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 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.… (more)

Broadly speaking, I care less for Volume III of Manning Clark's sprawling progressive Australian history. Whereas the first two volumes had so much to tell us about the literal creation of the white construct of colonial Australia, this is a story of a coming-together, a series of vignettes describing a particular historical moment, and not one I find as interesting as either what came before, or what will come after (in arguably the masterpiece of the series, Volume IV, when Australians really start agitating as an entity - despite still being individual colonies).

I understand some people are frustrated by Clark's flights of fancy, his determination to not just place people in their era but then subtly by sharply judge them for it, or for his languid writing style that takes in quotes in the voice of the day and lengthy lists of facts. I for one adore all of the aforementioned. But what separates me from Clark is his "Great Man" tendency, focusing here on the lives of those at the top. At the same time, the reality is that he has to. Historical records are much stronger in the letters, proclamations, and minutes that exist for life in the military and aristocracy of the young country. Still, the first half of this book is very much about a series of Great Men, as Clark wraps up his individual narratives of each colony, that I became exhausted.

Luckily, things pick up in the second half, after a spellbinding chapter about the state of the colony in 1841, when Clark brings the country's narrative together into a more focused story. By virtue of the events of the 1840s, the book shifts into discussions of rural life, of the "squattocracy", and less on matters of state. And it's all the better for it.… (more)

See my review of Volume I. A favourite - a wordy, impassioned, wonderfully argumentative history. The second volume covers the histories of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land from the start of the 1820s to the country's fiftieth anniversary in 1838, with a strong focus on the battles taking place: Protestant vs Catholic; white vs black; wealthy vs poor; free vs convict; and always, always, always old vs new... even when the "old" are still first generation immigrants themselves!

Some things never change.… (more)