Manning Clark

Charles Manning Hope Clark, (3 March 1915 – 23 May 1991) was an Australian historian and the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987.

He has been described as "Australia's most famous historian", but his work has been the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative and classical liberal academics and philosophers.

Clark was born in Sydney on 3 March 1915, the son of the Reverend Charles Clark, an English-born Anglican priest from a working-class background (he was the son of a London carpenter), and Catherine Hope, who came from an old Australian establishment family.

On his mother's side he was a descendant of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the "flogging parson" of early colonial New South Wales.

Clark had a difficult relationship with his mother, who never forgot her superior social origins, and came to identify her with the Protestant middle class he so vigorously attacked in his later work.

Charles held various curacies in Sydney including St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, and St John's, Ashfield, where Catherine was a Sunday School teacher.

The family moved to Melbourne when Clark was a child; and lived in what one biographer describes as "genteel poverty" on the modest income of an Anglican vicar.

Clark's happiest memories of his youth were of the years 1922–1924, when his father was the vicar of Phillip Island, south-east of Melbourne, where he acquired the love of fishing and of cricket, which he retained for the rest of his life.

He was educated at state schools at Cowes and Belgrave, and then at Melbourne Grammar School.

Here, as an introspective boy from a modest background, he suffered from ridicule and bullying, and acquired a lifelong dislike for the sons of the Melbourne upper class who had tormented him and others at this school.

His later school years, however, were happier.

He discovered a love of literature and the classics, and became an outstanding student of Greek, Latin and history (British and European).

At Oxford in the late 1930s he shared the Left's horror of fascism – which he had seen first hand during a visit to Nazi Germany in 1938 – but was not attracted to the communism which was prevalent among undergraduates at the time.

In 1933 he was equal dux of the school.

As a result, Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College at the University of Melbourne.

Here he thrived, gaining firsts in ancient history and British history and captaining the college cricket team.

In his second year he gained firsts in constitutional and legal history and in modern political institutions.

One of his teachers, W. Macmahon Ball, one of Australia's leading political scientists of this period, made a deep impression on him.

By this time he had lost his Christian faith but was not attracted to any of the secular alternatives on offer.

His writings as a student explicitly rejected both socialism and communism.

At this point Clark's political views continuously shifted from liberalism to a type of moderate socialism.

His favourite writers at this time were Fyodor Dostoyevsky and T. S. Eliot, and his favourite historian was the conservative Thomas Carlyle.

In 1937 Clark won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, and left Australia in August 1938.

Among his teachers at Oxford were Hugh Trevor-Roper (a conservative), Christopher Hill (at that time a communist) and A. J. P. Taylor (a moderate socialist).

He won acceptance by excelling at cricket – playing for the Oxford XI and competing alongside Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins.

His exposure to Nazism and Fascism in 1938 made him more pessimistic and sceptical about the state of European civilisation.

However, he was not attracted to the Left's emancipatory process of socialist revolution and favoured, instead, a capitalist, social democratic and democratic socialist approach.

At Oxford also he suffered the social snubs commonly experienced by "colonials" at that time, which was apparently the source of his lifelong dislike of the English.

In 1939 in Oxford he married Dymphna Lodewyckx, the daughter of a Flemish intellectual and a formidable scholar in her own right, with whom he had six children.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Clark was exempted from military service on the grounds of his mild epilepsy.

He supported himself while finishing his thesis by teaching history and coaching cricket teams at Blundell's School, a public school at Tiverton in Devonshire, England.

Here he discovered a gift for teaching.

In June 1940 he suddenly decided to return to Australia, abandoning his unfinished thesis, but was unable to get a teaching position at an Australian university due to the wartime decline in enrolments.

Instead he taught history at Geelong Grammar School, and also coached the school's First XI – a highly prestigious appointment.

Among those he taught were Rupert Murdoch and Stephen Murray-Smith.

At Geelong, he published two papers.

The first, "The Dilemma of the French Intelligentsia", concerned why French Catholic intellectuals such as Charles Maurras had supported the Vichy regime.

In terms of his evolving political views, a few years later, around 1944, Clark became a socialist of moderate views, a political position he maintained for the rest of his adult life, with political sympathies broadly placed on the Left and with the Australian Labor Party.

He began a master of arts thesis on Alexis de Tocqueville (he finally submitted it in 1947, and it was published in 2000).

Through basically sympathetic towards de Tocqueville's liberalism, Clark wrote that his political vision for a just society was flawed by his ignorance of the misery of the masses and by his unwillingness to consider force to ensure justice.