Gangland is Mark Davis’s sharp attack on what he saw as a self-protective clique of Australian cultural elites. He essentially stood up and called it a mutual-admiration cartel.

Davis argues that a particular literary and media establishment — largely centred around the baby-boomer generation — had turned cultural authority into a closed loop. Critics praised each other, institutions reinforced the same voices, and dissenting perspectives were dismissed before they could properly enter the conversation.

Through media analysis, literary feuds, and cultural case studies, Davis examines how generational identity became a weapon in these battles. The book is part polemic, part cultural sociology, dissecting the alliances, resentments, and gatekeeping mechanisms that shape who gets heard in public life.

More than a snapshot of 1990s literary politics, Gangland reads today as an early map of a familiar terrain: cultural industries that quietly function like networks of patronage.