Charles Manning Hope Clark, AC

Order of Australia

The Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...

 (3 March 1915 – 23 May 1991), an Australian historian, was the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987. He has been described as "Australia's most famous historian", but his work has been the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative

Conservatism

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...

 and classical liberal

Classical liberalism

Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets....

 academics and philosophers.

Early life

Clark was born in Sydney in 1915, the son of Rev Charles Clark, an English-born Anglican

Anglican Church of Australia

The Anglican Church of Australia is a member church of the Anglican Communion. It was previously officially known as the Church of England in Australia and Tasmania...

 priest from a working-class background (he was the son of a London carpenter), and Catherine Hope, who came from an old Australian establishment family. On his mother's side he was a descendant of Rev Samuel Marsden

Samuel Marsden

Samuel Marsden was an English born Anglican cleric and a prominent member of the Church Missionary Society, believed to have introduced Christianity to New Zealand...

, the "flogging parson" of early colonial New South Wales

New South Wales

New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...

. He had a difficult relationship with his mother, who never forgot her superior social origins, and came to identify her with the Protestant middle class he so vigorously attacked in his later work. His family moved to Melbourne when he was a child; and lived in what one biographer describes as "genteel poverty" on the modest income of an Anglican vicar.

Clark's happiest memories of his youth were of the years 1922–24, when his father was the vicar of Phillip Island, south-east of Melbourne, where he acquired the love of fishing and of cricket, which he retained for the rest of his life. He was educated at state schools at Cowes

Cowes, Victoria

Cowes is the main township on Phillip Island in the Gippsland region of Victoria, Australia. It is less than 2 hours drive from Melbourne and can also be reached by ferry from Stony Point on the Mornington Peninsula. Cowes is located on the northern side of Phillip Island and faces towards French...

 and Belgrave

Belgrave, Victoria

Belgrave is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 35 km east from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the Shire of Yarra Ranges. At the 2006 Census, Belgrave had a population of 4094...

, and then at Melbourne Grammar School

Melbourne Grammar School

Melbourne Grammar School is an independent, Anglican, day and boarding school predominantly for boys, located in South Yarra and Caulfield, suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia....

. Here, as an introspective boy from a modest background, he suffered from ridicule and bullying, and acquired a life-long dislike for the sons of the Melbourne upper class who had tormented him and others at this school. His later school years, however, were happier. He discovered a love of literature and the classics, and became an outstanding student of Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

, Latin and history (British and European). In 1933 he was equal dux of the school.

As a result, Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College

Trinity College (University of Melbourne)

Trinity College is the oldest college of the University of Melbourne. Founded in 1872 on a site granted to the Church of England, Trinity is unique among Australian university colleges in its diverse education programs...

 at Melbourne University. Here he thrived, gaining firsts in Ancient History and British History, and captaining the college cricket team. In his second year he gained firsts in Constitutional and Legal History and in Modern Political Institutions. One of his teachers, W. Macmahon Ball

William Macmahon Ball

William Macmahon Ball, AC was an Australian academic and diplomat. Educated at Caulfield Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, Ball studied both psychology and political science as a research fellow at Melbourne and the London School of...

, Australia's leading political scientist in this period, made a deep impression on him. By this time he had lost his Christian faith, but was not attracted to any of the secular alternatives on offer. His writings as a student explicitly rejected both socialism and communism. His favourite writers at this time were Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....

 and T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, and his favourite historian was the conservative Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...

.

In 1937 Clark won a scholarship to Balliol College

Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....

 at Oxford University, and left Australia in August 1938. Among his teachers at Oxford were Hugh Trevor-Roper (a conservative), Christopher Hill (at that time a communist) and A. J. P. Taylor

A. J. P. Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor, FBA was a British historian of the 20th century and renowned academic who became well known to millions through his popular television lectures.-Early life:...

 (a moderate socialist). He won acceptance by excelling at cricket – playing for the Oxford XI and competing alongside Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins

Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC was a British politician.The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in...

. He began a master of arts thesis on Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...

. At Oxford in the late 1930s he shared the left's horror of fascism – which he claimed (apparently falsely) to have seen firsthand during a visit to Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 in 1938 – and contempt for appeasement

Appeasement

The term appeasement is commonly understood to refer to a diplomatic policy aimed at avoiding war by making concessions to another power. Historian Paul Kennedy defines it as "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and...

, but was not attracted to the communism which was prevalent among undergraduates at the time. His exposure to Nazism in 1938 made him more pessimistic and sceptical about the state of European civilisation, however he was not attracted to the emancipatory process of socialism and favoured a capitalist, social democratic approach. At Oxford also he suffered the social snubs commonly experienced by "colonials" at that time, which was apparently the source of his life-long dislike of the English. In 1939 in Oxford he married Dymphna Lodewyckx

Dymphna Clark

Hilma Dymphna Clark, née Lodewyckx , was a language scholar and married to the historian Manning Clark.Born in Melbourne, Australia, and of Scandinavian and Dutch ancestry, Clark was educated at Mont Albert Central School and the Presbyterian Ladies' College in East Melbourne...

, the daughter of a Flemish intellectual and a formidable scholar in her own right, with whom he had six children.

Academic career

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Clark was exempted from military service on the grounds of his mild epilepsy

Epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...

. He supported himself while finishing his thesis by teaching history and coaching cricket teams at Blundell's School

Blundell's School

Blundell's School is a co-educational day and boarding independent school located in the town of Tiverton in the county of Devon, England. The school was founded in 1604 by the will of Peter Blundell, one of the richest men in England at the time, and relocated to its present location on the...

, a public school at Tiverton in Devon

Devon

Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...

shire, England. Here he discovered a gift for teaching. In June 1940 he suddenly decided to return to Australia, abandoning his unfinished thesis, but was unable to get a teaching position at an Australian university due to the wartime decline in enrolments. Instead he taught history at Geelong Grammar School

Geelong Grammar School

Geelong Grammar School is an independent, Anglican, co-educational, boarding and day school. The school's main campus is located at Corio, on the northern outskirts of Geelong, Victoria, Australia, overlooking Corio Bay and Limeburners Bay....

, and also coached the school's First XI – a highly prestigious appointment. Among those he taught were Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....

, Stephen Murray-Smith and Geoffrey Fairbairn. While at Geelong he began systematically to read Australian history, literature and criticism for the first time. The result was his first publication on an Australian theme, an open letter to the 19th century Australian writer "Tom Collins

Joseph Furphy

Joseph Furphy , is widely regarded as the "Father of the Australian novel". He mostly wrote under the pseudonym Tom Collins, and is best known for his novel Such is Life , regarded as an Australian classic.-Biography:Furphy was born at Yering Station in Yering, Victoria...

," on the subject of mateship

Mateship

Mateship is an Australian cultural idiom that embodies equality, loyalty and friendship. There are two types of mateship, the inclusive and the exclusive; the inclusive is in relation to a shared situation , whereas the exclusive type is toward a third party...

, which appeared in the literary magazine Meanjin

Meanjin

Meanjin is an Australian literary journal. The name - pronounced Mee-AN-jin - is derived from an Aboriginal word for the land where the city Brisbane is located.It was founded in December 1940, in Brisbane, by Clem Christesen...

.

In 1944 Clark returned to Melbourne University to finish his master's thesis, an essential requirement if he was to gain a university post. He supported himself by tutoring politics, and later in the year he was finally appointed to a lectureship in politics. The acting head of the Politics Department at this time was Ian Milner, who soon left to become an Australian diplomat. Years later it was revealed that Milner had been a secret communist and Soviet agent. Clark's brief friendship with Milner at this time has been seized on as evidence of Clark's supposed communist sympathies, but it is unlikely that Clark knew anything about Milner's covert activities. In late 1945 he transferred to the History Department, as a permanent lecturer in Australian History. With the encouragement of Professor Max Crawford

Max Crawford

Raymond Maxwell Crawford , was a leading Australian historian. He was Professor of History at the University of Melbourne from 1937 to 1970....

 (head of the History Department from 1937 to 1970), he taught the university's first full-year course in Australian history. Among his students were Frank Crean

Frank Crean

Frank Crean was a senior minister in the Australian Labor Party government of Gough Whitlam from 1972 to 1975, and was Deputy Prime Minister for the last six months of the government's term....

 (later Deputy Prime Minister) Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...

, Geoffrey Serle

Geoffrey Serle

Geoffrey Serle AO was an Australian historian, who is perhaps best known for his books on the colony of Victoria; The Golden Age and The Rush to be Rich and his biographies of John Monash, John Curtin and Robin Boyd....

, Ken Inglis

Ken Inglis

Kenneth Stanley Inglis is an Australian historian.Inglis completed his Master's degree at the University of Melbourne and his doctorate at the University of Oxford. In 1956 he was appointed as a lecturer to the University of Adelaide...

 and Ian Turner (all future historians of note), and Peter Ryan, later Clark's publisher. During this time he began thoroughly researching the archives in Melbourne and Sydney for the documentary evidence on Australia's early history. He also developed a reputation as a heavy drinker, and was a well-known figure in the pubs of nearby Carlton

Carlton, Victoria

Carlton is an inner city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2 km north from Melbourne's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Melbourne...

. (In the 1960s he gave up drink and was a total abstainer for the rest of his life.)

In 1948 Clark was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and was well set for a life-long career at Melbourne University. But as the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 set in he began to find the intellectual climate of Melbourne uncomfortable. In 1947 F.L. Edmunds, a Liberal

Liberal Party of Australia

The Liberal Party of Australia is an Australian political party.Founded a year after the 1943 federal election to replace the United Australia Party, the centre-right Liberal Party typically competes with the centre-left Australian Labor Party for political office...

 member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly

Victorian Legislative Assembly

The Victorian Legislative Assembly is the lower house of the Parliament of Victoria in Australia. Together with the Victorian Legislative Council, the upper house, it sits in Parliament House in the state capital, Melbourne.-History:...

, launched an attack on "Communist infiltration" of the University, naming Crawford (a largely apolitical liberal) and Jim Cairns

Jim Cairns

James Ford "J. F." Cairns , Australian politician, was prominent in the Labor movement through the 1960s and 1970s, and was briefly Deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam government...

, an economics lecturer and a left-wing Labor Party member. Clark was not named, but when he went on the radio to defend his colleagues, he was attacked as well. Thirty of Clark's students signed a letter affirming that he was a "learned and sincere teacher" of "irreproachable loyalty." The Melbourne University branch of the Communist Party

Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...

 said that Clark was "a reactionary" and no friend of theirs.

In July 1949, therefore Clark moved to Canberra to take up the post of Professor History at the Canberra University College

Canberra University College

Canberra University College was a tertiary education institution established in Canberra by the Australian government and the University of Melbourne in 1930...

 (CUC), which was at that time a branch of Melbourne University, and which in 1960 became the School of General Studies of the Australian National University

Australian National University

The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...

 (ANU). He lived in Canberra, then still a "bush capital" in an idyllic (if somewhat dusty) rural setting, for the rest of his life. From 1949 to 1972 Clark was Professor of History, first at CUC and then at ANU. In 1972 he was appointed to the new post of Professor of Australian History, which he held until his retirement in 1974. He then held the title Emeritus Professor until his death.

During the 1950s Clark pursued a conventional academic career while teaching history in Canberra. In 1950 he published the first of two volumes of Select Documents in Australian History (Volume one, 1788–1850: volume two, 1851–1900, appeared in 1955). These volumes made an important contribution to the teaching of Australian history in schools and universities by placing a wide selection of primary sources, many never before published, in the hands of students. The documents were accompanied by extensive annotation and commentaries by Clark, and his critics now regard this as his best work, before the onset of what they see as his later decline. At this stage of his career Clark published as C.M.H. Clark, but he was always known as Manning Clark, and published his later works under that name.

During this period Clark was regarded as a conservative, both politically and in his approach to Australian history. In an influential 1954 lecture published under the title "Rewriting Australian history", he rejected the nostalgic radical nationalism of "Old Left" historians such as Brian Fitzpatrick

Brian Fitzpatrick

Brian Fitzpatrick may refer to:*Brian T. Fitzpatrick, American academic and lawyer, Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University Law School*Brian Fitzpatrick *Brian Fitzpatrick...

, Russel Ward, Vance Palmer

Vance and Nettie Palmer

Vance and Nettie Palmer were two of Australia's best-known literary figures from the 1920s to the 1950s. Edward Vivian "Vance" Palmer was a novelist, dramatist, essayist and critic. Janet Gertrude "Nettie" Palmer was a poet, essayist and Australia's leading literary critic...

 and Robin Gollan, which, he said, tended to see Australian history as merely a "manure heap" from which the coming golden age of socialism would arise. He attacked many of the shibboleths of the nationalist school, such as the idealisation of the convicts, bushrangers and pioneers. The rewriting of Australian history, he said, "will not come from the radicals of this generation because they are tethered to an erstwhile great but now excessively rigid creed." There were a number of similar comments in his annotation of the Select Documents. The diggers of Eureka

Eureka Stockade

The Eureka Rebellion of 1854 was an organised rebellion by gold miners which occurred at Eureka Lead in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. The Battle of Eureka Stockade was fought on 3 December 1854 and named for the stockade structure erected by miners during the conflict...

, for example, were not revolutionaries, but aspiring capitalists; the dominant creed of the 1890s was not socialism, but fear of Asian immigration. Although these views were seen as conservative at the time, they were later taken up with greater force by the Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen

Humphrey McQueen

Humphrey McQueen is an Australian author, historian, and cultural commentator. He has written many books on a wide range of subjects covering history, the media, politics and the visual arts...

 in his 1970 book A New Britannia.

The orthodox left was sharply critical of Clark during this period. When Paul Mortier reviewed the second volume of Select Documents in the Communist Party newspaper Tribune, he criticised Clark for his lack of Marxist understanding: "Professor Clark rejects class struggle as the key to historical development: he expressed grave doubts about whether there has been any real progress: and he has no good word for historians who pay tribute to the working people for their contributions to Australia's traditions," he wrote.

In 1962 Clark contributed an essay to Peter Coleman

Peter Coleman

William Peter Coleman is an Australian writer/journalist, former politician and Minister of the Crown in the cabinets of Tom Lewis and Sir Eric Willis. Following Willis' resignation as leader he was made Leader of the New South Wales Opposition...

's book Australian Civilisation, in which he argued that much of Australian history could be seen as a three-sided struggle between Catholicism, Protestantism and secularism, a theme which he continued to develop in his later work. In his introduction Coleman wrote:

"The post-war Counter-Revolution [in Australian historiography] involves so many influences that it would be ridiculous to attribute it to the influence of any one man, but nevertheless the influence of Manning Clark has been of the greatest importance. By his questioning of the orthodox assumptions he did more than anyone else to release historians from the prison of the radical interpretation and to begin the systematic study of the neglected themes in our history, especially of religion."

At this time also Clark was close to James McAuley

James McAuley

James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism.-Life and career:...

, founder of the conservative literary-political magazine Quadrant

Quadrant (magazine)

Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...

. McAuley persuaded him to become a member of Quadrant 's initial editorial advisory board. Clark was, however, never fully identified with political conservatism. In 1954 he was one of a group of intellectuals who publicly criticised the position of the Menzies

Robert Menzies

Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, , Australian politician, was the 12th and longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia....

 government on the war in French Indo-China, and as a result was attacked as communist fellow-travellers in the House of Representatives by the outspoken right-wing parliamentarian Bill Wentworth. As a result he was placed under surveillance by Australia's domestic intelligence organisation, ASIO

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is Australia's national security service, which is responsible for the protection of the country and its citizens from espionage, sabotage, acts of foreign interference, politically-motivated violence, attacks on the Australian defence system, and...

, who over the years compiled a large file of trivia and gossip about him, without ever discovering anything in his activities which posed a risk to "national security."

The History of Australia

In the mid 1950s Clark conceived a new project: a large multi-volume history of Australia, based on the documentary sources but giving expression to Clark's own ideas about the meaning of Australian history. As a preparation he took leave from Canberra in 1956 and visited Jakarta

Jakarta

Jakarta is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Officially known as the Special Capital Territory of Jakarta, it is located on the northwest coast of Java, has an area of , and a population of 9,580,000. Jakarta is the country's economic, cultural and political centre...

, Burma and various cities in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, fossicking in museums and archives for documents and maps relating to the discovery of Australia by the Dutch in the 17th century, and also the possible discovery of Australia by the Chinese or the Portuguese. He then visited London, Oxford and the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, where he combed through the archives for more documents relating to the Dutch explorers and the founding of New South Wales in 1788 – Dymphna Clark did most of the research work in the Dutch archives. An immediate result of this research was Sources of Australian History (Oxford University Press 1957). On his return to Australia, Clark began to write The History of Australia. The History was originally envisioned as a two-volume work, with the first volume extending to the 1860s and the second volume ending in 1939. As Clark began to write, however, the work expanded dramatically, both in size and conception.

The first volume of the History ("from the earliest times to the Age of Macquarie

Lachlan Macquarie

Major-General Lachlan Macquarie CB , was a British military officer and colonial administrator. He served as the last autocratic Governor of New South Wales, Australia from 1810 to 1821 and had a leading role in the social, economic and architectural development of the colony...

") appeared in 1962, and five more volumes, taking the story down to 1935, appeared over the next 26 years. In his autobiographical memoir A Historian's Apprenticeship (published after his death), Clark recalled that his models were Carlyle, Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...

 and T.B. Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay PC was a British poet, historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history...

 – two conservatives and a Whig

British Whig Party

The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...

 – and that he was inspired by the belief that "the story of Australia was a bible of wisdom both for those now living and, I hoped, for those to come after us." By this time he had rejected all the notions of progressive (including Marxist) historiography: "I was beginning to see Australian history and indeed all history as a tragedy. Failure was the fate of the individual: success could be the fate of society. If that was a contradiction, I could only reply that it was but one of the many contradictions we must accept as soon as we can as part of the human condition."

The dominant theme of the early volumes of Clark's history was the interplay between the harsh environment of the Australian continent and the European values of the people who discovered, explored and settled it in the 18th and 19th centuries. (In common with most Australians of his generation, he had little knowledge of, or interest in, the indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....

, though this changed in his later life). He saw Catholicism, Protestantism and the Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

 as the three great contending influences in Australian history. He was chiefly interested in colourful, emblematic individuals and the struggles they underwent to maintain their beliefs in Australia – men like William Bligh

William Bligh

Vice Admiral William Bligh FRS RN was an officer of the British Royal Navy and a colonial administrator. A notorious mutiny occurred during his command of HMAV Bounty in 1789; Bligh and his loyal men made a remarkable voyage to Timor, after being set adrift in the Bounty's launch by the mutineers...

, William Wentworth

William Wentworth

William Charles Wentworth was an Australian poet, explorer, journalist and politician, and one of the leading figures of early colonial New South Wales...

, John MacArthur

John MacArthur

John MacArthur may refer to:* John Macarthur , Australian wool industry pioneer and Rum Rebel* John McArthur, Jr. , American architect* John McArthur , Union general during the American Civil War...

 and Daniel Deniehy

Daniel Deniehy

Daniel Henry Deniehy was an Australian journalist, orator and politician; and early advocate of democracy in colonial New South Wales.-Early life:...

. His view was that most of his heroes had a "tragic flaw" which made their struggles ultimately futile.

Clark largely ignored the 20th century historiographic preoccupation with economic and social history, and completely rejected the Marxist stress on class and class struggle as the driving force of social progress. He was also not much interested in detailed factual history, and as the History progressed it became less and less based in empirical research and more and more a work of literature: an epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 rather than a history. His inattention to factual detail became notorious, and was noted even in the first volume, which drew a critical review from Malcolm Ellis titled "History without facts." Ellis (who had a history of personal hostility with Clark) was the first of many critics to take Clark to task for too much speculation about what was in the hearts of men and too little description of what they actually did. The historian A.G.L. Shaw (who had been best man at Clark's wedding) said that while most of Clark's errors were trivial, together they created "a sense of mistrust in the work as a whole." There was also criticism that Clark relied too heavily on his own interpretation of primary sources and ignored the secondary literature. On the other hand many historians, including Max Crawford, Bede Nairn, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Australian academic)

Kathleen Fitzpatrick was an Australian academic and historian.Fitzpatrick was born in the town of Omeo, Victoria in 1905. She was educated at Loreto Convent in South Melbourne and Portland, Presentation Convent in Windsor, and Lauriston Girls' School in Armadale...

 and Allan W. Martin (later the official biographer of Robert Menzies

Robert Menzies

Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, , Australian politician, was the 12th and longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia....

), praised the book.

The History thus met a mixed critical response – "praise, misgivings and puzzlement in varying proportions" – but a generally positive public one. Most readers warmed to Clark's great gift for narrative prose and the depiction of individual character, and were not troubled by the comments of academic critics on his factual inaccuracies or their doubts about his historiographic theories. The books sold extremely well and were a major earner for Melbourne University Press (MUP) and its director, Peter Ryan. Even critics who found fault with the History as history admired it as literature (although later critics felt that the literary quality of subsequent volumes declined). In The Age

The Age

The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...

, Stuart Sayers hailed it as "a major work, not only of scholarship... but also of Australian literature." Some reviewers complained that Clark was "too pre-occupied with tragic vision" or condemned his "Biblical and slightly mannered style" (which grew more mannered in each successive volume), but "recognised that Clark's very excesses gave the History its profundity and distinctive insight." The respected historian John La Nauze, author of a highly-regarded biography of Alfred Deakin

Alfred Deakin

Alfred Deakin , Australian politician, was a leader of the movement for Australian federation and later the second Prime Minister of Australia. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Deakin was a major contributor to the establishment of liberal reforms in the colony of Victoria, including the...

, wrote that the importance of Clark's work "lies not in the apocalyptic vision of our history... which I do not understand, and which I am sure I would disagree with if I did," but in "the particular flashes of interpretation" which gave "a new appearance to familiar features." Alastair Davidson stated in a review in the magazine Dissent in 1968: "The astonishing savaging of volume one of A History of Australia, when it appeared in 1962, seems almost symbolic. What is important is that such pettiness did not harm such as Gibbon and Taine. Manning Clark will not go into the dustbin of history because of Ellis' quibbling about the precise time this or that event happened. Nor will McManners's more gentle questioning about whether he had really understood the nature of the Enlightenment correctly really be important. Great history is not determined by the precision of the facts it contains. What will decide this is the meaningfulness of the vision of Man which it has."

Meeting Soviet Man

In 1958, Clark visited the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 for three weeks as a guest of the Soviet Writers' Union

Creative unions in the USSR

Creative unions in the Soviet Union were voluntary societies that united people according to their creative professions, similar to Soviet trade unions....

, accompanied by the Communist

Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...

 writer Judah Waten

Judah Waten

Judah Leon Waten AM was an Australian novelist who was at one time seen as the voice of Australian migrant writing....

 and the Queensland poet James Devaney

James Devaney

James Martin Devaney was an Australian poet, novelist, and journalist.-Biography:Born in Bendigo, Victoria, Devaney attended St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, entering the Marist Brothers juniorate in 1904. He took his vows in 1915...

, a Catholic of moderate views. The delegation visited Moscow and Leningrad

Leningrad

Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...

, and Clark also visited Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

 on his way home. While Waten wanted him to admire the achievements of the Soviet state, Clark was more interested in attending the Bolshoi Ballet

Bolshoi Ballet

The Bolshoi Ballet is an internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia. Founded in 1776, the Bolshoi is among the world's oldest ballet companies, however it only achieved worldwide acclaim by the early 20th century, when Moscow became the...

, the Dostoevsky Museum and the St Sergius Monastery

Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra

The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius is the most important Russian monastery and the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church. The monastery is situated in the town of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 km to the north-east from Moscow by the road leading to Yaroslavl, and currently is home to...

 at Zagorsk. Clark annoyed both Waten and his Soviet hosts by asking questions about Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...

, the dissident Soviet writer who was in trouble for having his novel Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago (novel)

Doctor Zhivago is a 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet...

published in the West. Nevertheless, he was impressed by the material progress of the country after the devastation of World War II and by the limited political liberalisation which was taking place under Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...

.

On his return he wrote a series of articles for the liberal news-magazine Nation, which were later published in booklet form as Meeting Soviet Man (Angus and Robertson 1960). This work later became "exhibit A" for the charge that Clark was a communist, a communist sympathiser or, at best, hopelessly naive about communism. In it he gave ammunition to his enemies by denying that millions of people had died during Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

's collectivisation of agriculture. On the other hand he was scathing about the cultural drearyness of the Soviet Union and about the greed and philistinism of the Soviet bureaucracy. Although he criticised Soviet society for the "greyness" of everyday life and the suppression of religion, he praised the Soviet state's ability to provide for the material needs of the people. His comment that Lenin stood on a par with Jesus as one of the great men of all time was later often quoted against him.

At the time, however, the book was not universally seen as pro-Soviet. Writing in Tribune, Waten denounced it as misleading and "littered with half-truths and anti-Soviet clichés." Clark's son recalls:

"The irony is that it was during the time of publication that my father's relationship with Judah was most strained, and the point of conflict was over the content of the book. Judah attacked Meeting Soviet Man for being too sympathetic to the west, and too critical of the Soviet Union. I recall one particularly tense meeting at Judah's house. To lighten up the atmosphere he spent the first hour regaling us with colorful stories about the professional boxing bouts he attended in Melbourne's old Festival Hall. Then he and my father retired to another room to talk the issue out. I could tell from the grim expressions as they emerged that there had been no resolution of their differences."

Nevertheless, Meeting Soviet Man marked the beginning of Clark's reputation as a left-winger, something of which his work to that point had given no indication. James McAuley, hitherto a close friend, called the book "shoddy," and Donald Horne

Donald Horne

Professor Donald Horne was an Australian journalist, writer, social critic, and academic who became one of Australia's best known public intellectuals....

, then a conservative and editor of The Bulletin

The Bulletin

The Bulletin was an Australian weekly magazine that was published in Sydney from 1880 until January 2008. It was influential in Australian culture and politics from about 1890 until World War I, the period when it was identified with the "Bulletin school" of Australian literature. Its influence...

, called it "superficial" and showing "too much sentimental goodwill" towards the Soviet Union.

It remains unclear what Clark's political views actually were, although it is clear that from the mid 1960s onwards he identified the Australian Labor Party

Australian Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...

 as the party of progress and Australian independence, and particularly admired Gough Whitlam

Gough Whitlam

Edward Gough Whitlam, AC, QC , known as Gough Whitlam , served as the 21st Prime Minister of Australia. Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party to power at the 1972 election and retained government at the 1974 election, before being dismissed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr at the climax of the...

 (who became Leader of the ALP Opposition in 1967 and Prime Minister five years later) as the leader Australia had been looking for ever since the death of John Curtin

John Curtin

John Joseph Curtin , Australian politician, served as the 14th Prime Minister of Australia. Labor under Curtin formed a minority government in 1941 after the crossbench consisting of two independent MPs crossed the floor in the House of Representatives, bringing down the Coalition minority...

 in 1945. Stephen Holt wrote in his study A Short History of Manning Clark: "Though never belonging to a party, he was intensely political, embodying the conflicting loyalties of inter-war Australia... He disturbed conservative and conventional opinion without himself becoming an unswerving left-wing believer." Peter Craven disagreed: "I'm not sure that he [Holt] is right that Clark was an intensely political figure. He seems in some respects to have been more of a political agnostic whose personal mythology became conflated with the dreary mechanisms of celebrity in this country so that both sides were ready to plague him."

Whatever his real views, Clark enjoyed praise and celebrity, and since he was now getting it mainly from the left he tended to play to the gallery in his public statements. "He was more popular and newsworthy, 'the best guru in the business,' as Geoff Serle put it in 1974." There is, however, no evidence that Clark had any real sympathy with Communism as an ideology or as a system of government. He visited the Soviet Union again in 1970 and in 1973, and he again expressed his admiration for Lenin as a historical figure. But in 1971 he took part in a demonstration outside the Soviet Embassy in Canberra against the Soviet persecution of the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

, and in 1985 he again took part in an anti-Soviet demonstration, this time in support of the Polish trade union Solidarity. In 1978 he told an interviewer that he was not an advocate of revolution. He was torn, he said, between "radicalism and pessimism," a pessimism based on doubts that socialism would really make things any better.

The History of Australia: later volumes

Volumes II and III of the History broadly followed the path prepared by Clark's earlier work and ideas. Volume II (launched in 1968) took the story to the 1830s, and dwelt on the conflicts between the colonial governors and their landowning allies with the emerging first generation of native-born white Australians, many of them the children of convicts. It prompted Russel Ward to praise Clark as "the greatest historian, living or dead, of Australia." Even Leonie Kramer

Leonie Kramer

Dame Leonie Judith Kramer, AC, DBE is an Australian academic, educator and professor.-Education:Kramer was educated at the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Melbourne, the University of Melbourne, where she gained a Bachelor of Arts in 1945, and Oxford University, where she gained a Doctor of...

, doyenne of conservative intellectuals and closely associated with the Quadrant group, named Volume II as her "book of the year." The appearance of Volume III in 1973 aroused little controversy – commentators of all political views apparently felt there was nothing new to say about Clark's work.

By the time Volume IV appeared in 1979, however, the tone of both his work and of the critical response to it had changed greatly. (This process was aided by Clark's retirement from teaching in 1975 – he no longer faced the demands of a professional academic career and was free to write what he liked.) Although Clark had rejected the nostalgic nationalism of the "Old Left" historians, he shared much of their contempt for the old Anglo-Australian upper class, whose stronghold was the "Melbourne establishment" where Clark was raised and educated. His earlier preoccupation with the clash of European belief systems imported into Australia in the 18th century faded, and was replaced by a focus on what Clark saw as the conflict between "those who stood for 'King and Empire' and those who stood for 'the Australian way of life and the Australian dream,' between 'the Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green'." While this was a focus more relevant to the history of Australia in the late 19th and 20th centuries, it was also a much more politically contentious one, and Clark's undisguised contempt for the "Old Dead Tree" of the Anglo-Australian middle class fuelled the view that he was now writing polemic rather than history.

Writing in the heated political atmosphere of Australia in the 1970s, Clark came to see Robert Menzies

Robert Menzies

Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, , Australian politician, was the 12th and longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia....

 (Liberal Prime Minister 1949–66) as the representative of the "old" Australia, and to see Whitlam as the hero of a new progressive Australia. Clark campaigned for Whitlam in the 1972 and 1974 elections, and was outraged by his dismissal by the Governor-General

Governor-General of Australia

The Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia is the representative in Australia at federal/national level of the Australian monarch . He or she exercises the supreme executive power of the Commonwealth...

, Sir John Kerr, in 1975, after which he wrote an article for Meanjin called "Are we a nation of bastards?" These views increasingly coloured his writing, and were notable in the last three volumes of the History. Volume IV of the History, launched in 1978, was notably strident in its attacks on Anglo-Australian conservatism, materialism, philistinism and "groveldom." It attracted the now familiar range of critical comment: criticism from conservatives, praise from the left (although Marxists like Connell and McQueen continued to complain that Clark was really a "bourgeois historian").

In 1975, the Australian Broadcasting Commission invited Clark to give the 1976 Boyer Lectures

Boyer Lectures

The Boyer Lectures began in 1959 as the ABC Lectures. They were renamed in 1961 after Richard Boyer , the ABC board chairman who had first suggested the lectures...

, a series of lectures which were broadcast and later published as A Discovery of Australia. The Boyer lectures allowed Clark to describe many of the core ideas of his published work and indeed his own life in characteristic style. "Everything a historian writes," he stated for example, "should be a celebration of life, a hymn of praise to life. It should come up from inside a man who knows all about that horror of the darkness when a man returns to the dust from whence he came, a man who has looked into the heart of that great darkness, but has both a tenderness for everyone, and yet, paradoxically, a melancholy, a sadness, and a compassion because what matters most in life is never likely to happen." Clark's next work, In Search of Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest writer"...

(1979), was a reworking of an essay which was originally written in 1964 as a chapter for Geoffrey Dutton

Geoffrey Dutton

Geoffrey Piers Henry Dutton AO was an Australian author and historian.Dutton was born in Kapunda, South Australia in 1922 and died in September 1998...

's pioneering The Literature of Australia. It was worked up in some haste in response to the desire of the Macmillan publishing house for a new book with which they could cash in on Clark's popularity. Predictably, and with more than usual justification, Clark saw Lawson as another of his tragic heroes, and he wrote with a good deal of empathy of Lawson's losing battle with alcoholism: a fate Clark himself had narrowly avoided by giving up drink in the 1960s. But the book showed both its age and its haste of preparation, and was savaged by Professor Colin Roderick, the leading authority on Lawson, as "a tangled thicket of factual errors, speculation and ideological interpretation."

By the time Volume V of the History, which covered the years between 1881 and 1915, appeared in 1981, Clark had increasingly withdrawn from political controversy. The retirement of Whitlam after his defeats at the 1975 and 1977 elections removed the main focus of Clark's political loyalty – he was not very impressed with Whitlam's pragmatic successor, Bill Hayden

Bill Hayden

William George "Bill" Hayden AC was the 21st Governor-General of Australia. Prior to this, he represented the Australian Labor Party in parliament; he was a minister in the government of Gough Whitlam, and later became Leader of the Opposition, narrowly losing the 1980 federal election to the...

, and even less impressed with Hayden's chief rival, Bob Hawke

Bob Hawke

Robert James Lee "Bob" Hawke AC GCL was the 23rd Prime Minister of Australia from March 1983 to December 1991 and therefore longest serving Australian Labor Party Prime Minister....

, whom Clark had known since his student days at ANU and regarded as lacking in principle. In addition, Clark, although only in his mid 60s, was in poor health, already suffering from the heart problems that were to overshadow his final years. In any case, Clark made it clear in this volume that his enthusiasm for Whitlam had not changed his views of the Labor Party as a party: Labor's founding leaders, Chris Watson

Chris Watson

John Christian Watson , commonly known as Chris Watson, Australian politician, was the third Prime Minister of Australia...

 and Andrew Fisher

Andrew Fisher

Andrew Fisher was an Australian politician who served as the fifth Prime Minister on three separate occasions. Fisher's 1910-13 Labor ministry completed a vast legislative programme which made him, along with Protectionist Alfred Deakin, the founder of the statutory structure of the new nation...

, he wrote, were dull and unimaginative men, who wanted no more than that working men should have a modest share of the prosperity of bourgeois Australia. The real hero of Volume V was Alfred Deakin

Alfred Deakin

Alfred Deakin , Australian politician, was a leader of the movement for Australian federation and later the second Prime Minister of Australia. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Deakin was a major contributor to the establishment of liberal reforms in the colony of Victoria, including the...

, leader of enlightened middle-class liberalism, and (like Clark) a product of Melbourne Grammar and Melbourne University.

In 1983, Clark was hospitalised for the first time and underwent bypass surgery, and further surgery was needed in 1984. Always a pessimist, Clark became convinced that his time was running out, and from this point he lost interest in the outside world and its concerns and concentrated solely on finishing the History before his death. His work on Volume VI, to cover the years between the two world wars, led him to compare Hawke, who became Prime Minister in March 1983, with James Scullin

James Scullin

James Henry Scullin , Australian Labor politician and the ninth Prime Minister of Australia. Two days after he was sworn in as Prime Minister, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred, marking the beginning of the Great Depression and subsequent Great Depression in Australia.-Early life:Scullin was...

, the hapless Labor Prime Minister of the Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 years who failed to take any radical steps and saw his government destroyed. Clark's health improved in 1985 and he was able to travel to China and to the Australian war cemeteries in France. A final burst of energy enabled him to finish Volume VI in 1986, although the story was taken only down to 1935, when both John Curtin and Robert Menzies emerged as national leaders, allowing Clark to draw a sharp contrast between these two, portraying Menzies as the representative of the old Anglo-Australian "grovellers" and Curtin as the leader of the new Australian nationalism. The book was launched in July 1987.

Criticism of his work

By the 1970s, Clark, while still writing history which was conservative in a historiographical sense (that is, not based on any economic or class theory of history), had come to be seen as a "left-wing" historian, and eventually he accepted this label, despite his fundamental scepticism and pessimism. This meant that left-wing intellectuals and commentators generally praised his work, while right-wingers increasingly condemned it, in both cases often without much regard to the merit of the work.

Clark's defection to the left in the 1970s caused fury on the literary and intellectual right, particularly since he was accompanied by several other leading figures including Donald Horne and the novelist Patrick White

Patrick White

Patrick Victor Martindale White , an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative...

, whose career has some parallels with Clark's. He was denounced in Quadrant and in the columns of the Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....

 press as the godfather of the "Black armband view of history" (the view allegedly held on the left that Australia should be ashamed of its past history of racism, sexism etc.). He was unfavourably compared with Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Blainey

Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC , is a prominent Australian historian.Blainey was born in Melbourne and raised in a series of Victorian country towns before attending Wesley College and the University of Melbourne. While at university he was editor of Farrago, the newspaper of the University of...

, Australia's leading "orthodox" historian (who coined the "black armband" phrase). Clark reacted to these attacks in typically contrary style by becoming more outspoken, thus provoking further attacks. These exchanges were made more bitter by the fact that most of the participants had been friends for many years.

The attacks on Clark were not entirely politically motivated. Clark's professional reputation as a historian declined during the later period of his life, and the final two volumes of the History were given scant attention by other serious historians, regardless of their political views. This was not because they were seen as too "left-wing," but because they were seen as verbose, repetitive and with few new insights to offer. Clark's publisher at MUP, Peter Ryan, maintains that leading historians acknowledged to him in private that the later volumes of the History were inferior work, but would not say so publicly out of respect for Clark, or out of a reluctance to give ammunition to the political attacks on him. "By the time Volume V was published in 1981, this approached the proportions of a professional scandal. Quadrant, for example, asked five of Australia's leading historians to review it, and received five more of less identical replies: 'It's a terrible book, but you can't expect me to say that in print."

Clark's tendency to focus on individuals and their tragic flaws, while a servicable approach when writing about the early days of colonial New South Wales, a small and isolated society dominated by such colourful characters as MacArthur and Wentworth, had much less validity when he was writing about the more complex Australia of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His lack of interest in economic and social history became less forgivable, particularly among the younger generation of historians, regardless of their politics. The Marxist Bob Connell

Raewyn Connell

Raewyn Connell is an Australian sociologist. She is currently University Professor at the University of Sydney.-Profile:...

 wrote that Clark had no understanding of the historical process, assuming that things happened by chance or "by an odd irony." Bill Cope, writing in Labour History, the house-journal of left-wing historians, wrote that Clark had been "left behind, both by the new social movements of the postwar decades and the new histories which have transformed the way we see our past and ourselves." John Hirst

John Hirst (historian)

John Hirst is an emeritus professor of history at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.-Books:*Australia’s Democracy: A Short History ISBN 978-1865088457*QE 17 'Kangaroo Court': Family Law in Australia ISBN 978-1863953412...

, usually regarded as a moderately conservative historian, wrote: "In the end Clark became the sort of historian he had set out to supersede – a barracker for the 'progressive' side who accepted uncritically its view of the world."

Posthumous reputation

By the time Clark died in May 1991, he had become something of a national institution, as much for his public persona as for his historical work. His goatee beard, his bush hat, his stout walking stick, his enigmatic public utterances, had become widely known even among people who had never opened any of his books. It was this which inspired the 1988 project of turning the History into a musical, Manning Clark's History of Australia: the Musical, funded by the Australian Bicentenary and with a script by Don Watson

Don Watson

Don Watson is an Australian author and public speaker.-Biography:Watson grew up on a farm in Gippsland, took his undergraduate degree at La Trobe University and a Ph.D at Monash University and was for ten years an academic historian. He wrote three books on Australian history before turning his...

, historian and later speechwriter to Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating

Paul Keating

Paul John Keating was the 24th Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 1991 to 1996. Keating was elected as the federal Labor member for Blaxland in 1969 and came to prominence as the reformist treasurer of the Hawke Labor government, which came to power at the 1983 election...

. The show was a flop, but did not detract from Clark's public standing, particularly among Labor voters. His last works were two volumes of autobiography, The Puzzles of Childhood (Viking 1989) and The Quest for Grace (Viking 1990). A third, unfinished volume, A Historian's Apprenticeship (Melbourne University Press 1992), was published after his death.

According to Robert Manne

Robert Manne

Robert Manne is a professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.Born in Melbourne, Manne's earliest political consciousness was formed by the fact that his parents were Jewish refugees from Europe and his grandparents were victims of the Holocaust...

, editor of Quadrant from 1990 to 1997, Peter Ryan, who retired from MUP in 1988, was already preparing to publish an article attacking Clark and his work before the latter's death, but when Clark died he postponed the project for a decent interval. The article finally appeared in Quadrant in September 1993. Ryan had known Clark since 1947, when he had been his student at Melbourne University. He later became a close friend and drinking partner. When Ryan became Director of MUP in 1962, he inherited Clark's History, the first volume of which was already at the press. As Director, he edited and published Volumes II to VI, and had a long, stormy but still generally friendly relationship with Clark until the completion of the History in 1986. As he acknowledged, the History had been very beneficial both to MUP commercially and to his own professional career.

But in his 1993 article, Ryan declared that Clark was a fraud and his work valueless. Even while publishing the later volumes, he wrote, he knew that "scholarly rigour and historical strictness were slowly seeping out of both man and History, and that a sententious showiness in both of them, as it grew, was making the whole undertaking unworthy of the imprint of a scholarly publishing house." In retrospect, he said, he was ashamed to have published Clark's work, and that he ought to have resigned from MUP rather than continuing to do so. He did not do so, he said, because of his responsibilities to MUP's other authors, and because he hesitated to set his own condemnation of the History against its obvious appeal to the book-buying public and against the evident approval of Clark's work by other historians.

The first part of Ryan's article went over their friendship since 1947, and examined the roots of what he saw as the decline of Clark's personal and professional integrity in his later life. These included, in Ryan's view, his reflexive Anglophobia

Anglophobia

Anglophobia means hatred or fear of England or the English people. The term is sometimes used more loosely for general Anti-British sentiment...

, his theatricality, pomposity and vanity, and his hypocrisy in attacking the Anglo-Australian middle-class and their "bourgeois" culture when he himself was a product of the former and deeply imbued with the latter. Then Ryan proceeded to attack the History as "an imposition on Australian credulity – more plainly, a fraud."

"There is no strong narrative thread to guide a reader firmly through the broad plot from 1788 to 1935 [Ryan wrote], even though Australia's history is short, and not unduly complicated... No statistics are helpfully organised to display trends in growth or decline, or changes focuses of national interest... When they buy a six-volume national history, most people expect something of a work of reference. They will not find Manning Clark serviceable for this purpose."

This philippic

Philippic

A philippic is a fiery, damning speech, or tirade, delivered to condemn a particular political actor. The term originates with Demosthenes, who delivered several attacks on Philip II of Macedon in the 4th century BC....

 was not surprisingly attacked by a range of critics, notably historians such as Russel Ward, Don Watson, Humphrey MacQueen, Stuart Macintyre

Stuart Macintyre

Stuart Forbes Macintyre , Australian historian, academic and public intellectual, is a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has been voted one of Australia's most influential public intellectuals...

 and Paul Bourke and the critic Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...

. Ryan was denounced as an ingrate and a coward for attacking Clark after his death and after having benefiting materially and professionally from Clark's work. It was notable, however, that Ryan's critics mainly directed their fire at the propriety of Ryan's posthumous attack on Clark, and on a defence of Clark's personal and professional integrity, rather than on a defence of the History as an important piece of Australian history-writing. The polemic raged along predictable left-right lines: conservatives felt obliged to support Ryan and denigrate Clark, while leftists felt obliged to defend Clark, if not his historical method.

On 24 August 1996, the attack on Clark's reputation reached a new level with a front-page article by the Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....

 owned Herald Sun

Herald Sun

The Herald Sun is a morning tabloid newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia. It is published by The Herald and Weekly Times, a subsidiary of News Limited, itself a subsidiary of News Corporation. It is available for purchase throughout Melbourne, Regional Victoria, Tasmania, the Australian Capital...

, alleging that Clark was a Soviet spy. It published excerpts of Clark's ASIO

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is Australia's national security service, which is responsible for the protection of the country and its citizens from espionage, sabotage, acts of foreign interference, politically-motivated violence, attacks on the Australian defence system, and...

 file and stated that he was friendly with two men who were later confirmed to be Soviet agents. It also claimed that he had been awarded the Order of Lenin

Order of Lenin

The Order of Lenin , named after the leader of the Russian October Revolution, was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union...

 by the Soviet Union in recognition of his services.

The allegations were repeated in August 1999 with the allegation in Brisbane

Brisbane

Brisbane is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane's metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million, and the South East Queensland urban conurbation, centred around Brisbane, encompasses a population of...

's Courier-Mail

The Courier-Mail

The Courier-Mail is a daily newspaper published in Brisbane, Australia. Owned by News Limited, it is published daily from Monday to Saturday in tabloid format. Its editorial offices are located at Bowen Hills, in Brisbane's inner northern suburbs, and it is printed at Murarrie, in Brisbane's...

, that he had been a "Soviet agent of influence". This allegation has been maintained by the Courier-Mail editor-in-chief at the time, Chris Mitchell

Chris Mitchell

Chris Mitchell is an Australian journalist and is editor-in-chief of The Australian. He began his career on the former afternoon tabloid, The Telegraph, in 1973 and after working on The Townsville Bulletin, The Daily Telegraph and the Australian Financial Review, became editor of The Australian in...

, in his current position as editor of The Australian

The Australian

The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....

. In fact Clark, along with many others, had been given a mass-produced bronze medallion when he had visited Moscow in 1970, to speak at a conference organised to mark the centenary of Lenin's birth. An investigation by the Australian Press Council

Australian Press Council

The Australian Press Council is the self-regulatory body of the Australian print media. It was established in 1976 and is a private organisation. Its aims are to help preserve the traditional freedom of the press within Australia and to ensure that the free press acts responsibly and ethically...

 found the Order of Lenin allegations to be false. The Press Council ruling said: "The newspaper had too little evidence to assert that Prof Clark was awarded the Order of Lenin – rather there is much evidence to the contrary. That being so, the Press Council finds that the Courier-Mail was not justified in publishing its key assertion and the conclusions which so strongly flowed from it. The newspaper should have taken further steps to check the accuracy of its reports. While the Courier-Mail devoted much space to people challenging its assertions, the Press Council believes it should have retracted the allegations about which Prof Clark's supporters complained."

This allegation, the originator of which was Les Murray

Les Murray (poet)

Leslie Allan Murray, AO , known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings...

, a poet of strongly conservative views who is closely associated with Quadrant, was too much even for most of Clark's detractors. Robert Manne (who had been sacked as Quadrant editor in 1997) said: "It was clear that a couple of people saw him wearing a Soviet medal but there are many Soviet medals and I never thought that it was an Order of Lenin. But the Courier-Mail went from the assumption that it was an Order of Lenin to the assumption that he was one of the spies of the century. This was one of the most absurd pieces of journalism that Australia has ever seen."

Michael Thwaites

Michael Thwaites

Michael Rayner Thwaites, AO was an Australian academic, poet, intelligence officer, and activist for Moral Rearmament.-Early life and education:...

, a former Australian intelligence officer, said: "I can say without hesitation that I am not aware of any evidence that Manning was in any sense or form an agent of the Soviet Union. I differed with him in many ways: he sometimes expressed views that I thought were misleading. His book has been mentioned, Meeting Soviet Man, after his visit to Russia, and I remember thinking when that came out that that was a very one-sided picture: but that's a world away from saying that he was in any way working consciously for the Soviet Union."

Further criticism of Clark's reliability arose in March 2007 with the discovery that Clark's account, given in his memoirs and elsewhere, of walking the streets of Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

 the day after Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...

 was in fact a fabrication. By examining Clark's letters and diary, the writer Mark McKenna, who is writing a biography of Clark, established that it was Clark's future wife Dymphna, and not Clark, who was present on that day, although Clark did arrive in Bonn a fortnight later."Like many others," McKenna said, "I had taken Clark at his word. I had even quoted the Kristallnacht story in my published work. I reread Dymphna's letter carefully, checked Clark's diary entries, and saw that it was impossible for Clark to have been in Bonn on the morning of 10 November. As his own diary confirms, he did not arrive in Bonn until 26 November." Brian Matthews notes, however, that when Clark was reunited with Dymphna "as his diary records, on 25 November 1938" evidence of Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...

 "was still shockingly visible, and it was explicit and confronting enough to scar his sensibilities and live in his memory...With his capacity for imaginative reconstruction and his acute sensitivity to emotional ambience and atmosphere, what he saw of its immediate aftermath was for him quite as shattering as the original event had been for Dymphna and others who had experienced it on the night of 10 November 1938."

Honours

Clark was made a Companion of the Order of Australia

Order of Australia

The Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...

 (AC) in 1975. He won the Moomba

Moomba

Moomba is Australia's largest free community festival and one of the longest running festivals in Australia. Held annually in the city of Melbourne, Australia, Moomba is celebrated during the Labour Day long weekend , and has been celebrated since 1955...

 Book Award and the Henry Lawson Arts Award in 1969, the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal in 1970, Age

The Age

The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...

Book Prize in 1974 and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 1979. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Melbourne

University of Melbourne

The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...

, Newcastle University

University of Newcastle, Australia

The University of Newcastle is an Australian public university that was established in 1965. The University's main and largest campus is located in Callaghan, a suburb of Newcastle in New South Wales...

 and Sydney University. In 1980 he was named Australian of the Year

Australian of the Year

Since 1960 the Australian of the Year Award has been part of the celebrations surrounding Australia Day , during which time the award has grown steadily in significance to become Australia’s pre-eminent award. The Australian of the Year announcement has become a very prominent part of the annual...

.

After Dymphna Clark's death in 2000, the Clarks' home in Tasmania Circle, Forrest

Forrest, Australian Capital Territory

Forrest is a suburb of Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. Forrest is named after Sir John Forrest, an explorer, legislator, Federalist, premier of Western Australia, and one of the fathers of the Australian Constitution...

, was turned into Manning Clark House, an educational centre devoted to Manning Clark's life and work. Manning Clark House "provides opportunities for the whole community to debate and discuss contemporary issues and ideas, through a program of conferences, seminars, forums, publishing, and arts and cultural events." In 1999 Manning Clark House inaugurated an annual Manning Clark Lecture, which is given each year by a distinguished Australian.

As well as McKenna's book, Brian Matthews published "Manning Clark: A Life" in 2008. In the interim two less ambitious books have appeared: Stephen Holt's study A Short History of Manning Clark and Carl Bridge's collection of essays, Manning Clark: His Place in History. Manning Clark House is also planning to publish an edition of Clark's letters.

The Manning Clark Centre, a major lecture theatre complex at the Australian National University

Australian National University

The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...

, is named in his honour. In the south of Canberra, Manning Clarke house was built in his legacy in 1984 and served as the ACT Department of Education headquarters. The building is now home to Medicare Australia.

Further reading

• Stephen Holt (1982), Manning Clark and Australian History, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia (Queensland)
• Michael Cathcart (1993) Manning Clark's History of Australia an abridgement, Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Vic)
• Stephen Holt (1999), A Short History of Manning Clark, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards (NSW)
• Brian Matthews (2008), Manning Clark. A life, Allen & Unwin Crows Nest Sydney (NSW)
• Mark McKenna (2011), An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark, Miegunyah Press, Carlton (Vic)

External links

• Manning Clark House
• Melbourne University Press, Manning Clark's History of Australia
• Peter Craven's review of A Short History of Manning Clark