Manning Clark

By Carl Bridge

Manning Clark's work provokes violent reactions for and against. His majestic six-volume A History of Australia 'helped us to know who we are'. Yet attacks on Clark stretch back fifty years, and Peter Ryan accused him recently of writing 'gooey subjective pap, much of it false'.
These essays offer detailed, scholarly analysis of the History—its style and structure, its dominant themes, its treatment of women and Aborigines, its sense of place, its reliability. They examine Clark's place among Australian historians, artists and writers, his public role as 'the best guru in the business', his teaching methods, his philosophy of life, and his thinking on national identity.
How should we judge Manning Clark's contribution? What is his place in Australian history? This book seeks to inform opinion and to steady the debate. Its contributors include historians, political scientists, literary critics, classicists, men and women, young and old, friends and enemies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522868869

Book preview

MANNING CLARK

First published 1994

Typeset by Melbourne University Press in 10 pt Sabon

Printed in Malaysia by

SRM Production Services Sdn. Bhd. For

Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria 3053

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

© Carl Raymond Bridge 1994 (Introduction, this selection and arrangement)

Individual contributors 1994

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Manning Clark: essays on his place in history.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 522 84640 8.

1. Clark, Manning, 1915-1991. 2. Clark, Manning, 1915-1991—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Clark, Manning, 1915-1991. History of Australia. 4. Australia—Historiography. I. Bridge, Carl, 1950-.

994.007202

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1   Remembering Manning Don Baker and Kussel Ward

2   ‘Always a pace or two apart’ Stuart Macintyre

3   A Sentimental Humanist G. P. Shaw

4   Clark and Patrick White John Rickard

5   In Khruschev’s Russia P. A. Howell

6   A History of Australia as Epic J. S. Ryan

7   History Without Facts M. H. Ellis

8   Women in ‘A Man’s World’ Susan Pfisterer-Smith

9   A Sense of Place John Atchison

10 ‘I’m sorry, very sorry . . .’ Jo Woolmington

11 Two Clarks John Barrett

12 The Whole Game Escaped Him John Hirst

13 A Great Historian? Alan Atkinson

14 The Teacher Susan Davies

15 In the Public Arena John Warhurst

16 The Ryan Affair Peter Craven

17 Clark and National Identity Miriam Dixson

Abbreviations

Notes

Contributors

Index

Preface

Manning Clark’s work often provokes violent reactions both for and against, and has done since he first went into print as a historian over fifty years ago. His huge achievement as a scholar, writer and public intellectual is incontestable, and he would have been pleased to be still stirring up controversy two years after his death. Peter Ryan’s recent root-and-branch assault on Clark’s A History of Australia is but the latest in a long line. For Ryan the work is ‘gooey subjective pap’; it possesses ‘the insubstantiality of thistledown’ and is ‘a construct spun from fairy floss, and much of that false’. In the ensuing hullabaloo many, including Ryan himself, have called for ‘a fresh and critical examination of the truth and value’ of Clark’s History. Though the Sydney Morning Herald might remark loftily that Ryan’s ‘blunt axe has left an insignificant mark on a majestic blue gum’, there is still substance in the call for a considered discussion of Clark’s achievement. This book, which perhaps fortunately had its origins in the quieter days preceding the latest storm, attempts a fittingly serious and searching assessment. It is time to set aside the rhetorical posturing and to begin the real debate.*

Most of these papers were presented first at the University of New England Faculty of Arts Social Science Seminar for 1992. On behalf of all of the authors I wish to thank Professor Graham Maddox, Dean of the Faculty, for the idea and for his support. We are also grateful to Julian Croft, Humphrey McQueen and Kevin Walsh for presenting papers not published here; and to Miles Ashcroft, Bruce Mitchell, Michael Sharkey and Kate Thomas for their work during the seminar. Special thanks are due to Elizabeth McCabe for word-processing. A version of John Rickard’s paper has since appeared in Australian Historical Studies and we thank Dr Rickard, wearing his other hat as editor of that journal, for permission to include it. Peter Howell’s and Peter Craven’s papers were commissioned after the seminar. Our thanks to the editors of Quadrant for permission to reproduce John Barrett’s and John Hirst’s papers and of the Bulletin for M. H. Ellis’s review. Special thanks are due to Dymphna Clark for her help and encouragement and to Axel Clark and John Hirst who both made welcome and detailed criticisms of the manuscript.

* See Peter Ryan, ‘Manning Clark’, Quadrant , vol. 37, no. 9, 1993, pp. 9-22, and ‘A Reply to My Critics’, ibid., no. 10, 1993, pp. 11-14; Sydney Morning Herald , 28 August 1993, p. 28. The pages of the Age , the Australian , the Canberra Times and the Sydney Morning Herald bristled with articles and letters for about two weeks from 26 August. Peter Craven discusses the debate in detail in Chapter 16 .

Introduction

... by their fruits ye shall know them.

ST MATTHEW, 7:20

Charles Manning Hope Clark, Australia’s best known and probably most widely read historian, died in 1991. His grey, goatee beard, dark broad-brimmed hat and gnomic media utterances over the last twenty years of his life had made him a national figure. Along with Patrick White and Sidney Nolan (and later Barry Humphries and David Williamson) he had become a prominent definer of and commentator on our so-called ‘national identity’. The Whitlam government had recognised this by making him an A.C. in their first Australian Honours list; he was even elected Australian of the Year and was the subject of a musical.

Clark, in his 76 years, produced six children, the monumental six-volume A History of Australia, a short history, a book of short stories, a book on contemporary Soviet society, a biography of Henry Lawson, three volumes of historical documents, two volumes of autobiography, a book on his apprenticeship as a historian, the Boyer and numerous other public lectures, and a large number of articles, reviews and occasional pieces, including some memorable political commentary. And he is producing yet: Michael Cathcart has recently abridged the big history, and a book of previously unpublished speeches is in press.¹ In all of this, Clark wrote more about himself than most historians write about anything at all. His was a very public life and, more than that of any other academic historian, his history was addressed to the Australian public.

This book seeks to discuss for the first time Clark’s full literary and public achievement. The roots of his ideas are explored and his contribution to Australian historiography mapped. A History of Australia is analysed in detail for its literary structure, and for its treatment of Aborigines, women, and sense of place. His teaching and his role as a public controversialist—facets of his work hitherto rarely commented on—are essayed. Most important, questions are answered about his contribution to the debate about ‘Australian identity’.

Like all autobiographers Clark tried to influence later readings of his life and works by writing his own version in old age. He wrote his own myth. In his two autobiographical volumes—The Puzzles of Childhood (1989) and The Quest for Grace (1990)—Clark traces his life from his birth in Sydney in 1915 to his embarking on his magnum opus in the mid-1950s. The themes of his six-volume History are seen to be prefigured in his own life. Clark’s mother was a Hope, a descendant of Samuel Marsden and of Thomas Hassall, the first of the native-born to be an ordained clergyman—she was of the colonial gentry, of Old Australia. His father was born in London of working-class background, also an ordained clergyman of the Church of England, but in love of life and earthy exuberance, he had an affinity for the Australia of the common people. Clark’s immediate family background thus embraced two classes, and two views of Australia—what he came to call, quoting Lawson, the ‘Old Dead Tree’ of European civilisation (British capitalism and philistinism) and the ‘Young Tree Green’ of Australia as the working-man’s paradise, and latterly of republicanism, Aboriginal land rights, and perhaps multiculturalism.

In his mind’s eye, Clark was a ‘poor scholarship boy’ at Melbourne Grammar who by his wits won places at the University of Melbourne and at Balliol College, Oxford. He wrote a thesis on de Tocqueville, exploring the dilemmas of intellectual liberals confronted by the politics of the masses² He despised the decadent British establishment at the time of the Munich crisis; and was horrified by the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews on Kristalnacht, which he witnessed first-hand while visiting his fiancée, Dymphna Lodewyckx, who was studying languages in Bonn. His Leftist sympathies, his love of French, German, Scandinavian and Russian literature, and his rejection of ‘[Melbourne] Grammar and that sort of thing’ led him to reject the ‘life deniers’ of the Melbourne Protestant ascendancy and to seek out the ‘life affirmers’, the ‘banquet of life men’ of the Catholic working class.

Clark’s autobiographical saga continues. After schoolmastering at Blundell’s, a minor British public school, he returned to teach at Geelong Grammar before taking up posts in Political Science and then History at the University of Melbourne. There in 1946 he taught the first full-year course in Australian history, exploring through biography the clash between the Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green. He describes his escape in 1949 from Puritanical Melbourne for the sunlit expanses of the banks of the Murrumbidgee, the cradle lands of ‘mateship’, where he became foundation Professor of History at the Canberra University College, later the School of General Studies, Australian National University. There he stayed.

In A Historian’s Apprenticeship (1992) and elsewhere³ Clark shows how he consciously set out to establish himself through the mighty scale and subject matter of his six-volume History as a latter-day Antipodean Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle rolled into one. The History told of the clash of three great European traditions—Protestantism, Catholicism and the Enlightenment—of the rape of the land, the annihilation of the Aborigines, and of the ‘fatal flaws’ that brought down a gallery of desperate men (and occasionally women) in the Australian emptiness. He told of how a love of the ‘land boys we live in’ gradually grew up, and of how Prometheans like Wentworth, Curtin and Whitlam stole the fire from Heaven and tried to make a distinctive Australian contribution to the human conversation.

The old gods were replaced by the new under different stars. Priests of the old (Bruce, Menzies) were swept aside by the harbingers of the new. The triad clash of the early volumes was replaced by a binary conflict of British imperial versus radical nationalist Australia, and in the end Clark endorsed the values of the new, post-1972, independent Australia, and of the working-class Australians so beloved by his father.

Deeply interested in religion, Clark rejected the ‘perfectibility of man’ and sought solace in Dostoevskian mysticism and Irish-Catholic fatalism. In the ‘Age of Ruins’ and the ‘Kingdom of Nothingness’, comforters such as the ‘Galilean’, the ‘Virgin’ and Australian cultural myths were to be clung to for all they were worth.

Clark’s History and his autobiographies give Australia’s past and Clark’s own career and experiences a wonderful symmetry. But how much of this is life and how much art?

Old men forget. If we look into the heart of the matter and explore Clark’s life as recorded elsewhere we uncover a less consistent but more believable story. The anachronisms of the autobiographies are stripped away. No doubt Clark disliked the bullies and hearties of Grammar and cringed when others had five times his pocket money. But he worked hard at the school and at the University of Melbourne and became a model scholar and debater and a formidable cricketer⁴ Despite his apparent rejection of Oxford (much more evident in his memoirs than at the time), he managed to enjoy playing cricket for the University, had a good relationship with his tutor there, and secured his teaching posts at Blundell’s, at Geelong, and at the University of Melbourne with Oxford references. It seems that his apparent inability to settle down properly in Oxford had more to do with his desire to be with his fiancée in Germany than with the snubs of the English. It is very strange that the Clark who disliked Oxford so much was happy to spend his study leave there in 1956 and even contemplated prolonging his stay for a second year.⁵

Far from being the unconventional academic, Clark did all the right things until the mid-1950s. He edited documents, wrote learned articles, and was so liberated by Canberra that he even thought about returning to Melbourne and its straiteners in 1955.⁶ It was only in 1956, while researching Volume I of his History, that he gave up the pursuit of academic history of the Melbourne variety to write what was ‘in his heart’. Even then his first three volumes had all the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and learned argument (though he was weak on the monographic literature). It was really only after his retirement in 1974 and his open support for Whitlam in 1975-76 (prefigured a little, perhaps, by his condemnation of Menzies in 1973)⁷ that he became a major public figure and commentator on contemporary affairs. It is important to realise that fully half of his History was published after his retirement, and indeed after the fall of the Whitlam government—Volume IV in 1978, V in 1981 and VI in 1987.

Clark was, despite his disclaimers, fully in touch with his profession and the historiographical mainstream until about 1973. Politically, and philosophically, he bounced about quite a bit more than he later admitted. In 1943, in his first Australian history publication, ‘A Letter to Tom Collins’,⁸ he attacked the mateship ideal and asked whether Australia had anything more significant to offer. At the time he was impressed by James McAuley and Kenneth Slessor, both cosmopolitan conservatives of the Sydney school, and this influence probably remained dominant until 1962 or so. It was certainly there in his 1954 inaugural lecture,⁹ which the editor of Quadrant later hailed as part of a counter-revolution in Australian historiography.¹⁰ But it faded when that Bulletin hearty, M. H. Ellis, attacked him for factual inaccuracy (and implicitly for friendships with fellow travellers) in his first volume and men of the Left sprang to Clark’s defence.¹¹

As I say, however, he bobbed about a bit. He rejected the Protestant ascendancy, recalling a cartoon in an Irish newspaper in the famine year depicting a peasant eating grass and being told by a well-fed man in black that it would teach him the laws of political economy; and noting also (to underline the hatred of the measurer) a sign he saw just over the Ulster border when driving from the South that read ‘Not an Inch!’¹² He also eventually rejected Melbourne and the respective approaches of the two history professors who taught him there, Ernest Scott the Protestant and Max Crawford the ‘science of history’ man.

Not that he didn’t flirt with the ‘perfectibility of man’ men too. In 1958 he visited the Soviet Union for three weeks and on his return wrote Meeting Soviet Man (1960) in which he praised the Soviet state’s ability to deliver food, shelter and worldly goods to the masses but deplored the greyness of life and the lack of religion. Nevertheless, he came home proclaiming that Lenin stood on a par with Christ as one of the great men of all time.

Clark was always too pessimistic to be an out-and-out socialist. There was ever a serpent in the garden, a flaw in the potter’s clay. Literary or philosophical truth was permitted to dominate over historical truth. For Menzies it was pride; for Lawson and Curtin the demon drink. Clark too suffered from seeing the world through the bottom of a beer glass, from mocking, from spending too much time at that great Australian communion site, the pub. He pitied the sinners. Even the murderer Ned Kelly he forgave, for there was a lot of Australia in his larrikin behaviour, and of the madness of Ireland. He forgave and pitied Menzies for his faith in a hollow empire that had had its day.

In writing his History Clark may have appeared to be a throw-back to nineteenth-century romanticism, but he was also very much a creature of his time. Clark’s generation of post-war pessimistic nationalists felt a need to draw maps and to create or remodel icons—Nolan’s Gallipoli and Ned Kelly paintings (bushmen apotheosised); White’s Tree of Man (Adam and Eve in Australia) and Voss (the seeker); and Clark’s great History (the tragic coming of Western civilisation to Australia). The History is Australia’s Carlyle, with its tragic grandeur, its overwrought prose, its Biblical allusions, its liturgical repetitions and symbolic landscapes—gum trees, deserts, glittering harbours—and its heroic cast.

There is also in Clark’s work much of the almost vicious irony about Australian foibles that one finds in Patrick White and in Barry Humphries. Clark never fully followed his own favourite Biblical injunctions to ‘judge not’ and to look upon all men ‘with the eye of pity’. The larrikin isn’t far beneath the surface.

‘Great man’ history was rather old-fashioned when Clark started writing it. He didn’t adjust. For him women and Aborigines and common people were all sufferers and victims (‘I was weak on backdrop’) despite the new historiography where these groups tell their own stories with agency. He did, however, invent a method of polyvocalism—of letting his characters speak for themselves—that has a post-modernist feel about it, especially in his last two volumes.¹³ The authorial interventions can, however, be so stylised as to be almost peripheral to the story—merely nationalist moral incantations.

After his retirement Clark became a living national treasure: the hat, the beard, the broad belt, the pronouncements, the ever-readiness to speak to any audience anywhere. And he was an excellent speaker. I recall his Madgwick Lecture at the University of New England in 1985. He began with a whisper and rose to a crescendo, followed by a cool, sober restatement of his theme and a seeming benediction. His history, in the end, is parable, and his style that of a good sermon. He learnt well from his preacher father.

Clark stuck to his mates. For me, one of his finest moments was at the Australian Historical Association Conference in 1984. Geoffrey Blainey had made himself very unpopular by criticising the rate of Asian immigration, and many young scholars were baying for his blood. No doubt remembering the witch-hunts of the 1950s, Clark (whose views on immigration were far removed from Blainey’s) bravely defended his old friend and pupil, saying that each historian had but one window to look through and must report faithfully what he or she saw. Sometimes these descriptions met with popular approval and sometimes not.

Clark’s own focus was often not that of others. He could be exasperatingly sloppy with facts. To professional historians he appeared to be, to use one of his own terms, prone to attacks of the sillies. Long ago Ellis pointed out a rash of errors in Volume I—the First Fleet sailed from the wrong place; Dr Balmain shook hands with somebody even though the good doctor had been dead several years; and so on. More recently Clark had Phar Lap winning one too many Melbourne Cups. Clark could not resist a good effect, or scene, even if the evidence was dubious. At an Anzac Day talk once he almost burst into tears over the innocent faces on the war memorials, faces he said got younger the further west one travelled—innocence had dwelt in the country since classical times. When a Dryasdust pointed out in question time that all of the ‘boys’ were cast in the same factory in Botany, he ignored the questioner! These follies were avoidable, yet it seems his larrikin temper drove him to leave them in. He was, as Don Baker will testify, prone to ‘in’ jokes. Notoriously, he incorrectly styled Lady Franklin (wife of the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land) as ‘Lady Jane Franklin’. It tickled his fancy to include an ‘in’ reference to chapter 14 of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which ‘Lady Jane’ has a meaning which would have made the strait-laced Lady Franklin spin in her grave.¹⁴

What of Clark’s deeper motives? In his short stories he explores the ambiguities of a boy’s relationship with his father, the joys and pains of awakening adulthood, and his own relationships with his sons. These are tales of male initiation and Freudian symbolism. Innocence gives way to experience and the longing, as in the histories, to ‘be there’ when all is explained. Female characters are hardly developed other than as foils to the male heroes.¹⁵ Was Clark always proving himself to his father, cocking a snook at the Establishment, siding with the outsiders, the larrikins and the failures; exhibiting that essential spirit of Australia characterised by Les Murray in his notable phrase—we were ‘the poor who got away’?¹⁶

He was dissatisfied with Anglicanism and ‘Englishmanism’; and, though sympathetic to Catholic Christianity, especially its fatalism, he became, in George Shaw’s words, a sentimental humanist. He despised Melbourne because it judged him harshly and ultimately did not offer him its Chair. He wrote his great history as a paean of praise for the underdog, in the hope that Australians might fashion a society of note from the poor immigrants who chose or were forced to live here.

Clark’s message is important for several reasons. Confused in the 1940s and 1950s, it increasingly and clearly came to swim with the tide of change in the 1960s and 1970s. His European embrace via his reading and Dymphna’s and her parents’ non-English friends broadened into an embrace of soft multicultural-ism, though he predicted that the best of the old Australian identity would endure.¹⁷ His pity for the underdog positioned him well to catch the wave of Aboriginal land rights and the women’s movement. His rejection of ‘Grammar and that sort of thing’ and of ‘British philistinism’ made him a strong ally of the post-Whitlam Labor Party. (Though to many of us who grew up in later generations without the cultural cringe and interested in our Anglo-Celtic roots, it might now seem he protested too much on the anti-English score.) Clark, then, was finally on the side of the Young Tree Green. His agenda may have been confused in his early writings; in his maturity he wrote clearly within the radical nationalist tradition of Australian history.

On what did he base his message? On the great Christian truths (or myths) of the Fall of Man, forgiveness and understanding which, crucially, he clothed for us in Australian forms; thereby affirming Australians as participants in ‘the great conversation of humanity’. He worried through the problems of Australian identity over and over again, and settled on a shared sense of place and a shared past (with the old wrongs and antagonisms forgiven). The bush hat was simply an outward and physical sign of an inherent and spiritual Australianness, a communion with the bushmen and the larrikins, the people’s heroes, and the pastoral pioneers. There is a sort of elated pessimism born of encounters with the harsh and beautiful Australian landscape, and rooted in the rejection of imperialism and capitalism for a matey egalitarianism. (We walk, talk and joke in an Australian way which has its origins in the land itself and in our historical experience.) Above all, Clark’s central idea is that a shared love of the land we live in must be our uniting, comforting myth; importantly, one that can be common to Aboriginal Australians, Anglo-Australians and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds who have arrived in recent times.

Whether all this is sufficient to fashion a viable identity and a usable past for future Australians is anybody’s guess. But we can say that Clark articulated his message more clearly than any other in his or the next generation. Clark’s message must be negotiated seriously by us all, and that is the final measure of his achievement.

1

Remembering Manning

The Exploration of the Human Heart

DON BAKER

It so happened that I first met two of Australia’s best known, most fluent and most influential historians when I was a schoolboy at Geelong Grammar. The first was Russel Ward who came to Corio in 1935 or 1936. He was then not much older than the senior boys in the school and I remember him walking over the playing fields to the junior school looking like a Greek god. I was never in one of his classes but nevertheless he taught me more than did several of the masters directly responsible for instructing me. For Russel was a teacher to whom a boy could talk and be understood. I remember taking to him a political cartoon from some left-wing journal, perhaps the Communist Party Tribune, and asking him