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ROLLING COLUMN
In through the out door: writing three new chapters for Gangland
Mark Davis
TWO YEARS AGO I had a lot fewer enemies than I do now. I worked
as a graphic designer and PhD student, as a number of reviewers
of my first book, Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New
Generationalism , published around then, were careful to remind
me. I had crept into public life 'sideways', 'crab-like', one
commented. I was a tradesman who walked in the front door.
Assumptions about the often class-bound structure of public life
were among the things I wanted to question in Gangland. But I
didn't expect to turn myself into a case study. And now I had
enemies. People glared at me across rooms at book launches.
People walked up to me at literary festivals with their arms
folded and simply stood there, nose two inches from mine. One
well-known columnist, I was reliably assured, would never speak
to me, or of me, or invite me to the regular forum over which he
presided, simply because I criticised his work in the book.
About six months after the book was published I sent a supportive
e-mail to a critic of Gangland whom I agreed with on another
issue, and received no reply except for a baleful glare the next
time we crossed paths in public. Is he so sensitive to criticism,
I wondered, that he dare not even acknowledge one who disagrees
with some, but not all, of what he says? My lesson? Never
underestimate the vanity of those who think they have even a
small slice of the public's attention.
It wasn't so much the front door I walked through, as the entrance to the municipal day-care centre and sand-pit.
Yet Gangland is a comparatively mild-mannered book. True, it criticises without apology the often dated assumptions that underpin much of Australian public life, and the work of members of those coteries that have been most influential since the 1970s, or whose work typifies what I take to be some of the major problems. Yes, it looks hard at the unthinking importation of agendas from the US culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s with their reliance on clicheacute;s about so-called 'political correctness', their prejudicial treatment of post-liberal intellectual ideas, and their tedious damnation of popular and contemporary cultures, especially youth culture and young people themselves, and treats this syndrome with the querulous disdain I think it deserves.
But there's no name calling or vindictive personal attacks. There's no questioning of people's right to an opinion or their position. There's no spite, no malice and no abuse. Despite all the hoopla no one came forward with any real evidence they'd been misrepresented.
Spite, malice, personal abuse and attempts to discredit me took up a lot of space in the reaction to Gangland. Though only a small proportion of commentary was negative, it took up the most prominent real estate. All three major broadsheet reviews of the book, for instance, were by people whose work is criticised in the book. It showed.
Now all this, you might think, might be stuff for a second edition of Gangland. And you'd be right. But you'll be disappointed if you expect to find bitter and bloody paybacks for any of the above.
Instead, I wanted to add to the first edition for quite another reason.
I noticed as I was doing the media for the first edition of Gangland -- over sixty interviews in the end -- that almost no one wanted to talk about the issues that I regarded as the ethical heart of the book. Amidst all the coverage the book received, only one solitary interviewer mentioned ethnicity or race. This despite the fact that understanding how race has been used as a political tool is central to understanding the cultural controversies of the past decade, and central to the book's argument about the transitions that have taken place in Australian society since the 'cultural establishment' of the 1970s gained their ascendancy.
Instead most interviewers and commentators wanted to talk about baby-boomers or postured about how the book supposedly privileged and essentialised young white university students. Yet more space in the book is devoted to Aborigines, especially Aboriginal youth, than to baby-boomers or university students. As even a quick glance at the index shows, there is much more in the book on 'political correctness' or 'feminism' -- both topics pertaining to the book's main argument about ideological transitions -- than on baby-boomers -- a term the book eventually argues is at best of marginal demographic usefulness.
As the media for the book went on I increasingly tried to raise Aboriginal youth as a conversation topic. A context wasn't difficult to find. The passing of the Western Australian Crime (Serious and Repeat Offenders) Sentencing Act (1992) -- which effectively targets young Aboriginal men -- amidst a community panic orchestrated by talkback radio was an important impetus for my wanting to write the book. In successive interviews I tried to emphasise how central the category of race is to much contemporary cultural controversy. But to no avail. Only that one commentator was interested in the issue.
Soon I began to get some sort of inkling of how it might feel to be an Aborigine in this country, at least when it comes to noticing how general cultural debate tends to comprise white people talking about white issues ('baby-boomers' and 'Gen X', as I point out in the book, could hardly be more white middle-class topics for journalism), while indigenous issues are sequestered off, subject to what Marcia Langton describes as a kind of unspoken apartheid, where they are discussed in their own right, but not in the context of the wider polity or wider issues.