Gangland: The Revised Edition: Cultural elites and the new generationalism

by Mark Davis

Panics over the culture wars, political correctness and victim feminism, rap music, ecstasy and body piercings...our cultural landscape is currently peppered with examples of a desperately backward-looking stasis and a fearful hanging-on.

In Gangland Mark Davis analyses the dated ideals and assumptions of Australia's cultural establishment, and their near monopoly on cultural debate. Who are these people? What do they do? How is their influence affecting public forums and the media? Where does that leave the young people of today?

Davis's irreverent prose cuts across the moral panics and anxieties that characterise Australian culture to detect a deep-seated fear of change - a fear that is often expressed as hostility towards youth. Gangland names names and maps networks, laying bare the discrepancies between reality and the images peddled by some of Australia's most popular thinkers, questioning the ideas that have characterised Australia in the nineties.

'Deserves to become a manifesto for a disenfranchised generation' Australian Financial Review

'Finally somebody on the side of late teens and twentysomethings in Australia...[a] brilliant argument of a book' Adrian Smart, Cream

'Gangland has sparked a valuable debate, one which I've been looking forward to for years' Kathy Bail, Australian Book Review

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia, Politics

398 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Mark Davis was born in Geelong, Victoria. He has worked as a graphic designer in publishing and in 1995 he won ABPA book design awards for Real Gorgeous and The Art Of Tassel Making.

Reviews

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hugely entertaining read, with Davis laying into the old guard of Australian cultural and political commentators (both left and right). The argument peters out a bit towards the end, but not before some wonderful take downs of boomer/liberal worldviews. I particularly enjoyed the rehashing of the controversy surrounding The First Stone: Some Questions of Sex and Power, a book that would have derailed the career of anyone less well entrenched in the literary power structures of the time. The forensic illustration of the way that the boomer cliques reviewed each other's work and defend each other's reputations was striking as well. It's so refreshing to read something like this that doesn't pull its punches and names names. I'm not sure how its publication affected Davis' career prospects, but it was massively enjoyable to read.

It's all dated a bit after 20 years: the university as a key site of cultural debate feels much less relevant in 2017 than it seemed to in 1997 and the internet has obviously opened up such an array of spaces that the hegemonic place of the broadsheet/serious media has been massively weakened. If anything I think the cultural conversation is so much more fragmented these days, which makes it hard to sustain the kind of arguments that Davis makes here about cultural space, although I think the political situation remains strikingly similar.

[Romany · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a strange time to be reading this book. Mark Davis wrote this in 1997, just a little while before I attended Melbourne Uni (a setting which crops up frequently in his text). I was naive and oblivious to any and all of the wars mentioned in the book, and am only now beginning to open my eyes - but I still don't know enough to understand. To me, newspapers and television are dead. My news sources are all online. Blogs, Facebook, the grapevine. So this book seems like a text from a million years ago. And yet, the authors he speaks of, who were seen as the cultural gatekeepers at the time (Garner, Dessaix, Moorhouse) are still the being discussed today, 20 years on. Christos Tsiolkas made good though. I had to re-read Loaded to remind myself why he was so controversial. This book is definitely about cultural elitism, but its central concern probably isn't as linked to generationism as the author thought at the time (and parts of the text showed the author didn't really think so either). Are Arts faculties still hotbeds of "dissent"? Has Neo-liberalism changed this? When university staff are discouraged from being political (e.g. getting in trouble for putting up "Let Them Stay" posters, and having to include Twitter disclaimers) I don't know that it's the same, that's for sure. And, are youth more or less political than in the late 90s? Has the Internet changed anything? Time for the author to do an update!

[Bridget Weller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite old now, but the same gang is still clinging desperately to Australia's cultural capital

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is way outside my usual field of reading and I found it hard to engage. The fact that the same three examples were trotted out on every page made it feel repetitive and under researched.