Manning Clark (1915–1991)

I care a lot for Clark's six-volume History, which I'm reading seriously and completely for the first time since I was young. Clark is the original wordy, mothball-smelling professor, with so much knowledge and so many thoughts bursting out that he is not afraid of any tangent, or of potentially boring the passer-by. His style is distinctive, and not for everyone, and even then he's not especially interested in worrying about the reader wants so much as in what he thinks they need. And I show more love him for it.

Here, Clark explores the first fifty years after Captain Cook stumbled across Australia, with a worthy prologue examining other passing exchanges between Europeans and the Great Southern Continent, and thoughts on why the landmass had not previously been conquered by the warring Asian and Muslim nations and groups who had fought on the other side of the Torres Strait.

Clark's history is often angry, astounded even by the utterly cruel treatment of convicts, the Indigenous, and those who dared to be different or to advocate for equality rather than aristocracy. (Within mere years of Europeans colonising a small part of Australia, there is a growing self-declared nobility who want to make sure few others have access to what they have.) Conservatives live to point out areas where Clark becomes more of a novelist than an historian, or where he lets his own bugbears get the better of him. But that is part of why I enjoy Clark. He is pinning history to a narrative to create an understanding of how we got to where we were in 1788, and from there to the present day. Clark's history should by no means be taken as the definitive source text on Australia, but then neither should Geoffrey Blainey's admired History which - for all its merits - seeks to excuse earlier behaviour on the grounds that "people back then thought a certain way", while Clark seeks to explain it... and also perhaps ask the thornier question: if there were people (including women and Indigenous Australians) who thought a different way, can we fully excuse those who didn't listen? (The same question touches us when we talk about the early Anglo-Americans and their slave ownership, or for that matter modern Australians who argue harsh penalties for refugees fleeing war and terror. If others are making vocal cases in support of these dispossessed groups, how much can we excuse the ignorance of those who make the opposite case? How will history judge them?)

Clark has three great strengths. First, his extensive research. The historian was known for his in-depth analysis of source texts of Australia's first century under European rule, and here he has immaculately combed the archives to present a more well-rounded picture of the early Australia than most novelists or pop historians can hope to offer. Second, his sharp, bitter irony. Clark prefers not to use quotation marks, instead to immerse us in the ways of thinking of his protagonists. This can occasionally be confronting to the casual reader I'm sure (to hear descriptions of "savages" and the like, not to mention those dastardly Catholics!) but creates a world in which, as we come to understand why early settlers - especially white Protestant men - acted the way they did, we also grasp how their world, like any world, was a mostly closed system of thought, indoctrinating a way of thinking that most could not escape from no matter what evidence was presented. (We are all like that, whether redneck or hipster, and let's not forget it.) Clark's conservative enemies like to seize upon this irony as bias, but it should be noted that the historian treats everyone with the same barbed brush. No-one escapes his ravenlike abilities of observation and dissection.

And, thirdly, Manning Clark's strength is in his description. This book, with its appendices of populations and landholders, positively reeks of late 18th century Australia. One comes away with a deep appreciation of what life was like in the Colony of New South Wales between 1788 and 1830, the people, the determination, the bustle, the smell, the fervour, the plotting, and the uncertainties, cultural and otherwise.

A vital history of a young country that is still discovering what our future is supposed to be, and how we can reckon with a past that threatens to overwhelm our present. show less

Manning Clark was a true Australian great, although I'll be honest and say the 4-stars could easily have slipped down to a 3. This is the volume that Geoffrey Dutton (contemporaneously with this history's publication in 1980) called the masterpiece of the set in his wonderful The Australian Collection: Australia's Greatest Books. I think, if nothing else, it's certainly emblematic of the set.

Clark details Australia's history from the days of the gold rush and Eureka Stockade in the 1850s, show more to the celebrations for the country's centenary in 1888. It is a period in which Australians are beginning to argue about whether to federate the states, are beginning to move away from the Catholic/Protestant divide, and in which the typical white enemies like the Irish and the English face their first threats from non-Anglo migration. It is, of course, the high watermark of the British Empire under Queen Victoria, but also a time of much crisis in Europe and the USA.

Clark - an alarmingly skilled historian - had spent his later life combing the archives of Australia to find the stories of individuals from all levels of life. He is criticised by conservative historians for his focus on the negative, for his vision of Australia as a struggle for power in which those without get trampled in the dirt, be they the Irish, women, Aboriginals, Chinese immigrants, the poor, or the convicts. I can hardly profess to being impartial when I say that I dispute their argument. It has always been clear that power resides in the hands of the few, and even now at the end of the 2010s we watch as many of the same battles play out in new (but strikingly similar) arenas.

That is not to clear Clark of accusations of bias, of course not. He was - especially later in life - a victim of his world view, and determined to present it. This is a rambling history (polite people would say 'sprawling') filled with his love of lengthy sentences and the desire to quote - and footnote - everyone from Aeschylus to Dickens. (I haven't read the abridged one-volume version of Clark, but I can see its appeal!) Nevertheless for me, the literary nature of this history is part of its glory. It can't replace those that attempt to be impartial, or those that provide worthy if conservative viewpoints (Clark's great frenemy Geoffrey Blainey being the obvious example). Or even, I suppose, other great progressive historians such as Robert Hughes. But it is an important, pressing, beautifully outraged addition to the canon. Clark asks us - most importantly - to remember that no tradition is there because it is so. No. Traditions, cultures, aristocracies: they all emerge from the power struggle and that seemingly eternal desire of those who have made it in the door to close it rapidly behind them.

As an example, my 2019 self was struck by this passage, written in the late 1970s, referring to the transition in the 1850s from solo gold prospectors (most of whom never made a cent, or pissed away small winnings on a night's drinking) to corporate, industrial mining:
"In the eyes of the digger, companies, capital and machinery in their colossal proportions, threatened the 'whole cherished vocation of individual mining', and his freedom of action. Those who continued to wield the pick and the shovel became like men who had been superseded by the march of human progress. They became lost, bewildered and frightened men who were just as wild in their fears as they had been previously in their hopes... Henceforth they looked for a scapegoat on which to explode that anger of men who had asked for bread and been offered a stone. At the same time as they feared the loss of their economic freedom, they became afraid that those men in high places were plotting to deprive them of another freedom - their freedom as men."

No wonder, when Patrick White was reading these books, he remarked: "Interesting to see how we have remained the same pack of snarling mongrel dogs." show less

(review from 2020, don't know why it's showing up here as a later date.

At last, I emerge out the other end of Manning Clark's monumental history of Australia, charting the land from the arrival of the 17th and 18th century European explorers (and before) through to the fiercely contested 1930s. Clocking in at around 2,700 pages, and filled with dense rhetorical tangents, it has been quite a journey. So, how does Volume VI hold up?

To the positive: the first half of this volume is one of the show more strongest sections of the entire history - although that's partly the fault of the people who made the stories in the first place! WWI was a contentious period for Aussies, with two hotly debated referenda on whether to force army conscription, and the years immediately following the War were a time of national consolidation, as the "founding fathers" of the Australian parliament were gradually replaced by a new generation, with vastly differing aims on what they wanted the country to be. What Clark uncovers in the 1920s and early '30s is a fiercely divided Australia, one that perhaps wouldn't look that different to the culture wars of 2020! The "Left" was increasingly split between, on the one hand, Communists and their sympathisers, inspired by the revolution in Russia and elsewhere, who recognised that Australia's sycophantic ties to Britain were also ties to entrenched inequality and classism, and on the other, the traditional Labor supporters who wanted to direct the country in a progressive direction without terrifying the pearl-clutching moralists. Particularly engaging is the discussion on the challenges facing Australian trade and exports in the years leading up to the Great Depression, as centrist Labor argued that wages had to come down to save the country, while union strongholds refused to budge by so much as a cent. The immediate outcome was that Labor would remain almost exclusively in the political wilderness (at a federal level) until the 1970s, while the later outcome (not chronicled here) was the great schism of the Australian Labor Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

Meanwhile, across the aisle, Australia's conservatives took longer to get themselves organised. Indeed the two "great" pre-WWI conservative Prime Ministers, Hughes and Lyons, were both former Labor men who proved traitors to the cause! The conservatives were - as they still are - better at working together because of their shared goal of keeping the common people in their place, and as such the narrative here is focused just as much on the rise of the Country Party, which would be a thorn in the conservatives' side - in one guise or another - for a century to come.

Clark writes with his usual rhetorical flourishes (constant repetitions of phrases or quotes, such as the titular young tree green remind one almost of Homer!) and his powerful sense of moral righteousness. Sometimes those rhetorical touches are a tad dramatic here (during a factual paragraph on Billy Hughes' cockiness shortly before his political demise, the narrative voice adds: "Laugh on, laugh on, for retribution is not far away"). His strengths are in his insight of human character and his lifelong love of combing through dull archives in search of the moment of pathos or exasperation. And the nation really was exasperating. When Scullin decided to elect an Australian-born Governor-General, the conservative half of the country lost their minds; King George wasn't well pleased either. Most Australians agreed we didn't deserve a native-born head of state, but apparently it was gauche to even have a native-born representative of that head of state! And always, buried just below the surface, are the reminders that very little of what progressives fight for in the 21st century is new. By the 1930s there were Australians fiercely arguing for women's rights, sexual freedom, pacificism, Aboriginal rights, the raising up of the poor, republicanism, even gay rights, codes of conduct for politicians, and a world order that prioritised kindness and ethics. Arguably the only one of those that succeeded in the 20th century was sexual freedom, and unsurprisingly that was the one item that was of advantage to the straight white men of the world also!

No doubt had Clark been a younger man, he would have continued the history for another volume beyond 1935. But he could not do so, and thus was stuck with a story that could not reach its ending. As a result, he threads through this book the early life stories of John Curtin and Robert Menzies, the most iconic Labor and Liberal (conservative) PMs of their generation, men who would be defined by this era and would go on to rule the next. This almost obsessive focus on "great men", on politics, is a far cry from the mission statement in Volume I of this series, which treated the ordinary convict and settler with as much importance as Arthur Phillip himself. Perhaps Clark had little choice; the possible strands had broadened substantially from 1788, of course, but nevertheless it feels a bit like tunnel vision. As a detailed history of the rise of the Labor and Communist movements in the country, and of the backroom sagas that dominated the reigns of Hughes, Scullin, Bruce, and Lyons, it's worth noting. 100 years on, however, one sometimes feels that we have missed the trees for the woods.

As no-one has reviewed this text on Goodreads, I'm going to list the negative or unusual elements of this, before I wrap up with my positive conclusion!
First, there is a good deal of assumed knowledge. Writers and sportspeople from Australian history pop up, but often only for a paragraph, and sometimes without any introduction. They appear as figures experiencing history, perhaps with quotes from their letters or works, but to many of my generation - and certainly almost all non-Australians - the resonance of these passages will be non-existent without context.
By a similar notion, Clark will sometimes use passing details as colour, but one is left to wonder why. For instance, when reporting the results of a particular election night, he notes that six seats were undecided [on the night]. Well, great, but it's been 95 years, we surely know who won them now. Wouldn't it be more helpful to give us full numbers? Later, he mentions the Southern Cloud crash, the first airliner crash in Australia (and, I believe, one of the first in the world), but he gives just enough information to be tantalising without explaining what happened - the lengthy search, the epic narrative of the plane being found years later, the deaths of those onboard. It must already have been fairly vague history in 1987; to evade the details seems lazy at best.
There are some occasional typos when it comes to dates, where a 2 has been accidentally replaced with a 3, for instance. It can be quite jarring when a sequence happening in 1929 suddenly mentions 1939 for no reason!
While I acknowledged that Clark could not cover every national event in 20 years, the political tunnel vision mentioned above can be quite frustrating. The supreme example of this is the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. One would think that the vision, construction, and popular viewpoint of the Bridge would have made for a scintillating chapter. Instead, we get no mention of the thing until the famous opening day, which played a role in the downfall of Premier Jack Lang. (Similarly, the construction of Canberra, the nation's purpose-built capital, is staggeringly absent.)
There is a bewildering recurrent ominousness to the treatment of Robert Menzies, with the implication that karma ultimately conquered him. In the epilogue, it seems to be that Clark is talking about Menzies' temporary fall from grace during WWII, but of course, that was temporary, he went on to become the longest-serving PM in the country's history followed by a respectable retirement. So although I'm no fan of RGM, I can't quite see what CMC was aiming for.
And finally, by far the most distressing part of this history, is something that can only be put down to Clark's age and health, and perhaps a meek editor? He is constantly changing tense. Yes, you hear me. Within the one paragraph, largely writing in the traditional third-person past, Clark will toss in a sentence or two in present progressive. This is not a style he has used in previous volumes, and so I spent the first few chapters trying to interpret some kind of method in the madness. But alas, it seems to just be madness. Take these egregious passage, in which the tense changes twice!

"Anzac has made Australians more aware of themselves. They were not Australian Britons; they were Austral sons of British sires. But events in Australia and Great Britain would soon deal a setback to that development. Bruce has discovered Australia, but not how to make Australia free."

There is simply no good reason for this, and it's a distracting blot on the proceedings.

Ideologues will continue to deride his unabashed ethical view of history, refusing to be the impartial observer when he can instead sit in judgement of men. But the reviewer's task is to approach a text based on the author's intentions, not on what one would like to read oneself. And from this vantage point, Clark has achieved.

Don't mistake me, I'm very happy to be out of the thicket! It is a digressive, sometimes aggressive narrative of our country's infancy. But as I sit here in the midst of the darkest winter Australia has faced since those horrific days of WWII, I can't help but note the similarities. The 1930s progressives like Katharine Susannah Pritchard, not to mention the Manning Clark of 1987 (the year of my birth, no less), would surely be horrified to hear that in 2020, major media outlets are still able to disparage Indigenous Australians, that former Prime Ministers have no qualms about campaigning against the rights of queer and trans Australians, that a country founded on the work of immigrants and social rejects continues to betray those who seek refuge on its shores, and that a manipulative socio-capitalist construct continues to blast the treacherous claims of Rupert Murdoch to so many willing, ignorant ears.

It is often said that we learn history in order not to repeat it. I have come to believe that we learn history so that we feel less alone in our pain. show less

A delicate 4 stars.

Manning Clark's mammoth history of Australia charts the country from 1770 to 1935, from the arrival of the first tall ships to the slow descent into War that would force Australia into the modern era. One must, however, take Clark on his terms if one is to enjoy him at all. In the style of the "New Journalism", his is a literary, rhetorical, deeply partisan exploration of the past, lovingly researched but fiercely angry about a history of hypocrisy, oppression, and show more small-mindedness.

Volume V provides Clark with rich meat to feed upon. 1888, the year of Australia's centenary, is also the period in which nascent feminist and Labor (sic) movements begin to make themselves known. It is an era in which the first generation of Australian-born writers and artists attempt (often in vain) to make native forms of art. The 1890s is a period of dizzying politics as states and political parties fight for or against federation of the states, which finally takes place in 1901. With the death of Queen Victoria, the invention of the motorcar and the cinema, and new labour laws, life in Australia begins to change and diversify. And the excesses of the first years of the 20th century are to reach their peak with the horrors of the First World War, and the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Clark was well aware of the flaws of the "Great Man" view of history, but perhaps because of the subject matter, this volume is more focused on those at the top than ever before. This is a little frustrating, but Clark is especially insightful in his reflections on political matters. The hatred between Christian sects, which dominated the 19th century in Australia, is now replaced by a shared sense of racial fear. Interesting to hear from all of our early Prime Ministers, the "Founding Fathers" if you must, pure, undying support of the White Australia policy. The absurdity of Australia's participation in the Boer War campaign is given broad coverage, and Clark reserves his greatest censure for the Australian-born British sympathisers, who saw themselves as members of the Empire first, and citizens of the Great Southern Continent second.

But of course, what politicians endorse are (typically) only the deeply-held beliefs of the populace at large. Underpinning Australian culture in this era is a powerful cultural debate over whether the country's differences to the motherland are its strengths or its weaknesses. That sense of isolation bolsters the fear of the non-white, the concern about an invasion, whether militarily or by population growth, from those on the Asian and African continents. An eerie version of our current era, like a funhouse mirror, in which the Australians are keenly nationalistic about all the wrong things, while feeling viscerally uncomfortable about all the positive things their nation has to offer.

Clark was born in 1915 (he makes discreet reference to his pregnant mother in the closing chapters), but for most of us in 2020 those years seem so very distant. Yet they really are not. My great-grandparents were all teenagers when Clark was born, their values and beliefs shaped irrevocably their era, and these same values were those passed down to my grandparents, whose generation still looms large over our cultural values and shape our policies.

A reader of Australian history who only looks to Manning Clark would be a fool; a reader who seeks to understand it without him is surely lost. show less