In 1921, Clark's mother suffered a breakdown, and the six year-old Manning and his siblings were sent to maternal grandparents for several months. Clark's father, a working-class Londoner who retained a Cockney accent, became an Anglican clergyman thanks to a mentor, Reverend James Manning, after whom Clark himself was named. In Volume II of his massive History, published in 1967, Marsden (like Clark) was in his fifties, the age 'when honour, the respect of his fellow-men, and recognition of his achievement should have been his.' Instead, his hard labour of twenty-seven years (about the time Clark had been in Canberra) had yielded Marsden only the 'curses not loud but deep' of his enemies. Clark the historian was tough on Marsden - as he was censorious of his own faults - but he probably back-projected himself into his forebear. This link probably explains his sense of ownership of early Australian history: he was transfixed with veneration when shown Marsden's signature in the Admissions Register of Magdalene College Cambridge in 1964. Through his mother, Clark was descended from Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain in early New South Wales. More than in most biographies, McKenna's task has been to separate the superficial from the core reality. Both the identifiers that a cartoonist would have highlighted were artificial add-ons. The beard, grown on a visit to Russia, was a tribute to Lenin, while McKenna believes that the hat was an echo of Thomas Carlyle, author of a grand narrative history of the French Revolution. The early Clark was usually hatless, and definitely clean shaven, not the Manning of memory, but a doppelganger for the herbivorous primary school teacher who steered me through the Eleven Plus. I first handled McKenna's biography in wine-connoisseur fashion, skimming the pages and looking at the photographs. My last contact was a postcard approving the transfer of book's small income to the Menzies Centre in London: 'Readers are better than royalties.' My lingering image of Manning Clark was of an amiably narcissistic eccentric, defined by his goatee beard and a wide brimmed and jauntily angled hat. In fact, I found him friendly and, when I edited a collection of readings on the Botany Bay debate, he permitted the inclusion of his Historical Studies article. I was warned that Clark might not welcome me, since - a rash and brash young Pom - I dived into the controversy over the founding of New South Wales. You might deduce character from portraits by Raeburn or Reynolds, but how could you discern 'darker forces' in Arthur Phillip from a giant cigarette card of a corner-shop painting? I wanted to meet the author whose Short History of Australia I had first read across the world, although even then I had been puzzled by the confidence with which he had described his subjects. Among the younger crowd, mention of his name triggered ribaldry about the 'fatal flaw', Clark's formula for skewering the personalities he portrayed. La Nauze remarked that he was not really a historian but a novelist. My senior colleagues distrusted Clark: in a moment of impish confidentiality, J.A. There was little contact with 'our colleagues across the creek', as the SGS staff were dubbed with formal politeness: the divide was purely mental, for no creek separates the Coombs and Haydon-Allan Buildings. In 1960 it was merged into the ANU, a clumsy solution which subordinated the teaching departments as the School of General Studies. Clark's appointment had been to Canberra University College, an offshoot of Melbourne.
In the 1970s I was a research fellow in History in the Research School of Social Sciences - part of the original Australian National University of 1946. Since McKenna never met Clark but understands him well, so it seems egotistical to outline my own slight encounters with 'Manning', as he was known to friend and detractor alike. If McKenna's book should recede from prominence in years to come, it will be because he has extracted the opium from the tall poppy of his perplexing subject. Big books sometimes scoop awards before second thoughts consign them to semi-oblivion.
Mark McKenna has produced a magnificent biography, in which even the unanswered questions (how did Clark qualify for a funeral in a Catholic cathedral?) are deliberately left hanging. Some found the man and his writings inspirational to others, he was a mountebank. Manning Clark was professor of History in Canberra from 1949 until his retirement in 1974-5. Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press, 2011, pp. An Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna.Īn Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna.
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