Subcultural Flows
“In St Helens Town, where the breezes clap
there spands a bond and noble tap”
“Oh tap how we’ll always remember
your steady flow in unseasonably warm September”
“So long as legs can trek, our throats must wet
so long lives this tap, we have life in us yet”
In the Tasmanian town of St Helens, a mundane tap, blessed with no particular quality, has amassed a collection of Google reviews expressing the people’s appreciation — the people being a random assortment of backpackers passing through the area.
Many relate to the experience of waking up at night: stumbling to the bathroom to drink water straight from the tap and groaning loudly enough for our flatmates to be party to our inconvenience. For most of us, this is the extent of our appreciation of water in our everyday lives. For those on the road through St Helens, however, water taps are rhapsodised about, compared to famous love sonnets, their praise worth the expenditure of precious vacation time. The idea of expressing gratitude for natural resources is woven through the values of outdoor subcultures and in a digital age is shared online.
When I think of subculture, I picture punk — piercings, mowhawks, Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious — a far cry from a crusty hiker with a ziplock bag full of sandwiches scrawling poems on Giigle reviews in 2025. Today, subculture is a contested idea. In the eyes of Mirielle Silcoff, writing for the New York Times in 2024,
“Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics around which would so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed. What teenagers are offered today is a hyperactive landscape of so called aesthetics… These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum.”
Like an embossed page worn beyond meaning by the repetition of touch, the meaning of subculture has been lost to the internet’s frenzy.
Through this perspective, the poems on the review page of a tap on Google Maps are probably nonsensical brain rot. But squatting on the tarmac next to The Tap, I want to believe something else: that thriving on creativity, outdoor subcultures have found a haven from consumerism in niche crevices of the internet. If we return to punk, we see that it emerged in the throes of the 1970s English recession, but is also linked to a very real, environmental fear of a landscape of smoke and scorched machinery. Here in Australia, where the land is still scarred from the 2019 fires, is it not possible that the growing popularity of outdoor subcultures, or even a tap, is a wish to embrace a more nurturing connection between people and the environment?
Subcultures were first studied in Chicago in the 1920s in relation to gangs. In 1936, a leading scholar in the Chicago School of Sociology, Robert Parks, proposed that a city operates like an ecosystem with ‘clusters’ of people gathering in different zones. Through comparing teenagers to buffalo, Parks delivered a gem of wisdom — that youth subcultures are more than sites of criminality, they are active responses to inequality. Although later studies continued to shift the focus away from delinquency, subcultures remained characterised by their political and social deviance from mainstream culture. It is hard to buy into the narrative that the rise of social media means the death of subculture when subcultures are, by nature, sensitive and develop in response to the social conditions and concerns of the time.
In my eyes, subcultures are about creativity. When Green Day surprises audiences with a political lyric change, when a furry selects their fursona, when a bunch of hikers extol a water tap, each enacts an alternative reality. But Peter Murphy (2012) argues that phone screens have starved us of creativity, fluffing our brain spaces with kitsch communciation of superficial meanings.
As Browne (2014) summarises, the result is ‘the loss of that sense of irony imagination displays and the moral compass which derives from it.” Subcultures rely on the imagining and performance of utopian group identities. If Murphy’s argument holds, then, it is reasonable to believe that the entrails of subculture are splattered on the internet floor.
But the irony of the creative convergence of the technological world and the outdoor community defies this narrative. Leaving an intertextual poem on Google Maps, directly after a three day hike and nature detox, is an exercise in absurdism, sure, but also community. Social media carves out a space for communities to form through participation in abstract spaces beyond the realm of physical perception: through creativity.
Let’s pursue the example of outdoor subcultures. Mirielle Silcoff’s scathing criticism of TikTok subcultures tacked with the word ‘core’ would almost certainly extend to the rising popularity of outdoor subcultures and trending gorpcore aesthetics. Gorpcore, a name recalling an acronym for trusty hiking staples, Good Ol’ Fashioned Raising and Peanuts, is a fashion trend championing outdoor wear. Tracing the roots of gorpcore, we find Japanese fashion labels, functional urban clothing in 90s hip-hop, and outdoor subcultures like dirtbag. Dirtbag was born in the Yosemite National Park in the 1950s when a group of hikers deserted their conventional routine and established camp, scavenging food and living off the land much like the bushcrafters or survivalists of today.
Nowadays, trail runners, avid Strava users identify with the name and the ideas it embodies. As outdoor subcultures become more visible, it makes sense that they are more vulnerable to commercialisation. Writing about music in 2021, Jo Haynes and Raphaël Nowak describe how subcultures become a ‘currency tool’ which brands exploit for profit.
But does this appropriation of style mean that the original subcultures from which they are derived are lost? Does the rise of gorpcore have to also be the death of dirtbag?
I want to believe that the growing popularity of outdoor subcultures is not merely Gen Z’s submission to brand manipulation but a reflection of political conscience. The practices of outdoor communities defy the wasteful consumerism of the mainstream through principles of ‘leave no trace’, mindfulness of water use and environmental activism. Carrying your used tampons and empty chip packets is certainly a more frustrating and smelly effort, but it is working to reestablish the natural world as a primary responsibility.
Since the dawn of time, teens are scorned and misunderstood by their parents, people search the cavities of public spaces for free toilets and taps, the wheel turns. The prophets foretelling the death of subcultures are not as revolutionary as they may think. Their arguments mirror those seen in the past, wen people grieved the mainstream of punk even as the metalheads, rockabillies and goths flourished. In 1999, April Erickson argued that punk never abandoned our streets but instead moved into suburbs, responding to new issues rippling through the world with the same core values of authenticity and DIY mentality. In the same way, we can view the cyclical nature of subcultures as death and erasure or responsiveness and evolution.
“A hydrational dream from folklore lore”, Priscilla Toa describes The Tap. Trip lore, written on Google Maps, becoming tangible in laughter in a car. Subculture thrives on the creativity, the cultiness, randomness of it all. Circling back to the roots of its name, subculture, the outdoor community does not directly rebut its parent culture but appropriates it to give it new meanings.
Our thirst for subculture has not been quenched, but finds new pathways to flow, as liquid as ever.
Designed by Sophie Wishart