ABSTRACT
In Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, Mark Davis offers a devastating analysis of the shrinking arena of public culture and political debate in contemporary Australia, an arena he sees as monopolised by a post-war generation with its hands firmly on the wheel of public opinion-making, and wielding its influence to keep a younger generation out of the cultural mainstream. Davis describes the ways in which this generation maintains its ascendancy in creating and brokering ideas, installing its own ‘summer of love’ values as the moral high ground, unwilling ‘to admit that ideas can no longer pretend to cut across all times and places’, 1 and lashing out at youth culture. Turning his attention to a raft of recent controversies, from the vilification of the young women complainants in the Ormond College sexual harassment case, to the pillorying of the Paxtons on the television news-magazine A Current Affair, Davis claims that ‘it is in the highly public arena of the arts and the media that the backlash against youth culture is given its most vicious spin’. 2
