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.… (más)

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.… (más)

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.… (más)

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 [a:Geoffrey Dutton|329598|Geoffrey Dutton|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (contemporaneously with this history's publication in 1980) called the masterpiece of the set in his wonderful [b:The Australian Collection: Australia's Greatest Books|4340201|The Australian Collection Australia's Greatest Books|Geoffrey Dutton|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545612726l/4340201._SX50_.jpg|4388105]. 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, 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 [a:Geoffrey Blainey|248532|Geoffrey Blainey|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1482893611p2/248532.jpg] being the obvious example). Or even, I suppose, other great progressive historians such as [a:Robert Hughes|48890|Robert Hughes|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1312251489p2/48890.jpg]. 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 [a:Patrick White|50783|Patrick White|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1245343908p2/50783.jpg] was reading these books, he remarked: "Interesting to see how we have remained the same pack of snarling mongrel dogs."… (más)