An Ocker is an Australian working tradesman ('bricky', 'sparkie', builder, and so on) usually dressed in 'flannos' (flanelette shirts), 'wife beaters' (blue singlets), Stubbies (shorts) and old boots.

Ockers and 'Bogans' are close but not the same. Bogans tend to not to work and wear an outdated Hawaiian T-shirt, thongs with socks or just thongs, or they wear ugg boots outside in warm weather. Ockers and Bogans appear, on the surface, to be slow-witted.

Australians don't really use the term 'Ocker' or 'Bogan' anymore due to Australia becoming Americanised and slowly forgetting what it means to be Australian.

An Ocker is certainly an Australian, but one of a particular type: a rough and uncultivated working man. Think of the Australian characters in the Crocodile Dundee films, especially the Paul Hogan one, all stereotypical Ockers. An Ocker can be boorish and aggressive, blinkered, but often strongly nationalistic in speech and outlook; the impression is that their tolerance and good humour are as common.

The archetypal Ocker may be pictured in shearer’s singlet, shorts and thongs, leaning against a bar, sinking large quantities of beer. He will certainly be speaking in a characteristically slurred Australian accent using a considerable amount of slang, a lingo parodied as Strine, from an Ocker way of saying Australian. (The word Strine, incidentally, was invented by Alistair Morrison in 1964. He used it the following year in the title of his book, Let Stalk Strine, under the pseudonym of Afferbeck Lauder, whose name needs to be said with a Strine accent to fully savour its flavour.)

The original Ocker was a character of that name played by the Australian comedian, actor and writer Ron Frazer, in a late-night satirical television series The Mavis Bramston Show aired between 1965 and 1968. However, the peak in popularity of Ockerism seems to have been a little later, during the period of the Labor government of Gough Whitlam (1972-75).

The name is a variant on Oscar. It’s actually much older than the television programme, since anyone in Australia with the first names of Harold or Oscar might in earlier times have been nicknamed Ocker, for no very obvious reason (in the 1920s, a cartoon called Ginger Meggs included a character called Ocker Stevens, so anyone with the surname Stevens was also likely to be called Ocker).

It’s now rather out of fashion, since Australians have shrugged off the “cultural cringe” of earlier days and now prefer to think of themselves as more sophisticated than Paul Hogan’s characters.