by Doug Munro
and church services.
To understand the many causes he fought for from the 1960s to the 1990s
is to understand how instrumental his public life was in changing the
face of Australia in the twentieth century. Almost two decades before the
White Australia policy was dismantled, Clark called for an end to the
prejudice and inhumanity inherent in racial discrimination. He opposed
the Vietnam War; condemned the proliferation of nuclear weapons;
supported the land rights and treaty demands of Indigenous Australians;
championed the arts and the importance of teaching Australian history in
schools and universities; campaigned to save the Great Barrier Reef, Fraser
Island and the Franklin River; spoke against the logging of old-growth
forests; lent his name to numerous petitions to save significant historical
sites; backed heritage legislation; protested against the Soviet Union’s
incarceration of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the repression of the Solidarity
movement in Poland; enthusiastically embraced multicultural Australia;
personally encouraged generations of writers and artists; and worked to
challenge longstanding stereotypes of Australia abroad, especially in the
United Kingdom. In the last two decades of his life, Clark appeared in
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every possible media site, including midday television, house and garden
programs, and even managed a cameo role as the preacher in the 1985
film production of the Peter Carey novel, Bliss. In all of these appearances
and writings, Clark deftly cast his public interventions through the lens
of his personal experience. The public telling of autobiographical stories
– the modus operandi of the public intellectual – became the means
through which Clark established a popular audience and created himself
as a national prophet.
In the seven years I spent working on Clark’s biography between 2004
and 2011, I never doubted the importance of what I was doing.5 To be sure,
I experienced many moments of exasperation and exhaustion. To come
close to Clark, to know him intimately and, at the same time to keep
my distance was always a struggle. This is the biographer’s dilemma: to
resolve the tension between closeness and distance, to know and reveal the
subject without becoming the subject’s ventriloquist. Gradually, I realised
that there was something that transcended even the weight of Clark’s
scholarship and the substantial impact of his public life. On a human level
alone – as child, adolescent, lover, friend and father – his life was lived
and remembered with such an acute theatrical sensibility that it spoke
to readers regardless of their gender, cultural background or nationality.
Clark’s life contained contradictions numerous and large enough for all
of us to recognise shards of our own experience. It was both Australian
and universal. But it was also a life given over to public examination in
a way that few of us would dare contemplate, one burdened by extreme
self-consciousness and a pathological desire to be remembered as
a great man. Much of Clark’s archival legacy – his anguished diaries, his
voluminous correspondence with others (including more than 50 years
of letters to his wife Dymphna), his eulogies for departed friends and his
irrepressible ministering of others at times of personal crisis – was, as Ken
Inglis shrewdly remarked in 1991, more about ‘self than subject’.6 Nearly
everything Clark wrote and said was self-referential. Narrating the lives
of others became a way of seeding the autobiography of C.M.H. Clark in
the Australian imagination.
5 McKenna, An Eye for Eternity.
6 The remark by Ken Inglis is drawn from a set of hastily written notes by Inglis shortly after Clark’s death and given to me. The notes are still in my possession. Clark’s papers are held at the National Library of Australia (NLA, MS 7550), as are those of Dymphna Clark (NLA, MS 9873).
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One of the greatest challenges I encountered in writing Clark’s biography
was not only the question of how to deal with the work of previous
biographers such as Brian Matthews and Stephen Holt, but also the
far more pressing problem of how to deal with Clark’s autobiographical
writings.7 My intention was to write Clark’s life as it was lived, not as
he remembered it. Yet this proved tremendously difficult because he
had stamped so much of his own memory on the public image of his
life. To write Clark’s biography, I had to somehow wrest control of the
life from the extremely controlling voice of my subject. Perhaps the
most graphic example of this was Clark’s tendency to leave directional
notes to his biographers throughout his papers. But the sheer volume
of his autobiographical writings exacerbated the struggle for biographical
distance. To avoid paraphrasing Clark’s various accounts of his life and
merely accepting his version of events, I had to disarm his autobiographical
voice and test his interpretations and recollections against the perspectives
of others.
Clark’s best-known volumes of autobiography were published in quick
succession in 1989 and 1990. First, The Puzzles of Childhood, which
tells the story of his parents’ lives and the ‘nightmares and terrors’ of his
childhood, and then Quest for Grace, which picks up the story from his days
as a student at the University of Melbourne and Oxford in the 1930s and
ends just before the first volume of A History of Australia is published
in 1962. In addition to these two volumes, Clark’s autobiographical
writings extended to reflections on historical writing ( An Historian’s
Apprenticeship), essays, speeches and interviews. In fact, it is perfectly
reasonable to include Clark’s histories in the same category. For, as Clark
remarked, ‘everything one writes is a fragment in a gigantic confession
of life’.8 He saw all of his writing as inherently autobiographical.
Both as historian and public intellectual, Clark helped to destroy the
belief that Australian history was merely a dull, insignificant appendage
to British imperial history. Leading much of the post-1960s public debate
around ‘new nationalism’, he transformed popular understandings of
Australian history, an achievement that will undoubtedly prove to be his
most lasting contribution. The origins of Clark’s A History of Australia
7 Stephen Holt, Manning Clark and Australian History, 1915–1963 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1982); Holt, A Short History of Manning Clark (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999); Brian Matthews, Manning Clark: A Life (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008).
8 Manning Clark, ‘A Long Time Ago’, in his Speaking Out of Turn: Lectures and Speeches, 1940–
1991 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 79.
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can be found in the profound schism between the established pastoral
background of his pious, Protestant mother (a direct descendant of
Samuel Marsden) and the working-class larrikinism of his Anglo-Catholic
father of part-Irish descent, a division that Clark dramatised at every
oppo
rtunity, portraying the religious divisions of his family as Australia’s
writ large. More than any other writer of his generation, Clark succeeded
in aligning the trajectory of his own life with a larger narrative of national
awakening.
His histories were autobiographical not only because he infused the past
with his own experience but also because he often invented the thoughts
and emotions of historical characters. As they rise from their graves and
perform their soliloquies, they appear as thinly veiled shadows of their
author’s alter ego: they are ‘tormented’ by doubt and guilt, led on by
some ‘madness of the heart’, and inevitably brought down by their ‘fatal
flaw’. Women appear in A History of Australia in much the same vein as
Dymphna Clark appears in the pages of his diary. They are either the
temptress or the punisher, more often the latter; women with a sharp,
vindictive streak who undermine men’s idealism and fail to understand
the enormity of their husband’s creative genius. In the pages of Clark’s
history, potted autobiographies rain down one after another, almost
as if Clark were conducting an oratorio. In this light, it seems entirely
appropriate that A History of Australia was made into a musical in 1988
( Manning Clark’s History of Australia: The Musical). Clark’s grand narrative
– with its now familiar but at the time quite revolutionary schema of
seeing Australia’s past through the prism of three great belief systems:
Protestantism, Catholicism and the Enlightenment – lurches from the
inspired to the droll, finding tragedy, pathos and existential crisis on every
stump and street corner. Part Gibbon, part Macaulay, part Carlyle, and
steeped in the language of the Old Testament, it is entirely character driven,
mostly a succession of flawed, tormented males, who walk on stage at the
allotted time to play out the drama of their biographical roles. At regular
intervals, the ghosts of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Henry James
emerge from behind the arras to provide a guiding aphorism or two. Both
in everyday speech, and in the persona of the writer, Clark spoke through
the voices of the canon, peppering his language with literary and biblical
quotations; Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and the Book of Ecclesiastes were among
his favourite sources of inspiration.
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5 . ‘A GIGANTIC CoNFESSIoN oF LIFE’
Clark was probably the first historian in Australia to write at length about
the inner life of his characters (sketches that frequently mirrored his
emotional state at the time of writing). Much of the emotion in his work
is grounded in an acute religiosity, the parson’s son ministering the souls
of Australia’s flawed men – Wentworth, Lawson, Burke and Wills, John
Curtin and Manning Clark. His feeling was not only for his characters,
it was also for place. Until Clark’s six volumes, historical melancholy
was something Australians imagined resided only in the layered, built
environment of Europe. Like Sidney Nolan, Patrick White and Arthur
Boyd, Clark found this melancholy in the land itself, a melancholy not
only of exile but one born of an awareness of the continent’s antiquity
and the horror of the violent dispossession of Indigenous people;
a dispossession that is not so much documented in his work but rather
recurs as an underlying tragic refrain. A History of Australia succeeded
in attracting a large popular readership because of its narrative flair and
Clark’s mercurial ability to convince his audience that the story of his own
life was a unique window onto Australian history.
A handful of critics and reviewers noted the autobiographical dimension
of Clark’s history. John Rickard was particularly astute on the way in
which Clark increasingly relied on personal experience as the volumes
progressed: ‘the project which began as history’, Rickard observed, ‘has
become autobiography’.9 Inglis thought fellow historians Bede Nairn and
Allan Martin were both concerned that Clark had moved from history to
fiction and autobiography, with each volume hanging on an encounter
between an Anglophile villain (Alfred Deakin, Robert Menzies) and an
Australian tragic hero (Henry Lawson, John Curtin).10 Richard White was
another who observed that, in the last volumes, ‘history and memory had
come too close’.11 Reviewing Volume Five in 1981, Edmund Campion
noted that the woman seen crying out at the railway station at the end
of the book was actually Clark’s mother. He drew attention to the way in
which Clark introduced his personal memories of Anzac Day in the 1920s
and 1930s into the history, just as he did with his memories of songs,
radio advertisements and the Bodyline cricket series. ‘This personal note
is something new in our historians’, reflected Campion. ‘Indeed, it is so
9 John Rickard, review of A History of Australia, vol. 6 by Manning Clark, Times on Sunday, 23 August 1987.
10 This characterisation of Nairn and Martin comes from the file of notes given to me by Ken Inglis.
11 Richard White, review of The Quest for Grace by Manning Clark, Australian Society, November 1990, 39–40.
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noticeable in Manning Clark that when I first read Volume Six I thought
of suggesting to Melbourne University Press that they reject it as his
autobiography.’12
Perhaps the first question regarding Manning Clark’s volumes of
autobiography (and all autobiography for that matter) is why he decided
to write them? To defend oneself against biographers (as Doris Lessing
described her motive for writing autobiography); to claim one’s life before
the ‘ferrets’ (as Kate Grenville described biographers when donating her
papers to the National Library of Australia) usurp and misrepresent it;
to ‘set the record straight’, as so many politicians claim is the starting
point for their memoirs; or, as former Labor minister Barry Jones reflected
when writing his autobiography A Thinking Reed, ‘to explain my life to
myself’, to subject oneself to gruelling self-examination and at the same
time give an existing audience a more personal insight into the object
of their admiration.13 The very term autobiography suggests that the
decision to write is self-generated. I am a significant someone, therefore
I am an autobiographer. Few autobiographers find themselves at their
writing desk because they want to test or reconstitute the boundaries of
the genre itself. Historical context, celebrity marketing and the vagaries
of the publishing industry are usually far more important determinants
in the shaping and publishing of autobiography.
Clark’s autobiographies, written towards the end of his life when he was
already a well-known figure, were prompted initially not by the urgent
need for self-examination about which he spoke so frequently in public,
but much more practically by the suggestion of former Labor senator
Susan Ryan, who in the late 1980s worked as an editor for Penguin after
leaving politics. Ryan wrote to Clark and asked him if he would consider
writing his autobiography.14 Both
volumes of Clark’s autobiography were
therefore the direct result of his publisher’s initiative. Clark received
a $5,000 advance from Penguin to write The Puzzles of Childhood. Ryan,
who had witnessed Clark’s enormous public impact firsthand during
her time in parliament, recognised a commercial opportunity when she
12 Edmund Campion, ‘Manning Clark’, Scripsi, 5:2 (1989), 183–7.
13 Doris Lessing, Under my Skin: Volume One of my Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 14; Susan Wyndham, ‘Kate Grenville’s New Life as a Single Woman’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 21 March 2015, www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/kate-grenvilles-new-life-as-a-single-woman-
20150304-13vbim.html; Barry Jones, A Thinking Reed (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006), 1.
14 Clark on Susan Ryan’s invitation in his interview with Andrew Rutherford, Sunday Age, 14 October 1990, 11.
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saw one. Within months of publication, her decision was vindicated.
The Puzzles of Childhood won national literary awards, climbed to number
one in the list of bestselling non-fiction, while Qantas Airways purchased
500 copies to distribute to their passengers on long-haul flights. Although
Clark claimed to Humphrey McQueen that he was ‘upset’ by Penguin’s
marketing campaign for the book – ‘books should make their own mark
without aids from P.R. promoters who probably have not read the book.
Penguin makes me feel what I have to say is a commodity’ – he appeared
to revel in the opportunity to ‘confess’ his life story to the media.15
The particular cultural and political context in which Clark’s
autobiographies were written did much to shape their voice and narrative.
They were completed in the shadow of his failing health and the death
of many of his closest friends (‘my contemporaries, or more accurately,
my near contemporaries all seem to be dying’).16 These were the years
that followed the constitutional crisis that had divided Australian society
so deeply in 1975, when Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed
Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from office. As one of the
leading intellectuals of the Labor Left, Clark was at the forefront of
the campaign that condemned Kerr and the conservative parties and
demanded a republican constitution. These were also the years of growing