It’s Been Ten Long Years Since The Chk Chk Boom Girl First Went Viral

Ten years ago, in the hours after a shooting in Kings Cross, a young Australian named Clare Werbeloff decided to have a bit of fun.

Werbeloff, 19, spotted a host of media outlets crowding around the scene of a crime. Without having actually seen the shooting, an incident that left a young man named Justin Kallu in hospital, Werbeloff approached the Channel 9 camera crew and introduced herself as a witness.

Moments later, the camera trained on her, Werbeloff became one of Australia’s very first viral memes. “There were these two wogs fighting,” she told the cameras. “The fatter wog said to the skinnier wog: ‘Oi bro, you slept with my cousin.’ And the other one said: ‘Nah man, I didn’t for shit, eh’ and the other one goes: ‘I will call on my fully sick boys, eh.’ And then pulled out a gun and went ‘Chk Chk boom’.”

Within hours of the clip being aired, Werbeloff’s viral ascendency began. To the world, she was the Chk Chk Boom girl. Her catchphrase was printed on shirts; the clip circulated on YouTube and Facebook; and she even sat down for an exclusive interview with A Current Affair where she came clean and explained that she hadn’t actually seen the shooting.

The response wasn’t all positive. Many claimed that Werbeloff’s use of the word ‘wog’ indicated that she was racist, and a “hate page” was created to smear her on Facebook. Particularly unimpressed was Justin Kallu, the shooting victim himself. “I’m just a bit upset about the fact that I’ve been shot and that I almost lost my life and there’s this girl all over the news getting popular all because she has no brains,” Kallu explained in an email to News.com.au.

But the backlash wasn’t enough to slow Werbeloff’s quest for stardom. Almost immediately, the young woman began seeking ways to expand her platform. In a sit-down interview with Sunrise in which the hosts tried very hard to hide their smirks while recounting the story behind her “Chk Chk Boom” catchphrase, Werbeloff claimed to already be working on an album.

“I’m sitting down with some people in the next few weeks,” she said.

At the time, it did not seem impossible that she might be able to successfully pivot into a new career. After all, those were the early days of internet culture — articles reporting on Werbeloff’s success included brief paragraphs explaining what YouTube was for the uninitiated, and it hadn’t been drilled in quite how quickly those splashes of virality are over.

“I can’t walk out in the street without getting ‘Chk Chk Boom’,” Werbeloff told the Sunrise hosts, eyes wide.

Very soon, the attention began to dry up. But Werbeloff was determined to make something happen for herself. Within three years of the incident, she had appeared on the front cover of the very final issue of Ralph magazine, co-hosted a scam-centric reality show called The Real Hustle where she enlisted conmen to help her bamboozle shop assistants out of diamonds, and appeared in a Tropfest short film about a shark attack.

Nothing stuck. And before long, Werbeloff became another Australian first — Australia’s first ex-celebrity meme. She would not be the last.

These days, Werbeloff has largely retreated from the public eye; she maintains no public Instagram or Facebook pages. And we never did get that album. But still, her story is a neat encapsulation of a period in Australian history, where the idea of virality was still enticing; where there was a promise, however vague, that from fifteen minutes of fame, a whole lifetime of opportunity could be spawned.

She is, after all, one of many brief stars who emerged in the nascent era of virality, joining the ranks of Corey Worthington, and, a little later, the vicious baring dog man of A Current Affair — curious objects in the history of Australiana, doomed to rise briefly, and then fall.