Manning Clark
Charles Manning Hope Clark was an Australian historian and 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 also been the target of criticism, particularly from conservatives and classical liberals.
Early life
Clark was born in Sydney on 3 March 1915, the son of the Reverend Charles Clark, an English-born Anglican priest from a working-class background, and Catherine Hope, who came from an old Australian establishment family. On his mother's side he was a descendant of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the "flogging parson" of early colonial New South Wales. Clark 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. Charles held various curacies in Sydney including St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, and St John's, Ashfield, where Catherine was a Sunday School teacher. The family moved to Melbourne when Clark 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 1922–1924, 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 and Belgrave, and then at Melbourne Grammar School, where he was a boarder in School House. Here, as an introspective boy from a modest background, he suffered from ridicule and bullying, and acquired a lifelong 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, Latin and history. In 1933 he was equal dux of the school.
As a result, Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. 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, one of Australia's leading political scientists of 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. At this point Clark's political views continuously shifted from liberalism to a type of moderate socialism. His favourite writers at this time were Fyodor Dostoyevsky and T. S. Eliot, and his favourite historian was the conservative Thomas Carlyle. In terms of his evolving political views, a few years later, around 1944, Clark became a socialist of moderate views, a political position he maintained for the rest of his adult life, with political sympathies broadly placed on the Left and with the Australian Labor Party.
In 1937 Clark won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, and left Australia in August 1938. Among his teachers at Oxford were Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hill and A. J. P. Taylor. He won acceptance by excelling at cricket – playing for the Oxford XI and competing alongside Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins. He began a master of arts thesis on Alexis de Tocqueville. Though basically sympathetic towards de Tocqueville's liberalism, Clark wrote that his political vision for a just society was flawed by his ignorance of the misery of the masses and by his unwillingness to consider force to ensure justice.
At Oxford in the late 1930s he shared the Left's horror of fascism – which he had seen first-hand during a visit to Nazi Germany in 1938 – but was not attracted to the communism which was prevalent among undergraduates at the time. His exposure to Nazism and Fascism in 1938 made him more pessimistic and sceptical about the state of European civilisation. However, he was not attracted to the Left's emancipatory process of socialist revolution and favoured, instead, a capitalist, social democratic and democratic socialist approach. At Oxford also he suffered the social snubs commonly experienced by "colonials" at that time, which was apparently the source of his lifelong dislike of the English. In 1939 in Oxford he married Dymphna Lodewyckx, 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. He supported himself while finishing his thesis by teaching history and coaching cricket teams at Blundell's School, a public school at Tiverton in Devonshire, 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, and also coached the school's First XI – a highly prestigious appointment. Among those he taught were Rupert Murdoch and Stephen Murray-Smith.At Geelong, he published two papers. The first, "The Dilemma of the French Intelligentsia", concerned why French Catholic intellectuals such as Charles Maurras had supported the Vichy regime. Clark argued that Maurras and other French Catholic intellectuals had been reluctant collaborators, driven to support Vichy out of a dissatisfaction with bourgeois conservatism in France and a fear of the masses propelled by memories of the French Revolution. In his second paper entitled "France and Germany", Clark offered up a comparative study of the intelligentsia of Germany and France, asking why the former nation gave birth to National Socialism while the latter nation had to be defeated to become Nazi. Clark offered up what would today be called the Sonderweg interpretation, arguing that in the 19th century the majority of French intellectuals had by and large accepted liberalism, rationalism and the values of liberté, égalité, fraternité whereas the majority of German intellectuals by contrast had embraced conservatism, emotionalism, and a vision of a hierarchical society ruled by an autocratic elite. Clark noted that at the beginning of the 20th century, the most famous French intellectual was the writer Émile Zola who had been a leading Dreyfusard in the Dreyfus affair as he maintained justice must apply to all French people. By contrast, Clark noted that the most famous German intellectual in the same time period was the English-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the "Evangelist of Race", whose theories divided the world into a racial hierarchy with the Germanic Aryan race as the herrenvolk. 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", on the subject of mateship, which appeared in the literary magazine Meanjin.
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 Max Crawford, he taught the university's first full-year course in Australian history. Among his students were Frank Crean, Geoffrey Blainey, Bruce Grant, Geoffrey Serle, Ken Inglis and Ian Turner, Helen Hughes, 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.
Clark later stated that it was reading the novelists, poets and playwrights during this period such as Joseph Furphy, James McAuley, Douglas Stewart, Henry Lawson, and D.H. Lawrence that led to his "discovery of Australia" as he became convinced that the story of Australia had not been properly told by historians, and the Australians had a past to be proud of. Clark was also disappointed by the treatment afforded by historians of "dinkum" Australians with their values of mateship, egalitarianism and anti-elitism with the "dinkum" people being portrayed as almost a national disgrace. Clark argued it was time for Australian intellectuals to stop treating Great Britain as the model of excellence to which Australians should strive, writing that Australia should be treated as an entity in its own right. However, Clark himself was critical of "dinkum" Australians, albeit from another direction, as he maintained that values such as mateship were mere "comforters" that helped to make life in colonial Australia with its harsh environment more bearable, and failed to provide a means to fundamentally change society. Clark stated that he did not know what were the new values that Australian society needed, but that historians had the duty to start such a debate. A major problem for Australian historians in the 1940s was that most of the primary sources relating to the colonial period were held in archives in Britain, making research expensive and time-consuming. Starting in 1946, Clark together with L.J. Pryor collected documentary material relating to the founding of the colony of New South Wales in 1788, the transportation of convicts to the penal colony and the squatters living illegally in the bush, with the aim of publishing them to make them more accessible to historians.
In 1948 Clark was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and was well set for a lifelong career at Melbourne University. But as the Cold War set in, he began to find the intellectual climate of Melbourne uncomfortable. In 1947 F.L. Edmunds, a Liberal member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, launched an attack on "Communist infiltration" of the university, naming Crawford and Jim Cairns, 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 said that Clark was "a reactionary" and no friend of theirs.
In July 1949, Clark moved to Canberra to take up the post of professor of history at the Canberra University College, 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. He lived in Canberra, then still a "bush capital" in a 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 of 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. 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 publication of the first volume of Select Documents in 1950 attracted much media attention at the time, being hailed as the beginning of a new period of Australian historiography. 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, Russel Ward, Vance Palmer 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, 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 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'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:
At this time also Clark was close to James McAuley, founder of the conservative literary-political magazine Quadrant. McAuley persuaded him to become a member of Quadrants 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 government on the war in French Indo-China, and as a result was attacked as one of the 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, who over the years compiled a large file of trivia and gossip about him, without ever discovering anything in his activities that posed a risk to "national security".