Clio's Lives
Page 13
second autobiography, Professing History (1976), Hancock made oblique
reference to an ‘exhausting’ quarrel in respect of the Dictionary as well as
to another unrelated imbroglio, adding, ‘Those stories had better not be
told’.26 But I was there, and had preserved the correspondence between
Hancock and myself across the critical years of 1960–61 when the ADB’s
relationship with the independent historian Malcolm Ellis was at its most
24 Lord Beaverbrook, Men and Power, 1917–1918 (London: Hutchinson, 1956, and numerous subsequent editions).
25 Ann Moyal, Breakfast with Beaverbrook: Memoirs of an Independent Woman (Sydney: Hale
& Iremonger, 1995), 59–60.
26 W.K. Hancock, Professing History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), 39; D.A. Low, ed., Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 249–68.
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4 . THE FEMALE GAzE
complex. It seemed important that the story should emerge. My chapter
on the foundations of the Dictionary in my memoir remained the main
historical source on this great pioneering enterprise until the publication
based on the full archives was told in The ADB ’s Story, edited by Melanie
Nolan and Christine Fernon in 2013.27 For me, my years at the Dictionary
returned me to Australian history and led, through Hancock’s mentorship,
to my study of the history of Australian science.
Against this backdrop, the female autobiographical gaze was further
enriched during the late 1990s by a trio of participant women writers, set
in a specific historical period, with their gender specific titles: Susan Ryan,
Catching the Waves (1999); Wendy McCarthy, Don’t Fence Me In (2000);
and historian Anne Summers, Ducks on the Pond (1999). All three, writing
in mid-career, published vivid accounts of their contributions to Australia’s
political, feminist and organisational life.28 Summers, a history graduate
of the University of Sydney, with her PhD study and book, Damned
Whores and God’s Police, behind her, overviewed her creative role as an
activist in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and her key
participation as an advisor on Women’s Affairs to two Australian prime
ministers, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.29 Her title, ‘Ducks on the Pond’,
relayed the words shearers cried out when a women was seen approaching
their male domain. A new gendered autobiographical form was on the
shelves, and more was to come with Cassandra Pybus’s light-hearted and
partly fictionalised memoir, Till Apples Grow on an Orange Tree.30
This genre continued to evolve, and the letters of daughters to mothers as
sources for autobiography figure in the works of two historians composing
their memoirs in the twenty-first century. Alice Garner, daughter of the
writer Helen Garner, cut her teeth in history at the University of Melbourne
in the late 1980s where she became attracted to French history through
her lecturer, Peter McPhee. Garner spent time in France working on both
her MA thesis and her PhD thesis, the latter being a study of changing
27 Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon, eds, The ADB ’s Story (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013).
28 Susan Ryan, Catching the Waves: Life In and Out of Politics (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1999); Wendy McCarthy, Don’t Fence Me In (Sydney: Random House, 2000); Ann Summers, Ducks on the Pond: An Autobiography, 1945–1976 (Ringwood: Viking, 1999).
29 Ann Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia
(Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974).
30 Cassandra Pybus, Till Apples Grow on an Orange Tree (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1998).
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CLIo'S LIvES
place across two centuries in a fishing village at the Bassin de Arachon.31
Garner’s autobiographical the student chronicles is a slight, evocative record
of student days at the University of Melbourne drawn from her diaries and
letters, which recall those pre-computer days of the late 1980–90s when
students hand-drafted their essays, typed them up with effort, used card
catalogues and microfiche, kept their lips firmly closed through tutorials,
and struggled at the onset of the Dawkins era when managerialism was
‘sliding its cold fingers down the wrinkly collars of Arts faculty staff’.32
Keeping all her essays for the record and her scattered recollections, she
reconstructs some of the confusions, rawness and habits of student life.
The second historian is Sheila Fitzpatrick, whose memoir My Father’s
Daughter offers a frank, probing and, at times, poignant account of her
relationship with her father, the notorious Melbourne radical historian,
Brian Fitzpatrick, and her high dependence as a child on his attention and
regard: ‘Daddy, are you watching? I’m going to jump.’33 In a sense, her
father was her childhood. After education in the Department of History
at the University of Melbourne, she had escaped his influence by taking
up a scholarship to study Soviet history and politics at Oxford University
when his unexpected death at the end of her first year sent her spiralling
into extended grief and a determination to distance herself physically from
Australia. Fitzpatrick’s essay in this volume brings the reflective skill of the
historian to an examination of her own mode of writing family memoir.
It provides further demonstration that, in Australia, the canvas for women
historian autobiographers presents itself as Janus-faced. We have moved
into the pertinent examination of the varied nature and processes of
history in the telling of a personal life, while we have also remained closely
tied to the remembrance of childhood and youth.
In A Spy in the Archives, Fitzpatrick uses her diaries and letters to her
mother to provide a detailed memoir of her experience as a doctoral
student in Moscow working in the Soviet Archives in the mid to late
1960s in the period of the Cold War.34 At a time when the study of
Soviet history was in its infancy, she and her fellow exchange students
31 Alice Garner, A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823–2000 (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2005).
32 Alice Garner, the student chronicles (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006), 107. The lower-casing is original to the title of the book.
33 Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 2, 230.
34 Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013).
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4 . THE FEMALE GAzE
from Britain ‘felt like cosmonauts who had landed on the moon’, and
she writes vividly of the drabness of the Brezhnev age – the people
poorly dressed, the challenge of inconvenient stores, learning Russian,
a people-less life, and the gossip and obsession with spying. But the core
of the book is her historian’s account of working in the archives on A.V.
Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment after the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution, alongside one of his former assistants, Igor Sats,
who became a key mentor: ‘untapped archives’, Fitzpatrick recalls, ‘plus
a primary informant willing to give you a running commentary o
n what
you read in the archives the day before is something that only happens
once in a lifetime’.35 In time she would be ‘outed’ as a spy, a so-called
‘ideological saboteur’, and face scrutiny and diverse modes of bureaucrat
overview and control. But, leaving Russia for marriage in England, her
research task complete, she allowed, ‘I am very much at home in this
funny atmosphere’.36 It laid the foundation for her rise as a leading
Soviet historian.
For my own part, writing autobiography as a woman in what is called
the ‘seventh age’ or later, as I have done with my A Woman of Influence in
2014, is as yet a rare phenomenon in Australia and elsewhere.37 What was
my impulse towards it? I had written Breakfast with Beaverbrook in my late
60s, yet my life had remained richly active. I was also given a mental push
by an American literary academic, Carolyn Heilbrun, who deplored that
whenever she read an autobiography written by a woman in her 50s or
beyond, it was always confined to her youth or romance: ‘She abandons
age, experience, wisdom to search the past, usually for romance, always
for the beginnings of childhood.’ But, as Heilbrun argued, ‘the story of
age, of maturity before infirmity, before meaningless old age, has never
been told except perhaps by Shakespeare who told everything, provided
he could tell it of men’.38
And so I engaged to write with some passion of my long career as
a historian of Australian science, as a biographer and of those men
and women who had influenced and enriched me in my personal and
professional development. It is a story of interconnections. Importantly,
late in life candour becomes important; one has nothing to lose, and there
35 Ibid., 170.
36 Ibid., 1, 329.
37 Ann Moyal, A Woman of Influence: Science, Men & History (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2014).
38 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), quoted in Moyal, A Woman of Influence, ix.
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CLIo'S LIvES
is an eagerness on the part of readers to share in the intimacy of one’s
story. So my text turned into a stretching, allusive conversation with
my readers where identity became entwined with other lives and where
my work as a historian played an integral part. For, as Alan Moorehead,
whose biography I wrote working among his papers for several years at
the National Library of Australia, declared: ‘And so a writer’s books are
the chapters of his life.’39
I wave to Beaverbrook returning to England in recent years as a senior
historian to look at the Beaverbrook papers in the Parliamentary Archives
at the House of Lords and to reassess this remarkable participant
historian, archival proprietor and writer, and how we worked together
when I was young. As a reviewer of my book summed up aptly: ‘The act of
remembrance begins as a personal, private and often spontaneous activity
but once shared with others, memories become collective remembering.’40
Or, perhaps, as Jill Ker Conway writes in her excellent When Memory
Speaks: ‘We’re heard when we speak confidently out of our understanding
of our own experience. … We should play close attention to our stories.
… We are all autobiographers.’41
39 Ann Moyal, Alan Moorehead: A Rediscovery (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2005), frontispiece. See also Alan Moorehead, A Late Education: Episodes in a Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970).
40 Susan Steggall, ‘Cultivating Minerva’, review of A Woman of Influence by Ann Moyal, ISAA Review, 13.2 (2014), 101–4.
41 Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998), 177–80.
78
Nation-Defining
Authors
5
‘A gigantic confession of life’:
Autobiography, ‘National
Awakening’ and the Invention
of Manning Clark1
Mark McKenna
Perhaps this is the worst deceiver of all – we make up our pasts.
— Doris Lessing
By any measure, Manning Clark (1915–91) is Australia’s most well-known
and controversial historian. Born only seven weeks before Australian
soldiers landed at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915, Clark’s intellectual life
was framed by the great ideological struggle of the twentieth century,
which began with the Russian Revolution in 1917 and ended with the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the time of his death on 23 May
1991, he had also witnessed the slow yet inexorable decline of the British
connection in Australia.
As professor of Australian history at The Australian National University
(ANU) in Canberra, Clark produced an exceptional volume of work over
a period of 40 years; three volumes of historical documents (the bedrock
1 An earlier version of the present chapter appeared in the journal Life Writing: ‘“National Awakening,” Autobiography, and the Invention of Manning Clark’, Life Writing, 13:2 (2016), 207–
20. The author and editors are grateful for permission to republish.
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CLIo'S LIvES
of university courses in Australian history for more than two decades),
A Short History of Australia (which was translated into several European
and Asian languages and sold widely overseas), an extremely controversial
short book on his visit to the Soviet Union in the late 1950s – Meeting
Soviet Man – another on the writer Henry Lawson, the ABC Boyer
Lectures in 1976, a collection of essays, two volumes of short stories,
hundreds of articles, reviews, newspaper op-eds and two volumes of
autobiography. Five further volumes of speeches, letters, history and
autobiographical writings were published posthumously. From 1938, the
time of his scholarship to Oxford at age 23 until his death in 1991, Clark
also kept personal diaries, documenting his inner life often with fierce and
uncompromising honesty, as well as tracking the personal lives of many
of his friends and colleagues in sometimes brutal fashion, all of it in his
barely legible ink scrawl, a script once compared to ‘micro barbed-wire’.2
In addition, he kept copious notebooks over the same period mapping his
reading and the conceptual development of his work. Taken together, this
output, most of it completed while he was still teaching, easily exceeded
that of many of his contemporaries. And yet, remarkably, the above list of
publications excludes the work for which he is best known, his six-volume
A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987. Clark’s six
volumes comprised well over one million words and their extraordinary
popularity played a large part in keeping Melbourne University Press afloat
for over two decades (selling an average of 40,000 copies per volume).3
In media interviews, Clark’s personal story of the creation of the six
volumes became part of his success, as if the nation were waiting for the
next instalment in the story of its own creation. In the 1970s and 1980s,
he was interviewed both after each volume was published and when he
had completed successive drafts. Clark’s ability to dramatise the writing
process usually involved
a disarming cocktail of self-deprecation and
special pleading, particularly in the 1980s (‘I haven’t done everyone justice
and I regret that I did not have more ability … I know I’ve made a lot
of mistakes … I don’t want to sound too pompous. I’ve got a reputation
for being a bit of a bullshit artist’).4 Clark created the illusion that his
readers were buying both A History of Australia and a latter-day version of
Rousseau’s The Confessions, a deeply personal impression of the past and
2 Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011), 29.
3 See Appendix to this chapter for bibliographic details of Clark’s oeuvre.
4 Clark interviewed by Ken Brass, Weekend Australian Magazine, 2 March 1985.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
life itself. He frequently referred to his historical writing as the ‘child of
his heart’. For Clark, there was no distance between the historian and the
past he inhabited.
In the public eye, from his retirement in the early 1970s until his death in
1991, Clark wore his trademark dress – the slightly tattered, black three-
piece suit, the watch chain dangling from the fob pocket, the long, thin
legs anchored in paddock-bashing boots and the grave, goatee-bearded
face of the old man crowned by a crumpled, weather-beaten Akubra.
Across Australia, he was renowned as a historical oracle. At the height
of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was awarded a Companion of
the Order of Australia (1975), named Australian of the Year (1981) and
won almost every major Australian literary award. In 1988, the year of
Australia’s Bicentenary, Clark (and his hat) seemed to be everywhere.
He was the frequent subject of cartoonists’ caricatures; he penned major
critical essays interpreting the historical significance of the Bicentenary
for magazines such as The Bulletin and Time Australia, and was easily
the nation’s most prominent public intellectual. In his last years, after
his retirement from teaching, Clark addressed Australia Day events and
citizenship ceremonies; launched books; opened art exhibitions, fetes,
music festivals, opera and theatre productions; endorsed rock bands;
spoke at school speech nights, Australian Labor Party campaign rallies