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Issue Eight, Summer 2007/08

Art & Lies I

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Manning Clark. Writing history to understand the world we live in.

Samantha Young

Deakin University

Manning Clark’s A History of Australia has weathered scepticism, criticism and political

rebuke, and the same can be said of the author. His A History of Australia excludedAborigines and women from history, yet by privileging narrative, aesthetics and philosophyin his writing, by blurring of the line between fact and fiction, art and lies, Clark’smethodology was prophetic. The historian has been accused of straying from historicalfact, of seeking to define the undefinable and therefore turning to the comforters of theGreeks – to myth, exaggeration and narrative.

But for too long Clark’s work has been tainted by the pursuit of those eager to discredit

him. This paper recognises The History’s value and driving influence in the development ofAustralian history, and re-examines Clark’s use of narrative, myth and philosophy in thecreation of an Australian identity. It asks whether Clark was able to solve his own puzzle,posited in 1979, that ‘there must be some reason why in the twentieth century we find itmore difficult to answer the question: what is the identity of an Australian?’ (M Clark,1980b:16). I suggest, with Richard White, that images of national identity are alwaysinventions, and that there is nothing unusual in a national history of the past being writtenand studied in order to serve the present. As White notes, ‘When we look at ideas aboutnational identity … we need to ask, not whether they are true or false, but what their functionis, whose creation they are, and whose interests they serve’ (White, 1981:viii). I argue thatClark’s concern lay with the inner monologue of the nation, the guiding influence of humannature in history and his unyielding, Dostoyevskyan conviction that all history is tragedy.

History, Myth and the Ancient Paradigm

Historical discourse of any form will in some way doff its cap to the works of the Ancients,and history will forever be linked to narrative, to myth and to the legends it allows a readerto imagine and believe in. Heroes of Ancient Greek mythology and historiography such asHomer, Herodotus and Thucydides are planted into the fabric of historical pursuits, andhave provided a template to which not only novice scholars of history but also experiencedhistorians, novelists, reporters and the like so often turn before attempting their ownstudies. Homer wrote mythos, a narrative retelling and explanation of life’s events andcircumstances. We can assume that Homer’s poetry reflected existing oral histories andtraditions, and his works became the means by which the Ancient Greeks preserved theirway of life. The mythic offered a structure they enjoyed; it was a touchstone, a way ofunderstanding and explaining the natural world; it gave meaning to life and providedexplanations of events and ideological movements. In the mythic interpretation, life wascyclical, predictable and ordered; it was intuitive, not intellectual.

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The historian’s affection for myth has been variously enunciated. The need to map time, ourtime, to mark a path of nationhood, and the desire to make heavy our footsteps in the past

lies deep in Western culture. One could comment that the genesis for the mythos of KingArthur and his Round Table was the need to create for the Medieval Britons a worthy andnoble national history that pre-dated Roman and Norman invasion – to prove to a widerEurope, and to the Britons themselves, that they possessed as much bravado and as louda dialogue with the (Christian) divine as their conquerors. Manning Clark suggested in1979 that human suffering was ‘one of the reasons why human beings build mythologies.They create mythologies to make life both intelligible and bearable. A mythology explainsboth creation and the existence of evil in the world: mythology is mankind’s great comforter’(M. Clark, 1980b:20). Mythologies are created to cherish a moment and provide a roadmap for social development.

Myth and Young Australia

In Australia, the myth of the Anzac soldier has become folklore, a symbol from whichnational identity was forged and contemporary patriotic sentiment is promoted. It is thisnation’s most favoured and accessible national story. The Anzac experience at Gallipoliwas not only a tragically flawed military episode, it was a baptism of fire for the people ofAustralia – the first time a truly Australian corps had played on the field of battle and hadnot gone wanting, and the first time details and names of Australian dead appeared in thedaily papers in great numbers.

The reports posted first by Briton Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and later by official Australianhistorian C.E.W. Bean detailed brave and heroic acts, confidence in the face of battle anda fierce loyalty to Empire. Lists of the dead, wounded and missing ran alongside stories ofvalour, achievement and sacrifice. The legend was secure and young Australia, justfourteen years passed Federation, could hold her head proud on the world stage. The firstnewspaper stories spoke of a romantic Gallipoli where Allied troops were making inroadsin battle and where only hundreds had fallen, not the thousands who actually perished. Thebrutality and reality of war did not enter the myth and had not yet reached the understandingof those on the home front.

It did not matter. Australians were captivated and comforted by the propaganda of war andAnzac is a legend as difficult to debunk as explaining to a group of school children thatJohn Simpson was not an Australian. By the early-1920s the Anzac reputation wasinviolable. During that period, reports from British command and personal accounts of April25th revealed ‘debilitating errors of planning and command, that there was great confusionamong both staff and soldiers, and that by the afternoon the men at the front, confused,exhausted and exposed to enemy shrapnel and counter-attacks, were suffering terriblestress’ (Thomson, 1991:7). Correspondents and historians in Britain were not exposed tothe great legend Anzac had become and did not recognise how integral it now was to anation rebuilding after war and struggling to manage with its devastating effect on the homefront. The legend represented much more than a military offensive and it was to be faithfullydefended, despite stories of desertion, straggling soldiers and shirkers. That Australiansoldiers fought hard and earned the respect of the Allied Forces meant even more. TheFirst World War affected nearly every Australian town and city and memorials to fallensoldiers outnumber those anywhere else in the world. Anzac was so celebrated because itwas a myth, or an ideal, that was tangible and accessible. The Australian experiencebefore this had been segmented, class-based and specific to the pre-Federation states.

As much as we create myth to understand the world we live in and to glorify the past,episodes in our history that place an uncomfortable pea under our mattress can be glossedover or omitted – if to suit a purpose. The histories taught at Australian schools anduniversities during the 1960s and 1970s, for example, reflected the social and politicalfabric – to create an understanding of national identity and to support policies of economicdevelopment and White Australia. Frontier conflict, Aboriginal Australia and the role of

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women in Australian history were pushed to the sidelines, if mentioned at all. Marilyn Lakenotes: ‘It was a story of white men’s achievements: no Aborigines mentioned by name …Women feature in the index between wombats and wool, with the entries for the latter morenumerous’ (Lake, 2003:162).

Yet there is nothing unusual in a national history of the past written and studied in order toserve the present. Nineteenth century nationalism was the domain of the white, pastoralmale and Australia promoted itself as the Workingman’s Paradise. ‘A voyage to Australiais the working man’s only road to the future’ (White, 1981:41) was a cry loud enough toreach those on the British Isles and Asia in search of a gold rush fortune. So was thepromise of better food, a warmer climate and working class affluence. 1888 Centenarycelebrations heralded the successes of the nation and its abounding comforts, but theywere the successes and comforts of the employed white man and did not extend to theunskilled, to women, or to children. The 1901 constitution ignored the minority Aboriginalpopulation entirely.

Prime Minister Billy Hughes stayed on for sixteen months in Europe following the end of theFirst World War as he set about constructing his view of post-war Australia. While somehad flirted with republican ideas in the late nineteenth century, Federation in 1901, the warand Hughes’ commitment to and reliance upon Imperial defence of the region left the nationfettered to Britain. As Holt asserts, ‘The fierce innocence of 1888, when radicals could stilldream of an Australia whose destiny was not tied to Europe’s, was gone forever’ (Holt,1999:201). Hughes projected his ideal for Australia at the Versailles peace summit in 1919by petitioning that German New Guinea be restricted from Japanese migrants. He claimedto be speaking for ‘some 60,000 dead’ (Nairn & Serle, 1983:398), and that his move wasessential to the defence of Australia – a White Australia. The glimpse of republicansentiment in the late-nineteenth century had done little to sway common feeling in thecolonies, and it was clear that Australian national identity was as the Earth revolving aroundthe British Sun. The convict heritage of the first generations of Australian-born wassublimated with an innate British respectability, and the stain of convict blood was seen asa mark of impurity until well after transportations were abolished in the 1850s, as ‘fewrespectable native-born Australians had the confidence not to quail when real Englishmenspoke of their convict heritage’ (Hughes, 1986:xii). This is where the Anzac legend foundfurther resonance; the Australians’ baptism of fire cleansed them of the persistent shame oftheir convict past.

Into the twentieth century the Workingman’s Paradise became the Lucky Country, but theimage of Australia was relatively unchanged. Many in the working class succeeded inattaining the material comforts of home ownership and a new model Holden, but race,gender and class divisions drew a heavy mark through the Australian landscapedistinguishing ‘us’ and ‘them’. Some believed that in signing the Federation constitutionAustralia had merely tightened its ties to Britain and that the young nation had failed toestablish itself as anything more than a satellite colony. Where the post-war years hadprovided a period of wholesome and nostalgic attachment to the motherland, economicdepression in the 1930s exposed the tyranny of distance and demanded the nation ‘growup’. Global conflict in 1939 again drew the nation to war and forged new alliances withforeign superpowers. Australia’s history as much as her identity continued to be composedsomeplace else. As Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, the reasons for a historycurriculum that sought its stories elsewhere was ‘that there seemed to be so little in ourearly history to which we could point with pride. "History" meant great men, stirring deeds,useful discoveries and worthy sacrifices; our history was short of these. This made us evenmore anxious about our worth as Australians’ (Hughes, 1986, 12).

Australian Histories

Studies of Australian history can be said to fit in one of two boats: the left and the right. Thisdistinction could also be framed as the republican versus the monarchist, or the nationalist

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and the British loyalist. The period from the late 1850s through the 1890s was a time whenthe understanding of an Australian ‘national identity’ grew increasingly polarised. On oneside these decades were a turning point borne of a renewed sense of nationalist fervour.Dissimilarity from the mother country ‘played a part in institutionalising iconicrepresentations of "the Australian" and imprinting national values … Bushrangers,pioneers, swagmen also featured in this sunburnt, truly Australian landscape of droughts,floods and bushfires’ (Smith & West, 2003:640). The Bulletin magazine emerged as a(then) platform for republican and libertarian sentiment at a time when the movementtoward Federation was embraced as an opportunity for self-definition and independencebased on the United States experience. But this opportunity was greatly unrealised, asthose in the other, louder, camp sang intolerant policies and held a preference for Empire.The open-arms welcome once synonymous with the Workingman’s Paradise faded duringthe 1860s with the advances of the new industrialised world, and the many Chinese whohad found wealth on the goldfields and made Australia their home were shunned by thosewho believed Australia should remain true to its colonial origins: a land, society and culturereserved for the white man and his descendants living peacefully under the watchful eye ofthe Crown. Clark observed, ‘The believers in the brotherhood of man and equality of all inthe sight of God were silent. So the men who believed that the unity of labour was the hopeof the world united with the apostles of Christian civilisation to preserve Australia for thewhite man’ (M Clark, 2006:234).

A united understanding of identity had never been realised and was unlikely to emerge.Ideological and political pursuits of the twentieth century – post-colonialism, socialism, theLabor Party split of 1916, Menzies’ referendum to dissolve the Communist Party ofAustralia in 1951, the Whitlam Dismissal in 1975 – cut a swathe through the vision ofAustralian nationalism. Each side pledged a nation founded on democratic institutions andthe idea of the ‘fair go’. They embraced equally the larrikin tradition and significance ofAnzac and colonial heritage. Yet one side had broken with Britain while the other remainedher most loyal servant. Clark wrote in 1950 that ‘[t]he first settlement of Australia byEuropeans was an episode in British History’ (M Clark, 1973:1), and throughout thetwentieth century an equal share of Australian identity was built upon this belief as was bythe party who rejected it. In recent times, and especially since the failure of the republicanreferendum in 1999, the polarity of the two schools of thought has again manifested – asnotalgia for Empire increases in one camp, the other continues to question why the fathersof Federation didn’t strike a better deal.

The history we read and practice in schools is, generally speaking, one that thegovernment in power chooses to advocate. Richard White reminds us that images ofnational identity are inventions: ‘When we look at ideas about national identity … we needto ask, not whether they are true or false, but what their function is, whose creation they are,and whose interests they serve’ (White, 1981:viii). In 1996 The Courier-Mail newspaperalleged that Manning Clark had been awarded the Soviet Union’s highest honour, theOrder of Lenin, some time in the 1970s and that he was an ‘agent of influence’ during theCold War. Although doused quite swiftly as unfounded and unsupportable claims, theMail’s posthumous case against Clark pushed the historian into the headlines where hebecame the subject of academic and political polemic. Attacks on Clark’s ‘leftist’ analysisof Australian history found new, albeit shaky, ground while his defenders recited their oft-spoken support. The attacks were not unusual. In that same year then Australian ForeignMinister Alexander Downer declined to present Clark’s six-volume History of Australia to aUnited States university, preferring a biography of Sir John Monash (McKenna, 1998; seealso Holt, 1999:233 and Macintyre & Clark, 2004:68). For decades Clark had been thesubject of historical controversy in this country; he was too negative of Australia’s past forthose on the right, yet often seen as a ‘fence sitter’ (McQueen, 1997:74) by those on the farleft.

Australia’s latest History Wars, spurred by Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication ofAboriginal History (2002) and the Howard Government’s Australian History Summit in

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August 2006, have given capital-H History a renewed public profile as debate over anational curriculum and contests of political principles rage. Within this debate the twoschools of thought have presented themselves in a new guise – those wearing a blackarmband, and those with a white blindfold. The History Wars indicate just how much politicsentwines itself with history:

Rising in the House of Representatives, [Prime Minister] Bob Hawke moved‘That this house expresses its deep regret at the death, on 23 May 1991, ofEmeritus Professor Manning Clark, AC, and tenders its profound sympathy tohis family in their bereavement’. … John Hewson, the Opposition leader,suggested that Clark might have taken an unduly tragic view of Australianhistory; David Kemp observed that he had neglected the market economy andrejected the British heritage. Both joined John Carlton in expressing their deeprespect for his art and his vision … Five years later a new prime minister, JohnHoward, said that he had always had ‘a less than rapturous view of the ManningClark view of Australian history’, and found the ‘cultural rapture of the Left’ for it‘rather nauseating’. ‘It’s too negative’, he explained, and accused Clark of tryingto generate ‘pessimism about Australia’ through ‘his black armband view’(Macintyre & Clark, 2004:50-51).

Manning Clarke and Australian Identity

So much has been written about Clark and about his six-volume A History of Australia thatthere is no need to add to the oeuvre of critique. Instead it is worth asking if hisachievement has been as successful in illuminating a national identity as Clark had hoped.Was he able to solve his own puzzle, posited in 1979, that ‘there must be some reason whyin the twentieth century we find it more difficult to answer the question: what is the identity ofan Australian?’ (M Clark, 1980b:16).

If a historical discourse nourishes an audience with an accurate understanding of an event,a movement or a moment in time, then we may claim it has been a successful endeavour.In Clark’s case, his historical writings are too often secondary to attacks on his reputation.As Stuart Macintyre concluded in The History Wars, ‘the quality of that work and its validityas an interpretation of Australian history were less important than the public figure whocame to stand for a highly politicised view of the national past’ (Macintyre & Clark,2004:71). A contemporary revision of Clark is therefore necessary, to acknowledge thecritics but to put them aside, and recognise The History’s value and driving influence in thedevelopment of Australian history. Revisiting the volumes will also enable us to discoverwhy Clark has been so instrumental to understanding Australian national identity.

Yet it has become impossible to extricate Manning Clark the man from Manning Clark thework. When assessing the figure of the Australian that Clark produced, we must also lookat the character he came to be. Clark’s six volumes, published between 1962 and 1987,brought many honours and an esteemed reputation, but they also brought scepticism of thework’s accuracy and endless, heated discussions of whether the narrative should beembraced as historical document. From the late-1960s Clark moved on from the stable ofacademic journals and found fame in the media – television, radio and the press – andenjoyed regular appearances there until his death. He became a public intellectual and wasidentified most commonly with the controversy surrounding his History. At least 16,000copies have been sold of each of Clark’s volumes but it is unknown if Australian familiesread the tomes or if they were purchased and placed unread on bookshelves as an act ofperceived patriotism. Either way, to Clark the quest had been charged – answer thequestion of who Australians are, and articulate their true inner character.

Manning Clark (the man) is a complicated icon. The final volumes of the History show Clark‘increasingly enunciat[ing] a view of Australia which was tinged with Biblical gloom andprophetic fears’ (Matthews, 1996:14). He depicted characters of Australian history as

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strong individuals troubled by tragic flaws, and this reflects his own (public) persona. Hewas identified with the political left and his outrage at the 1975 Whitlam Dismissal sparkeda fire in Clark’s belly that was never doused, and did little to sweeten his already temperedrelationship with the conservatives. But before this, following his inaugural lecture atCanberra University College in June 1954, Clark was heralded as offering the launch of ‘acounter-revolution in Australian historiography’ (Bridge, 2001), that explored and espousedthe ongoing European sway in Australian society and questioned the weight of influence(then) given to mateship, the bush and the battler – principles of those nineteenth centuryradicals Clark would later come to indicate as crucial to this national identity. Clarkbelieved his task was to fill ‘the lacuna of the twentieth century – written up by theEstablishment boys of the Left’ (M Clark, c.1953, NLA), and Peter Coleman, former editorof the Bulletin, saw that by questioning orthodox assumptions Clark ‘did more than anyoneelse to release historians from the prison of the radical interpretation and to begin thesystematic study of the neglected themes in history, especially religion’ (Coleman, 1962:7).

Journeys to Europe and Asia in the late 1950s as fieldwork research for Sources of

Australian History (1957) had much influence upon Clark’s personal ideology and futureapproach to historical endeavour. He did not move to focus on the themes Coleman hadsuggested, instead returning to Canberra armed with the idea for the then two-volume

History of Australia. What began in 1953 as a need to revise and restate the instruction ofAustralian history and reject the earlier historical schools – the Nationalist, the Academicand the Left Wing (M Clark, c.1953, NLA) – became a rejection of progressive, ormaterialist, historiography. Clark turned to concentrate on the guiding influence of humannature in history and his unyielding, Dostoyevskyan conviction that all history is tragedy.

When crafting the History, Clark wrote:

To be great as literature – the aim of all historians – [the work] must be writtenby someone who has something to say about human nature, but above all, itmust be written by someone who has pondered deeply over the problems of lifeand death. Like the fox in the Greek fragment, the historian must know manythings, but like the hedgehog, he must know but one thing – and feel it deeply(M Clark, 1980a).

In retirement Manning Clark reconciled the difficulties of writing history as narrative throughan understanding that the lives he told were not the sheep and the cattle of the socialscientists’ output; he understood rather that he was communicating ‘a vision of life … [he]believed in the Australia that was coming to be, that we here could contribute towardsending the "old-world errors, wrongs and lies"’ (M Clark, 1988b:53, 56). For Clark this wasnon-negotiable. His study was guided by the belief that he needed a ‘bank of his ownexcitements and disappointments, his success and heartbreaks, before he could writehistory as art – before he could write about the inner life of others, informing their world withthe shared experience of his life’ (McKenna, 2007:27). This focus on the personal, thehuman and the tragic fuelled criticisms of the History from both the academy and the widermedia. Studies of the psyche differentiated him from the ‘radical left’, and noticeable flawsin his historical analysis, combined with a reluctance to consider economic and culturalmovements, prompted attacks of Clark’s methodology. He focussed on ‘men of greatdeeds’ and omitted women and Aborigines from history, he got dates wrong andanachronisms are easily spotted – he has Governor William Bligh shake hands with a manthree years dead, he awarded Phar Lap too many Melbourne Cups, and in recent times we

have learnt Clark placed himself in an erroneous scenario. He manipulated and stretchedthe boundaries of erudite historical norms; he strayed far from the domain of capital-HHistory; he rarely read the work of contemporaries and did not respond to his critics.

In his 1962 Bulletin review, ‘History Without Facts’, MH Ellis outlined inaccuracies inVolume I of the History ranging from the departure point of the First Fleet to the name of theship the Macarthurs sailed on. Clark did not respond to Ellis’ letter and rarely revised hisworks to correct factual errors. Ellis and Clark shared a strained relationship and following

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the Bulletin article Ellis published frequent commentary outlining flaws in Clark’s work,amongst other writer-historians of the Left. Ellis found little professional reward in hispursuit of Clark, learning instead that, more often than not, a critique or review was apersonal attack rather than a comment based on one’s work. In "Being There. The strangehistory of Manning Clark", Mark McKenna narrates his discovery when reading Clark’sletters and diaries that it was impossible for the historian to have witnessed events of

Kristallnacht in 1938 Germany as he had recalled, and that he had used the experienceand memory of his wife, Dymphna, and claimed them as his own. ‘I felt a sense of disbeliefand disappointment at having been misled … [believing] the historian, of all people, wouldnot play with the truth in such a way’ (McKenna, 2007:31). But this incident could be anaccidental appropriation of another’s memory, as much as it could be a trait of the author:‘Typical Manning – theatrical, playful, pulling your leg’ claimed a novelist friend.

Antagonism toward Clark reflected the paradigm shift of late-1960s and 1970s Australiathat saw those in Whitlam’s ‘cultural revolution’ fighting Menzies/Fraser-era conservatives.Clark was attacked for a lack of patriotism. Establishment critics claimed he dwelled tooheavily on dark passages of Australia’s past and did not consider the great achievementsof the colonisers. Conversely his break from the imperial-centred past tapped into an anti-British post-colonial sentiment gaining popularity in camps on the left, and of the newmobile working classes. The crux of his complaints with post-Federation Australia was nottied up in a black armband, rather in his belief that the nation had failed to fulfil its potential.Clark saw an Australia that remained shackled to the British past, with a constitution thathad been installed in 1901 and remained unchanged and unchallenged since then.Australians were without a unique, tangible identity. Any identity that existed drifted inuncertainty – it relished the opportunities of multiculturalism and shaking off WhiteAustralia, yet struggled to define and understand its British heritage. Clark noted that ‘bythe second quarter of the twentieth century Australians had grown out of the traditions andattitudes handed down from the past. They were remote from the lag of convict tradition,that tradition of glorying in crime, of making heroes out of bushrangers’ (M Clark,1980b:15), and that each of the states bore an identity and concerns of its own. ‘In NewSouth Wales there was a vested interest in free trade; in Victoria there was a vestedinterest in protection. New South Wales was a convict colony; South Australia was not.New South Wales and Queensland played Rugby football; the other colonies playedAustralian Rules’ (M Clark, 2006:216). Could these differences ever be consolidated toform something resembling the ‘Australian’?

Clark did not attack the colonisers, nor did he present a vision of Australia that hisaudience would be shamed to read, and he did not champion what has come to be knownas the black armband view. What he did was recognise the need for a revision of the past,and in doing so popularised a critical reading of Australian history (McKenna, 2003:366).Clark saw that Australians were ‘ready to face the truth about our past, to acknowledge thatthe coming of the British was the occasion of three great evils: the violence against theoriginal inhabitants of the country, the Aborigines; the violence against the first EuropeanLabor force in Australia, the convicts; and the violence done to the land itself’ (M Clark1988a:12). In his 1988 Boyer Lecture redress Clark acknowledged his regret for theabsence of Aboriginals and women in his histories: ‘I told only a part of what is possibilitythe greatest human tragedy in the history of Australia – the confrontation between the whiteman and the Aborigine. That, I believe, will probably fill the centre of the stage when thenext historian tells the story of human beings in Australia’ (M Clark, 1988b:56). Oncontemporary themes of the black armband view Clark spoke with characteristic, propheticintensity: ‘The fear of inferiority, of being condemned to a lowly position in the great chain ofbeing, became one of the ghosts which haunt us from the past. Our country is full of suchghosts – the ghost of what our ancestors did to the Aboriginals, of what they did to the land,the ghosts of convictism, the ghost of foreign wars. We must live with our ghosts as best wecan’ (M Clark, 1980b:9). But he did not contribute to the vast collections of the emerging,determined enquiries on the Stolen Generations, land rights claims and frontier conflict. Heleft that to both his contemporaries and to the next wave, the postmodern school – Geoffrey

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Blainey, Bill Stanner, Windschuttle, Inga Clendinnen, Richard Broome and Ann Curthoysamong others.

The black armband debate positions Australian history writing in two camps and creates adiametric opposition. Since Blainey coined the phrase at his 1993 Sir John LathamMemorial Lecture, critical observations of the past have been cloaked with a black shroud.As Anna Clark observes, ‘to imply that revision is inherently critical or biased is tomisunderstand the way the past is continually re-evaluated’ (A Clark, 2002:2). The historianmust apply new knowledge, discoveries, endeavours and ideologies to his or her study.Acknowledging and allowing a ‘black’ consideration of the Australian past expands thebreadth of historical focus and enriches our understanding. The term ‘critical’ does thestudy a disservice; it is a misnomer commonly misconstrued as ‘negative’. Clark cannot beforgiven for omitting crucial aspects of Australian national history, yet it would be short-

sighted to discredit the ongoing impact of his History on this basis alone.

Historical pursuits, as ever, reflect the ideology of the Federal Government. GeoffreyBlainey charged Manning Clark and Prime Minister Paul Keating with promoting the blackarmband view and not surprisingly the most recent attack on Clark began with the changeof Federal Government in 1996, and mirrors the climate of Howard’s Australia. For in anAustralia with flagpoles in every schoolyard ‘there is no room for those who wonder whetherthey "belong" or dare to doubt the legitimacy of the national project. We are "free to beproud of our country" but we are not free to repudiate our country’ (McKenna, 2003:383).To use Blainey’s own metaphor – the pendulum of Australian history swings from black towhite; from attacks on Clark to attacks on Blainey and back again. We can reflect andpraise, but we cannot question or intend indifference. The 2007 Anzac model, not the 1915vision, is testimony to this.

Conclusion

Manning Clark’s A History of Australia reflects the modernist method of the post-warintellectual milieu and many of the preconceptions and concerns of his era. It is the role ofthe historian not to judge the past against contemporary standards but to reflect from aretrospective advantage, to use the staircase of time to survey the landscape of all that hascome before. Clark has been called a ‘travesty of a historian’ who strayed so far from thestructures of ‘history’ that he is best labelled a novelist, and that his greatest works werecompleted before he began the six-volume History. He is judged, often furiously, bycontemporary norms by critics who fail to see his works as one man’s aesthetic,passionate, yet nonetheless considered rendering.

Manning Clark believed myth telling is used as a comfort when we are unable to pinpointsomething tangible, authentic and truly ours. Neither Clark nor his work could bepigeonholed in the way that his antecedents and contemporaries could: Keith Hancock (tooradical), Henry Lawson (a drunk radical), Blainey (too conservative) and Ellis (an envious,‘honorary’ academic). Clark’s exposure in the media increased the spread of his works,while friendships with prominent intellectuals and performers – Patrick White, BarryHumphries – pushed his vision of Australia even further, aggravating detractors. Hissympathy for Gough Whitlam’s desire to ‘revolutionise’ Australia’s reputation as a culturalwasteland was welcomed, especially in the decade after the great exodus of youngAustralians to Britain and the United States.

Manning Clark’s oeuvre has had long-lasting influence. Each of his papers, lectures,studies and personal reflections mirrors the last, and undoubtedly, his works cannot bedeemed those of a ‘fact-grabbing’ historian. But that was never Clark’s intention. Hisobsession with the personal, the tragic was as much an attempt at self-definition as it wasto discover the ‘Australian identity’ and he spoke through the voices of literary heroes –Dostoyevsky, Lawson, Tolstoy – rather than any scholar of historical expertise. Clark’sdiagnosis of the true, inner character of ‘Australianness’ was not one proud of the

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pioneering progress of the nineteenth century, he did not glorify a peaceful reputation of thesettler communities, nor did he champion war heroes. His diagnosis is incomplete andremains as ill defined as the identity itself. Clark’s concern lay with the inner monologue ofthe nation and attempted to clarify what could not be done – to attempt an explanation forwhat is abjured, ambivalent and constructed could never be articulated. So in seeking todefine the undefinable, he turned to the comforters of the Greeks – to myth, to exaggerationand to narrative.

References

Carl Bridge (ed.) (1994). Manning Clark. Essays on his Place in History (MelbourneUniversity Press: Melbourne)

Carl Bridge (2001). "Clark, (Charles) Manning Hope", The Oxford Companion toAustralian History, ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Oxford

University Press: Oxford Reference Online, State Library of Victoria,http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t127.e320;accessed 6 June, 2007)

Anna Clark (2002). "History in Black and White: a critical analysis of the Black Armband

debate", in Richard Nile (ed.). Country: Journal of Australian Studies no 75 (University ofQueensland Press: St Lucia)

Manning Clark (c.1953). Notes, undated, "The rewriting of Australian History" in Papers ofManning Clark, Series 27, Folder 67 (National Library of Australia)

Manning Clark (c.1953). Ideas on Australian history, 18 March 1953 – 22 June 1945(Notebook), Papers of Manning Clark, Series 3, Folder 24 (National Library of Australia)

Manning Clark (1973/1950). Select Documents in Australian History, 1788-1850,selected and edited (Angus & Robertson: Sydney)

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