Whatever you do, don’t tell an Australian that they were “born with a silver spoon” in their mouth — especially not after the actor Rebel Wilson won Australia’s biggest-ever defamation payment.

The charge against her? She had been accused of having an “upper middle-class” background, and of pretending that she had been brought up in a poor, rough community.

The result: The star of Pitch Perfect 2 and Bridesmaids will be paid $3.66 million (about A$4.56 million), reportedly four times the previous record for an Australian defamation case.

In other countries, saying someone came from a “good family” might be regarded as a compliment. Not, it seems, in Australia. At the heart of the court proceedings lay the term “bogan” — an Australian term, of uncertain derivation, meaning “an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status”.

The American term “trailer trash” may be an equivalent, except that “bogan” is so often used with defiant self-regard by the people it describes.

For instance: Rebel Wilson. She had painted her background as “bogan”, and early in her career had created a six-part television comedy called Bogan Pride, celebrating the world of the economically strained outer suburbs.

Enter Bauer Media, Australia’s biggest magazine publisher. Some of the company’s magazines appeared to gang up on Wilson, implying that she was a serial liar: Shock horror! She wasn’t as “bogan” as she made out. She had attended an upmarket, private school and came from an “upper middle-class” family.

The story was widely repeated by websites in the United States and elsewhere, with the result — according to Wilson — that she lost several Hollywood roles for which she was already a shoo-in, such as in Trolls and Kung Fu Panda 3.

The result was a uniquely Australian court case in which evidence was presented by Wilson’s mother that, yes, the family were bogans. “I accept I’m a bogan. I live, and teach, in the western suburbs of Sydney,” Wilson’s mother, Sue Bownds, told the Victorian Supreme Court.

Evidence was presented about the sleeping arrangements in the house — the future actor sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a small three-bedroom home, alongside her three other siblings.

To the extent that giving unusual names to one’s children may be a measure of bogan status, that, too, featured in the evidence.

Bownds explained that the names of Rebel and her sister, Liberty, had kept to a “theme of freedom” and independence, while another child was called Anarchy, with the whole family later deciding to change the spelling to Annachi. “[We thought] we could ‘boganise’ the name,” Wilson’s mother told the jury. “It wasn’t invented by Rebel.”

Wilson herself spent more than six days in the witness box, tearfully recounting how the articles had ruined her reputation: “They know I haven’t made up stories, they know I’m an authentic, candid person. That’s why I’m popular in America. I didn’t have to invent anything.”

In the end, a jury of six women accepted that Wilson had been defamed by being portrayed as a liar, while the judge was left to determine the appropriate damages. Justice John Dixon, unfortunately for the magazine publisher, accepted that the articles had cost Wilson some valuable Hollywood roles.

As he put it in his judgment: “Substantial vindication can only be achieved by an award of damages that underscores that Ms Wilson’s reputation as an actress of integrity was wrongly damaged in a manner that affected her marketability in a huge, worldwide marketplace, being the market for Hollywood films of the type in which Ms Wilson appeared.”

Wilson, for her part, said she would give the money away, tweeting from London: “I’m looking forward to helping out some great Australian charities and supporting the ‘Oz’ film industry with the damages I’ve received.”

Bauer Media is a relatively new player on the Australia media scene: in 2012, the German publisher bought a longstanding local company, Australian Consolidated Press.

Perhaps Australia’s complex relationship with social class is not quite understood in Hamburg.

After all, Australia’s European history began with the dumping of Britain’s convicts on the other side of the world. For a while that “convict stain” was a source of shame. In more recent times, the stain has turned into an ornament: there are even organisations for those who wish to celebrate having a First Fleet convict in the family tree.

We are proud that our wealthiest citizens talk with the same accent as our poorest. Even better are the First World War stories of our soldiers refusing to salute their British commanders, on the basis that “Jack is as good as his master”.

We celebrate this egalitarian country despite knowing, at some level, that the country is nowhere near as equal as we like to think.

In the German headquarters of Bauer Media, these subtleties of the Australian character may seem to defy understanding. Until now. There is nothing like a $3.66 million payout to concentrate the mind.

•Richard Glover is an Australian writer and broadcaster