The Bondi Hipsters are a couple of Sydney guys, Dom and Adrian, who by day are really concerned that the 15-seed loaf at the organic shop is gluten-free, but by night rack up lines of coke. They are fictional characters but if you live in Bondi, the clips on YouTube, and now in the ABC series Soulmates, feel almost too real to be a proper parody.
After all, it’s not unusual to see some really buff looking person in your yoga class complain while in downward facing dog that their sweat stinks because they’re coming down off ecstasy.
The show is written by Conor and Christiaan Van Vuuren, and stars Christiaan and Nicholas Boshier. This second series follows the story of two friends who are continually drawn together as a couple of buddies hanging out over the course of human history.
This season there are characters building tombs in ancient Egypt – as well as old favourites from the first series; the pretentious Bondi Hipsters, cavemen in prehistoric times, and two hapless New Zealand secret agents on assignment in Australia in 1981.
Christiaan Van Vuuren says it’s a difficult show to categorise but if pressed to describe it he says it’s: “Flight of the Conchords meets Adult Swim meets Black Adder – there’s some familiarity. It’s two buddies trying to purchase a goal that they’ll never reach.”
Boshier says: “They are two people who are bad for each other but totally need each other.”
Boshier and the Van Vuuren brothers are producing some of the most astute and intelligent comedy in Australia right now. Soul Mates is rife with social observation and a keen sense of the ridiculous. In this season, Dom and Adrian open a café that is so cool that it’s always closed and you have to be in the know, to know that closed actually means open.
I meet Boshier, 35, and Christiaan Van Vuuren, 34, at a quintessential Bondi cafe, Porch and Parlour. Their “green brekky bowl” is an Instagram favourite among people who use the “#cleaneating” hashtag.
Van Vuuren and Boshier look like the hipsters but different – certainly more “normcore” than their characters’ special t-shirt range, the Double V, two “v” collars cut into a shirt, would suggest.
“Your eyes are amazing!” Van Vuuren tells me immediately, possibly or possibly not in character.
“Oh wow. So many great colours – amber and … ” says Boshier, leaning closer with something approaching awe.
“Green – and ringed with ….something – what is it?” asks Van Vuuren.
“Wow – yeah really great. I love your eyes!”
We get a table and order. I get a plate of $20 mushrooms. Boshier gets some sort of gigantic roasted root vegetable and a piccolo. Van Vuuren gets a beer from one of the more obscure Brooklyn boroughs and a kombucha (weird fermented Chinese drink). I get a green juice and a glass of wine.
“Hey man,” Van Vuuren is talking to the waiter. “Your eyes are so great.”
“Yeah, they’re amazing,” says Boshier.
The waiter is flattered. “Oh thanks man, one is slightly different from the other – chromosome thing, mum and dad”
“Omg – that’s so great.”
“Yeah, they are beautiful man.”
The waiter is still talking about his chromosomes. Boshier and Van Vuuren are gazing at him adoringly.
TB to TV
The story of the Bondi Hipsters began when Van Vuuren had become seriously ill in South America with TB and returned to Australia. His weight had dropped so low “all my friends were calling me the Machinist because I was like Christian Bale. Skin on bone.” He spent six months in quarantine.
“I was taking a lot of drugs and the environment was pretty bleak but my results started vastly improving when I accepted I was sick and owned it. At my low point – I was just looking down the corridor at all these sick people and I was thinking: ‘I’m not in the right place’ and one day I looked at myself in the mirror – pale with long hair, dark eyes and a Jesus beard and and I thought, ‘no, I was a patient and I was sick.’
“Because I sat in a hospital room for six months in the CBD – my window looked out at the city and I was watching people going to and from their work – looking depressed, fucking hating their lives. From my cynical view point I thought – you know – I don’t really love my job [in advertising]. I’m just walking around and holy shit, I’m 27 years old – how much time have I spent working doing stuff I don’t enjoy?”
The six months “literally reset my whole life”.
In quarantine he and his brother made videos under the moniker Fully Sick Rapper, that went viral. Out of quarantine Boshier and Van Vuuren metat a YouTube conference in 2011 after each had been working on his own web series. Boshier, a former music manager had been trying to make it as an actor in LA, living on $1.50 a day and surviving off bags of peanuts from the nearby Mexican grocer. With Connor Van Vuuren they created the characters Dom and Adrian.
Even though the team have created new and interesting characters for the ABC series, the hipsters endure – kinda like hipsterdom itself. Boshier says, “The reason why they endure is their central thing revolves around being cool and trying to stay cool and now. And anytime a thing is a thing or before a thing is a thing, we can weave that into their story.”
The Van Vuurens and Boshier pick up storylines just by being attuned to what’s going on around them, and what they’re seeing in the Facebook news feeds.
Says Van Vuuren: “In this season we involve Vipassana in the story and to me it’s one of those things where you have one friend who says: ‘I did Vipassana, it’s a silent mediation retreat’. And then you have more and more friends doing it. And then you think it’s funny people go away for 10 days for silence and self reflection and then not shut the fuck up about it.”
The waiter with the “beautiful eyes” comes over.
“I’m still going on my beer, my juice is sick, the food is beautiful,” says Van Vuuren.
“I’ll get a double piccolo this time – scale it up a bit,” says Boshier. He hasn’t been sleeping because he has a crying baby in the upstairs flat.
The pair live around the Bondi beach area and say that the show wouldn’t have had the same impact if the brand of Bondi wasn’t attached to the project.
“When we first started creating the show, it was just called Hipsters,” says Van Vuuren. “I went to a conference and met one of the guys from Bondi Rescue – and he said as soon as he attached Bondi as a location to it – it just gave it wind and legs and got it into other markets.”
Could it have been the Manly Hipsters?
“There’s something that’s a tad obnoxious about Bondi,” says Boshier. “You either live here and know the obnoxiousness or you don’t live here and it’s like: ‘Eugh – Bondi.’ People are so beautiful here.”
Van Vuuren interrupts “ … and sad. There is a sense of sadness here … it’s no easier to like yourself when you have an epic rig – your rig does not make you any more satisfied. If anything most people you meet who are extremely beautiful are really insecure. There is also literal pressure to be hot because of social media. Look at those beautiful yoga girls running Instagram pages – even the pressure of taking three photos a day holding fucking body butter is enough to cave.”
There is a lot to satirise in this small corner of Sydney.
“Everyone has to do seven side projects,” says Van Vuuren. “When everyone else at the bar or café is saying: ‘I’m so fucking busy and I’m starting my own green juice company and we’re selling out shirts at the market and I have a coffee van and I’m starting a music festival.’ It makes you think you should be busier. It’s this fabricated urgency.”
But Van Vuuren and Boshier have made it according to the very value system they satirise. They have a second series of a successful TV show, they do commercial work – but ironically without selling out, they are busy, and due to the crying baby, Boshier is on his yoga matt most days by 6am.
They are killing it, the Bondi way.
Soul Mates II airs Wednesday night on ABC2 at 9:30pm. Episodes also available on iView
