Editing Manning Clark (section)

==''The History of Australia'': later volumes==
Volumes II and III of the ''History'' broadly followed the path prepared by Clark's earlier work and ideas. Volume II (launched in 1968) took the story to the 1830s, and dwelt on the conflicts between the colonial governors and their landowning allies with the emerging first generation of native-born white Australians, many of them the children of convicts. It prompted [[Russel Ward]] to praise Clark as "the greatest historian, living or dead, of Australia". Even [[Leonie Kramer]], doyenne of conservative intellectuals and closely associated with the ''Quadrant'' group, named Volume II as her "book of the year".{{Sfn|Holt|1999|pages=151-152}} The appearance of Volume III in 1973 aroused little controversy – commentators of all political views apparently felt there was nothing new to say about Clark's work.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=169}}

By the time Volume IV appeared in 1979, however, the tone of both his work and of the critical response to it had changed greatly. (This process was aided by Clark's retirement from teaching in 1975 – he no longer faced the demands of a professional academic career and was free to write what he liked.) Although Clark had rejected the nostalgic nationalism of the "Old Left" historians, he shared much of their contempt for the old Anglo-Australian upper class, whose stronghold was the "Melbourne establishment" where Clark was raised and educated. His earlier preoccupation with the clash of European belief systems imported into Australia in the 18th century faded, and was replaced by a focus on what Clark saw as the conflict between "those who stood for 'King and Empire' and those who stood for 'the Australian way of life and the Australian dream,' between 'the Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green'".<ref>Alan Atkinson, "A great historian?", in Bridge, ''Manning Clark'', 124</ref> While this was a focus more relevant to the history of Australia in the late 19th and 20th centuries, it was also a much more politically contentious one, and Clark's undisguised contempt for the "Old Dead Tree" of the Anglo-Australian middle class fuelled the view that he was now writing polemic rather than history.

Writing in the heated political atmosphere of Australia in the 1970s, Clark came to see [[Robert Menzies]] (Liberal Prime Minister 1949–1966) as the representative of the "old" Australia, and to see Whitlam as the hero of a new progressive Australia. Clark campaigned for Whitlam in the 1972 and 1974 elections, and was outraged by his dismissal by the [[Governor-General of Australia|Governor-General]], Sir [[John Kerr (governor-general)|John Kerr]], in 1975, after which he wrote an article for ''Meanjin'' called "Are we a nation of bastards?".{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=177}} These views increasingly coloured his writing, and were notable in the last three volumes of the ''History''. Volume IV of the ''History'', launched in 1978, was notably strident in its attacks on Anglo-Australian conservatism, materialism, philistinism and "groveldom".{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=181}} It attracted the now familiar range of critical comment: criticism from conservatives, praise from the left (although Marxists like Connell and McQueen continued to complain that Clark was really a "bourgeois historian").

In 1975, the [[Australian Broadcasting Commission]] invited Clark to give the 1976 [[Boyer Lectures]], a series of lectures which were broadcast and later published as ''A Discovery of Australia''. The Boyer lectures allowed Clark to describe many of the core ideas of his published work and indeed his own life in characteristic style. "Everything a historian writes," he stated for example, "should be a celebration of life, a hymn of praise to life. It should come up from inside a man who knows all about that horror of the darkness when a man returns to the dust from whence he came, a man who has looked into the heart of that great darkness, but has both a tenderness for everyone, and yet, paradoxically, a melancholy, a sadness, and a compassion because what matters most in life is never likely to happen".<ref>CMH Clark. Discovery of Australia. 1976 Boyer Lectures Australian Broadcasting Commission Sydney 1976 p12.</ref> Clark's next work, ''In Search of [[Henry Lawson]]'' (1979), was a reworking of an essay which was originally written in 1964 as a chapter for [[Geoffrey Dutton]]'s pioneering ''The Literature of Australia''. It was worked up in some haste in response to the desire of the Macmillan publishing house for a new book with which they could cash in on Clark's popularity. Predictably, and with more than usual justification, Clark saw Lawson as another of his tragic heroes, and he wrote with a good deal of empathy of Lawson's losing battle with alcoholism: a fate Clark himself had narrowly avoided by giving up drink in the 1960s. But the book showed both its age and its haste of preparation, and was savaged by [[Colin Roderick]], the leading authority on Lawson, as "a tangled thicket of factual errors, speculation and ideological interpretation".{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=187}}

By the time Volume V of the ''History'', which covered the years between 1881 and 1915, appeared in 1981, Clark had increasingly withdrawn from political controversy. The retirement of Whitlam after his defeats at the 1975 and 1977 elections removed the main focus of Clark's political loyalty – he was not very impressed with Whitlam's pragmatic successor, [[Bill Hayden]], and even less impressed with Hayden's chief rival, [[Bob Hawke]], whom Clark had known since his student days at ANU and regarded as lacking in principle. In addition, Clark, although only in his mid 60s, was in poor health, already suffering from the heart problems that were to overshadow his final years.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=197}} In any case, Clark made it clear in this volume that his enthusiasm for Whitlam had not changed his views of the Labor Party as a party: Labor's founding leaders, [[Chris Watson]] and [[Andrew Fisher]], he wrote, were dull and unimaginative men, who wanted no more than that working men should have a modest share of the prosperity of bourgeois Australia. The real hero of Volume V was [[Alfred Deakin]], leader of enlightened middle-class liberalism, and (like Clark) a product of Melbourne Grammar and Melbourne University.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=198}}

In his last years, Clark responded to criticism about his treatment of the Aborigines with many lambasting him for his 1962 statement that "civilisation did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century".{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=37}} In response, Clark stated that when he began the ''History'', he was writing with a "British clock" in his mind, saying: "Now I want to go on to persuade Australians to build their own clock. That, I think, must start forty or fifty thousand years ago with the migration of the Aborigines to Australia...I told only a part of what is possibly the greatest human tragedy in the history of Australia-the confrontation between the white man and the Aborigine".{{Sfn|Hughes-Warrington|2000|p=37}}

In 1983, Clark was hospitalised for the first time and underwent bypass surgery, and further surgery was needed in 1984. Always a pessimist, Clark became convinced that his time was running out, and from this point he lost interest in the outside world and its concerns and concentrated solely on finishing the ''History'' before his death. His work on Volume VI, to cover the years between the two world wars, led him to compare Hawke, who became Prime Minister in March 1983, with [[James Scullin]], the hapless Labor Prime Minister of the [[Great Depression|Depression]] years who failed to take any radical steps and saw his government destroyed. Clark's health improved in 1985 and he was able to travel to China and to the Australian war cemeteries in France. A final burst of energy enabled him to finish Volume VI in 1986, although the story was taken only down to 1935, when both John Curtin and Robert Menzies emerged as national leaders, allowing Clark to draw a sharp contrast between these two, portraying Menzies as the representative of the old Anglo-Australian "grovellers" and Curtin as the leader of the new Australian nationalism. The book was launched in July 1987.{{Sfn|Holt|1999|p=213}}