Manning Clark and the History of Australia

The first required text of the course is Manning Clark’s Short History of Australia. It is no exaggeration to say that this book, or rather the six-volume work on which it is based, is a nation-maker. It is a formative work, a study in how a historian might put together a nation from a colonial land in mid-twentieth century.

Biographical

1915-1991. Born in Sydney, grew up in Victoria, spending his most formative years at Phillip Island. Ambitions as a cricketeer frustrated by mild epilepsy. Educated at Melbourne Grammar School, at the University of Melbourne, at Oxford, and at Bonn. His university teaching career began at the University of Melbourne and concluded at Australian National University, Canberra. An admirer of Tocqueville. Most of his life's research and writing is comprised in his six-volume History of Australia, for which he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1975 and named Australian of the Year in 1980. Loved to quote Dostoevsky when speaking of the influence of a vast land on a people; visited and wrote about the Soviet Union; these circumstances, along with Clark's left-of-center political sentiments, led to startling accusations in the Brisbane Courier-Mail in 1996 that he had received the Order of Lenin for having served as an "agent of influence" for the USSR.

Significant Works

A History of Australia. 6 vols., Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1962-1987.

In Search of Henry Lawson. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978.

Meeting Soviet Man. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1960.

A Short History of Australia. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1963.

Selected Quotes from Clark's Autobiographies, The Puzzles of Childhood and The Quest for Grace (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1990)

On his parents: "My mother was a fine flower of patrician and genteel Sydney; my father was a child of the London dockyard and the respectable working-class areas of St. Peters. That was one of many differences between them."

What his mother said: "'Mann, dear, you are a very special boy. There's nothing you can't do, if you want to do it.' I remember that remark now, because all my life there was a gap between my mother's estimate of my capacity and character and the estimate of others."

On the historian's motives: "My father died on 16 January 1951. . . . For years afterward I often dreamed I was standing on the shores of the Styx waiting to be ferried across to the other shore. My father rowed over from that shore, and started to collect bait for fishing. I asked him to help me cross over to the other shore. He replied, 'Boy, that is the one journey you must make by yourself.' The teaching in Melbourne, Canberra and Harvard, the books on the history of Australia, the book on Henry Lawson, and the short stories, are all interim reports on that journey."

On the historian's grace: "I turned to alcohol as a crutch. . . . One glass and I began to get my own back, to settle scores for the agonies suffered from concealing such a weakness as minor epilepsy, that agony of resenting that everyone else could walk without the fear of falling down. I found it difficult to forgive others their happiness. So for years I derived a perverse satisfaction from needling the virtuous, the happy and the good. I played for the applause of those who had quite different reasons from mine for their hatred and their mockery. I fell for the temptation to believe that those who carried a cross were entitled to take liberties. I was tempted for years to believe that those with strong spiritual aspirations could wallow in the gutter without doing themselves or others any harm. I did not foresee that what stood between me and what I wanted was a stroke of great fortune. It never occurred to me that a flaw could be a means of grace. There would be much thrashing around in the fog, before I learned that Australia did not have to belong to the tough; that Australia could and should belong to the lovers and believers."

On the historian's attitude: "The novelists, the poets, the playwrites and the painters, had sensed the tragic grandeur in the story of Australia. A historian must tell the story. He must evoke the spirit of the place, he must portray the Aborigines, he must create characters and scenes in the drama, not in the manner of a Gibbon as another tale of the follies and passions of human beings, nor as an Old Testament prophet who had taken up residence in the Antipodes and was chastening a wicked and an adulterous generation, but to evoke pity for all men and women—yes, and a little love for all of them."

Clark's Periodization of Australian Political History

Nothing about Clark is straightforward, but from his work it is possible to extract the following periodization of Australian political history.

Span of the Political Period	Characteristics of the Times
To 1821—founding years, culminating in "The Age of Macquarie"	Convict settlement, authoritarian governors, military and civil officers profiting
"The Transition, 1821-1831"	"economic power . . . belonged to the large settlers and the merchants . . . political and social power were beginning to belong to the same group"
Squatting and gold, 1831-61	Pastoralists and diggers create two opposing ideals, one aristocratic, the other egalitarian--see early state constitutions
"The Age of the Bourgeoisie, 1861-1883"	"This was the golden age of the bourgeoisie"
"Radicals and Nationalists, 1883-1901"	"Liberals . . . proceeded to . . . give the state a new role as the instrument and protector of the material well-being of its citizens," confederation in 1900; "The old order was dying at the moment when bourgeois statesmanship and civilization reached their apogee"
From "Optimists" to "Survivors," 1901-1941	"Australia . . . was to be a liberal, bourgeois society in which the materially weak, the aged, the halt, the lame and the blind were to be protected against the laws of supply and demand by a benevolent though austere and frugal state"
Belated birth of the welfare state, 1941-1949	Labour (briefly) rules, and banishes the "evils of unemployment"--"Their answer . . . was the welfare state."
Entering the "Age of Ruins," 1949-1986	Country-Liberal-Reform resurgence, followed by Bob Hawke's version of Labor--"He believed Labor could give capitalist society a human face . . . Hawke also believed in consensus."

Some Study Questions from Clark’s Short History of Australia

[Questions in preparation.]

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