gangland cultural elites and the new generation MARK DAVIS

REMEMBER THIS? IT CAME OUT IN 1997. 

gangland  cultural elites and the new generationalism  by mark davis  Allen and Unwin rrp $16.95

This is an important book. davis opens and closes with a mustering of facts which unequivocally demonstrate the socio/economic disadvantage visited on youth by a succession of our governments.

'Youth' in davis' terms is those aged from seventeen to early thirties. Australians in this category face not only huge current unemployment but a non-future in the way it is being figured by present governments and cultural shapers. Youth are excluded from cultural organs such as the intellectually pretentious broadsheet newspapers by the hegemony of overwhelmingly anglo, post Whitlam, conservative and neo conservative males. First generation feminists are co-opted by this press to support this male hegemony and to exclude all who threaten it, including youth. davis sides with those neo feminists who attacked Helen Garner's The First Stone, brilliantly characterising what he claims are Garner's modus operandi and repeatedly accusing her of being 'disingenuous' in her approach. He does not look closely at her text in support of this claim.

davis seems to me not good on the particular, he is however a dead shot when there's a big distance between him and his subject. His book rests on a series of generalisations which are alarmingly valid but which fail to do justice to the variety and complexity of the contemporary Australian reality. He tends to muster his evidence from the home paddock, relying on a really quite narrow range of sources with which to damn us Baby Boomers.

Christos Tsiolkas’ (evidently a friend) novel Loaded  must stand for much of grunge fiction in this very Melbourne University-oriented book (davis makes nothing of Loaded as a queer text). davis fails to give any sense of the the realities of oppression in his rather tokenistic references to queer.

There is too much of this kind of narrow sampling in gangland. Its style lurches too often into a dead demotic to convince that its author has real sympathy with the post modern world and davis is finally at such pains to cover over any sense of commitment to anything that his strength - polemic thrust - is vitiated.

Ian MacNeill