Editing Manning Clark (section)

==Academic career==
[[File:Clarkgeelong.jpg|thumb|350px|left|Manning Clark as coach of the [[Geelong Grammar School|Geelong Grammar]] First XI, 1941]]

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, Devon|Tiverton]] in [[Devon]]shire, 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]].{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=49}}

At Geelong, he published two papers.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=33}}  The first, "The Dilemma of the French Intelligentsia", concerned why French Catholic intellectuals such as Charles Maurras had supported the Vichy regime.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=33}} Clark argued that Maurras and other French Catholic intellectuals had been reluctant collaborators, driven to support Vichy out of a dissatisfaction with bourgeois conservatism in France and a fear of the masses propelled by memories of the French Revolution.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=33}}  In his second paper entitled "France and Germany", Clark offered up a comparative study of the intelligentsia of Germany and France, asking why the former nation gave birth to National Socialism while the latter nation had to be defeated to become Nazi.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=33}} Clark offered up what would today be called the ''Sonderweg'' interpretation, arguing that in the 19th century the majority of French intellectuals had by and large accepted liberalism, rationalism and the values of ''liberté, égalité, fraternité'' whereas the majority of German intellectuals by contrast had embraced conservatism, emotionalism, and a vision of a hierarchical society ruled by an autocratic elite.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=33}} Clark noted that at the beginning of the 20th century, the most famous French intellectual was the writer Émile Zola who had been a leading Dreyfusard in the Dreyfus affair as he maintained justice must apply to all French people. By contrast, Clark noted that the most famous German intellectual in some time period was the English-born [[Houston Stewart Chamberlain]], the "Evangelist of Race", whose theories divided the world into a racial hierarchy with the Germanic Aryan race as the ''herrenvolk'' ("master race").  While at [[Geelong]] he began systematically to read Australian history, literature and criticism for the first time. The result was his first publication on an Australian theme, an open letter to the 19th-century Australian writer "[[Joseph Furphy|Tom Collins]]", on the subject of [[mateship]], which appeared in the literary magazine ''[[Meanjin]]''.

In 1944 Clark returned to [[Melbourne University]] to finish his master's thesis, an essential requirement if he was to gain a university post. He supported himself by tutoring [[politics]], and later in the year he was finally appointed to a [[lectureship]] in politics. The acting head of the Politics Department at this time was [[Ian Milner]], who soon left to become an Australian [[diplomat]]. Years later it was revealed that Milner had been a secret communist and [[Soviet agent]]. Clark's brief friendship with Milner at this time has been seized on as evidence of Clark's supposed communist sympathies, but it is unlikely that Clark knew anything about Milner's covert activities.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=66}} In late 1945 he transferred to the History Department, as a permanent lecturer in Australian History. With the encouragement of [[Max Crawford]] (head of the History Department from 1937 to 1970), he taught the university's first full-year course in Australian history. Among his students were [[Frank Crean]] (later Deputy Prime Minister), [[Geoffrey Blainey]], [[Bruce Grant (writer)|Bruce Grant]], [[Geoffrey Serle]], [[Ken Inglis]] and [[Ian Turner (Australian historian)|Ian Turner]] (the latter five all future historians of note), [[Helen Hughes (economist)|Helen Hughes]], and [[Peter Ryan (publisher)|Peter Ryan]], later Clark's publisher. During this time he began thoroughly researching the archives in Melbourne and Sydney for the documentary evidence on Australia's early history.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} He also developed a reputation as a heavy drinker, and was a well-known figure in the pubs of nearby [[Carlton, Victoria|Carlton]]. (In the 1960s he gave up drink and was a total [[abstainer]] for the rest of his life.)<ref>Ryan, "Manning Clark," 12</ref>

Clark later stated that it was reading the novelists, poets and playwrights during this period such as [[Joseph Furphy]], [[James McAuley]], [[Douglas Stewart (poet)|Douglas Stewart]], [[Henry Lawson]], and [[D.H. Lawrence]] that led to his "discovery of Australia" as he became convinced that the story of Australia had not been properly told by historians, and the Australians had a past to be proud of.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} Clark was also disappointed by the treatment afforded by historians of "dinkum" Australians (i.e. ordinary Australians, so-called because they spoke the "dinkum" variety of English) with their values of mateship, egalitarianism and anti-elitism with the "dinkum" people being portrayed as almost a national disgrace.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} Clark argued it was time for Australian intellectuals to stop treating Great Britain as the model of excellence to which Australians should strive to meet, writing that Australia should be treated as an entity in its own right.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} However, Clark himself was critical of "dinkum" Australians, albeit from another direction as he maintained that values such as mateship were mere "comforters" that helped to make life in colonial Australia with its harsh environment more bearable, and failed to provide a means to fundamentally change society.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} Clark stated that he did not know what were the new values that Australian society needed, but that historians had the duty to start such a debate.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} A major problem for Australian historians in the 1940s was that most of the primary sources relating to the colonial period were held in archives in Britain, making research expensive and time-consuming.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} Starting in 1946, Clark together with L.J. Pryor collected documentary material relating to the founding of the colony of New South Wales in 1788, the transportation of convicts to the penal colony and the squatter living illegally in the bush with the aim of publishing them to make them more accessible to historians.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}}

In 1948 Clark was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and was well set for a lifelong career at Melbourne University. But as the [[Cold War]] set in he began to find the intellectual climate of Melbourne uncomfortable. In 1947 F.L. Edmunds, a [[Liberal Party of Australia|Liberal]] member of the [[Victorian Legislative Assembly]], launched an attack on "Communist infiltration" of the university, naming Crawford (a largely apolitical liberal) and [[Jim Cairns]], an [[economics]] lecturer and a left-wing Labor Party member. Clark was not named, but when he went on the radio to defend his colleagues, he was attacked as well. Thirty of Clark's students signed a letter affirming that he was a "learned and sincere teacher" of "irreproachable loyalty". The Melbourne University branch of the [[Communist Party of Australia|Communist Party]] said that Clark was "a reactionary" and no friend of theirs.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=75}}

In July 1949, Clark moved to [[Canberra]] to take up the post of professor of history at the [[Canberra University College]] (CUC), which was at that time a branch of Melbourne University, and which in 1960 became the School of General Studies of the [[Australian National University]] (ANU). He lived in Canberra, then still a "bush capital" in a rural setting, for the rest of his life. From 1949 to 1972 Clark was professor of history, first at CUC and then at ANU. In 1972 he was appointed to the new post of professor of Australian history, which he held until his retirement in 1974. He then held the title emeritus professor until his death.

During the 1950s Clark pursued a conventional academic career while teaching history in Canberra. In 1950 he published the first of two volumes of ''Select Documents in Australian History'' (Vol. 1, 1788–1850; Vol. 2, 1851–1900, appeared in 1955).{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} These volumes made an important contribution to the teaching of Australian history in schools and universities by placing a wide selection of primary sources, many never before published, in the hands of students.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} The publication of the first volume of ''Select Documents'' in 1950 attracted much media attention at the time, being hailed as the beginning of a new period of Australian historiography.{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=34}} The documents were accompanied by extensive annotation and commentaries by Clark, and his critics now regard this as his best work, before the onset of what they see as his later decline.<ref>John Barrett, "The two Clarks," in Bridge, ''Manning Clark'', 115</ref> At this stage of his career Clark published as C. M. H. Clark, but he was always known as Manning Clark, and published his later works under that name.

During this period Clark was regarded as a conservative, both politically and in his approach to Australian history. In an influential 1954 lecture published under the title "Rewriting Australian history",<ref>C.M.H. Clark, "Rewriting Australian history," in T.A.G. Hungerford, ''Australian Signpost'', Melbourne University Press 1956, 130. The lecture is now more readily accessible in Imre Salusinszky (editor), ''The Oxford Book of Australian Essays'', Oxford University Press, 1997</ref> he rejected the nostalgic radical nationalism of "Old Left" historians such as [[Brian Fitzpatrick (Australian author)|Brian Fitzpatrick]], [[Russel Ward]], [[Vance Palmer]] and [[Robin Gollan]], which, he said, tended to see Australian history as merely a "manure heap" from which the coming golden age of socialism would arise. He attacked many of the [[shibboleths]] of the nationalist school, such as the idealisation of the [[convicts]], [[bushrangers]] and pioneers. The rewriting of Australian history, he said, "will not come from the radicals of this generation because they are tethered to an erstwhile great but now excessively rigid creed".{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=95}} There were a number of similar comments in his annotation of the ''Select Documents''. The diggers of [[Eureka Stockade|Eureka]], for example, were not revolutionaries, but aspiring capitalists; the dominant creed of the 1890s was not socialism, but fear of Asian immigration.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=96}} Although these views were seen as conservative at the time, they were later taken up with greater force by the Marxist historian [[Humphrey McQueen]] in his 1970 book ''[[A New Britannia]]''.

The orthodox left was sharply critical of Clark during this period. When [[Paul Mortier]] reviewed the second volume of ''Select Documents'' in the Communist Party newspaper ''Tribune'', he criticised Clark for his lack of Marxist understanding: "Professor Clark rejects [[class struggle]] as the key to historical development: he expressed grave doubts about whether there has been any real progress: and he has no good word for historians who pay tribute to the working people for their contributions to Australia's traditions," he wrote.<ref>Paul Mortier, "The professor is baffled but the documents are clear," ''Tribune'', 27 July 1955</ref>

In 1962 Clark contributed an essay to [[Peter Coleman]]'s book ''Australian Civilisation'', in which he argued that much of Australian history could be seen as a three-sided struggle between [[Catholicism]], [[Protestantism]] and [[secularism]], a theme which he continued to develop in his later work.<ref>C.M.H Clark, "Faith," in Peter Coleman (editor), ''Australian Civilisation'', F.W.Cheshire 1962. Coleman was later a state and federal [[Liberal Party of Australia|Liberal]] MP and is the father-in-law of [[Peter Costello]]</ref> In his introduction Coleman wrote:

:"The post-war Counter-Revolution [in Australian historiography] involves so many influences that it would be ridiculous to attribute it to the influence of any one man, but nevertheless the influence of Manning Clark has been of the greatest importance. By his questioning of the orthodox assumptions he did more than anyone else to release historians from the prison of the radical interpretation and to begin the systematic study of the neglected themes in our history, especially of religion".<ref>Coleman, ''Australian Civilisation'', 7</ref>

At this time also Clark was close to [[James McAuley]], founder of the conservative literary-political magazine ''[[Quadrant (magazine)|Quadrant]]''. McAuley persuaded him to become a member of ''Quadrant''{{'}}s initial editorial advisory board.<ref>Cassandra Pybus, ''The Devil and James McAuley'', University of Queensland Press 1999, 35, 115, 157</ref> Clark was, however, never fully identified with political conservatism. In 1954 he was one of a group of intellectuals who publicly criticised the position of the [[Robert Menzies|Menzies]] government on the war in [[French Indo-China]], and as a result was attacked as communist fellow-travellers in the [[Australian House of Representatives|House of Representatives]] by the outspoken right-wing parliamentarian [[William Wentworth (Australian politician)|Bill Wentworth]].<ref>Stuart Macintyre, "Always a pace or two apart," in Bridge, ''Manning Clark'', 19</ref> As a result, he was placed under surveillance by Australia's domestic intelligence organisation, [[Australian Security Intelligence Organisation|ASIO]], who over the years compiled a large file of trivia and gossip about him, without ever discovering anything in his activities that posed a risk to "national security".{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=89}}