Serious question: what did we do before the Internet? How did average Joes and Josephines get their 15 minutes of fame without the rapid-fire spread of content that’s become second nature?

It’s a puzzle to be solved another time. Right now, we’re turning our attention to the Australian viral stars of yesteryear and what they’re up to in 2018. Their online fame is modest by 2018 standards, but their shticks had serious sticking power in the early days of internet virality.

We don’t know what this says about the culture of celebrity, but we do love the Internet, so here’s a quick refresher on three early 2000s Aussie heroes: gone (somewhere), but not forgotten.

#1 The Party Animal: Corey Worthington

Type the letters “C-O-R-E” into Google and you’ll quickly be hit with “Corey Worthington” as the primary suggested search.

The reason this particular query ranks so highly is because we’ve all wondered what this party-hungry, shirtless, yellow glasses-loving little turd has been up to at one point or another. Does he still have those sunnies and that attitude? Has he finally taken “a good hard look” at himself, as per A Current Affair host Leila McKinnon’s mid-naughties request?

For the uninitiated (who are you and what the hell were you doing in 2008 when this all went down?), Corey Worthington became famous overnight for throwing a completely bonkers house party for around 500 of his closest mates while his parents were out of town. Police, Corey’s neighbours, and A Current Affair’s audience were not amused.

Where is he now? Where do we begin.

He’s an actual unit of a man these days, and he’s putting it to good use: he competed in season two of a little Channel 9 TV show called Ninja Warrior. He didn’t win.

He has (and presumably runs) a Corey Worthington dedicated Facebook page (facebook.com/partyboy2008, for reference), on which he’s classified as a “public figure”. The page has more than 10K likes, all of whom are there for his very on-brand pre-Ninja Warrior shirtless selfies. He hasn’t posted since July 17 this year, but hang in there.

He’s married now, apparently to the woman of his dreams – and it looks like he took his glasses off for the ceremony. Congrats, Corey, we guess!

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#2 The “Chk Chk Boom” Girl: Clare Werbeloff

2009 was a much simpler time: The Prime Minister at the time (cheers, Kevin07) hadn’t yet been ousted by Julia Gillard, heaps of Australians received $1000 in spending money from the government in a bid to outrun that whole GFC dealy, and people actually still went to Kings Cross to party on the weekend – including Clare Werbeloff, one of the first Australian women to be memed.

Werbeloff skyrocketed to internet fame after a TV news crew stopped her for an on-camera interview about a shooting outside a Darlinghurst strip club. The story she told was completely made up (lol), but that didn’t stop “chk chk boom” from exploding into the zeitgeist as a flimsy, throw-away catchphrase for a still relatively young Internet audience. Werbeloff and the phrase she spawned popped up everywhere: on merch, in dumb Youtube remixes, and even in parliament, when Anthony Albanese compared Malcolm Turnbull’s level of fame to hers.

And now? Short of a somewhat dubious cover shoot for the final issue ever of lad’s magazine Ralph in 2010, Werbeloff seems to have fallen from Internet meme-dom into relative obscurity. Perhaps it’s for the best.

Still, though, she may go down in history as one of the great pop culture figures of Sydney’s pre-lockout days. All hail Clare Werbeloff.

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#3 The Big Brother Has-Beens: The Logan Twins

Real talk: does anyone actually know who the Logan Twins are? Like, what do they look like? Why were they famous? They’re not Blair McDonough (who’s really just a remix of Shannon Knoll) or Sara Marie Fedel, so what’s all the fuss about? Anyone else on board the HMS Clueless?

And they’re famous because, yes, they actually did win Big Brother in the show’s fifth season (2005). The identical twins entered the house under the guise of being one person named Logan, the twins’ shared middle name. They’d regularly swap places, triggering mass confusion amongst the other housemates, but when there’s $1m up for grabs, is anyone there to make friends?

Since taking out the winning spot and splitting the cash straight down the middle, David and Greg Mathew have done the dad thing. Greg is a legit multi-millionaire/pub mogul in Newcastle and has an account on IMDb (titles include nothing you’ve ever heard of). From what we can gather, David is in the mining business, and works out of Queensland. Nothing suss.

We can’t find either of them (or their formerly ripped bods) on Instagram. Shame, really.

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(Lead images: A Current Affair / Channel Ten /

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