modern sheila. They frequent the pub, wear denim, prefer ciggies over vapes, can banter about sport with the best of ‘em and most likely play in one of their local leagues, they’re political and politically active, unabashedly feminist, fit rather than thin, and likely listen to the music of Wet Leg, Panic Shack, Miss Kaninna, Camp Cope, Lambrini Girls and Barkaa.
They made the mullet cool again and became aspirational enough that Miley Cyrus tried the sheila persona on for an album cycle with her Plastic Hearts era. They’re athletes like 18-year-old Milla Coco Brown, who can trade professional skateboarding for professional surfing with a toss of her hair and become a viral sensation for answering a journalist’s question about how long she has been surfing: “straight outta the fucking womb, mate”. Most recently, her cover of surfing bible Tracks magazine – where she flips the bird at the camera while decked out in a Roxy shirt – reportedly prompted a school librarian to take it off the shelves.
Then there’s Margot Robbie, probably the shiniest example of a sheila done good. On the one hand, she’s a three-time Academy Award nominee and genuine Hollywood mogul. On the other, she’s happy giving homemade tattoos to her girlfriends and describes “bogan nachos” as one of her favourite foods growing up, reaffirming the mantra that you can take the girl out of the Gold Coast, but you can’t take the Gold Coast out of the girl.
She was pivotal in making the mullet cool again thanks her portrayal of the ultimate pop cultural sheila Harley Quinn: probably better known as the Joker’s girlfriend from DC Comics until 2020’s Birds Of Prey, which saw her shaking off a toxic relationship and teaming up with a rag-tag group of other sheilas.
Speaking ahead of a Birds Of Prey anniversary screening in Brisbane, director Cathy Yan says Harley’s look was not fully appreciated at the time.
“What we were doing was so dramatically different … every choice was like ‘oh – you’re going to put Harley in a mullet? What a weird haircut,’” she says.
“It has been really nice to see that our gut feelings about the types of stories and representation and even aesthetics that we were drawn to personally would have other people still connecting to it years later.”
The sheila resurgence is not going away anytime soon if events like Sheilas Shakedown are anything to go by. The annual motorcycle rally for women and gender-diverse riders, which Milne attends, began with about 30 attenders in its first year, ballooning out to thousands travelling from all across Australia to celebrate its 10th anniversary in February of this year.
Milne says one of the keys to its success is its overlap with the queer community – many who embrace the sheila archetype – as “it gives them a safe space to be in spaces that haven’t been historically safe for them”. It’s a similar ethos to Dykes On Bikes, the international lesbian motorcycle club that began in the 70s but rose to prominence in the 80s by leading the Mardi Gras Parade in Sydney.
With reclamation rather than designation, the trend is pushing more mainstream than ever with meet-ups like Sheilas Shakedown a micro example of the macro revival. Once embedded in an era of stale Australiana that revelled in its isms (racism, sexism, ableism), the modern sheila now includes everyone willing to embrace a tattered pair of denim cutoffs and celebrates the differences rather than trying to compress them into a palatable form of femininity.
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Maria Lewis is an award-winning filmmaker, pop culture etymologist and best-selling author of 11 novels including titles for Marvel and Assassin’s Creed
