I came to know the study, the ladder and other parts of the house quite well in 1988-89. Having completed the History, Clark had decided to begin transferring his personal papers and manuscripts to the National Library, and my job was to help him assemble them. It took longer than I expected, and I made many visits to Tasmania Circle, which fortunately is only a mile from the Library. Some visits were very short, as Clark often double-booked, or we would be interrupted by a press reporter and photographer, or he would tire quickly and suggest I return on another day. Sometimes we moved quickly. The long run of research files, which now fill eighty-eight boxes, needed only cursory inspection. With many other papers, however, Clark was uncertain or cautious, and I would wait patiently while he read a letter or document, silently deliberated, and then either added it to the Library pile or pushed it into his coat pocket. We worked through several filing cabinets in the study and also high cupboards in other parts of the house. Time seemed to stand still as I stood on a ladder, the round rungs slowly digging into my feet, waiting for Clark to reach up for the next file. Yet more papers were in boxes under the house, and retrieving them required a certain degree of agility.

As I gradually assembled the papers and packed them in my car, I formed some general impressions about the archives. Leaving aside his woeful handwriting, Clark was in many ways a good record keeper. Nearly all the papers were in folders, and all the folders were titled and dated. Early research files had labels such as ‘Manning Clark, Canberra, 1954, The Foundation of Australia’, and his system did not change in the next thirty years. The drafts of his books were all kept, with the mysterious exception of Volume 3 of the History. Shortly after he moved into the house, he began to file letters by date, and he kept up the practice for many years. In the late 1960s, however, he became more creative and started new series of files, such as ‘Comments on my work’, ‘Public life’ and ‘My great friends’. Twenty years later, he reorganised some of his papers, extracting letters from old files and making the overall arrangement even more complex. This task was unfinished at the time of his death, but some of the late file titles suggest the range of his friendships: Geoffrey Blainey, Geoffrey Fairbairn, Helen Garner, Barry Humphries, Iris Murdoch, Douglas Stewart, Patrick White. Clark nearly always wrote by hand, and there are relatively few copies of his own letters.

Clark donated more than one hundred boxes of papers to the Library in 1989 and made a few smaller transfers in the next two years. In May 1991 I met him on the steps of the Library and he handed me the manuscript of The Quest for Grace. He died a week later. In his will, he bequeathed his papers and unpublished works to the Library on condition that they be closed until 2000. Before long, I returned to Tasmania Circle and collected many more of Manning’s papers from Dymphna Clark. Eventually, her own papers would also come to the Library.

I had originally assumed that house moves and travel had led to the loss of all of Clark’s early papers, as almost nothing seemed to date from before 1953. The assumption was not entirely wrong, but in the boxes that came after Clark’s death were some much earlier papers. They included photographs of the youthful cricketer, a cuttings book mainly kept when he was overseas in 1938-40, the notes for the thesis on Alexis de Tocqueville, notebooks kept at Oxford and Geelong, and diaries extending from 1938 to 1991. The diaries were small and often terse, but as well as recording his lectures, meetings and travels they conveyed his moods and emotions. He wrote, for instance, of his exhilaration at representing Oxford against the powerful Yorkshire team in 1939, and of his despair following the attacks of Malcolm Ellis and others when the first volume of the History was published in 1962. The diaries, notebooks and other early papers had evidently accompanied Clark as he travelled around Germany, France and Britain, and from Geelong and Melbourne to Canberra.

The survival of a personal archive depends partly on an individual’s values and habits. Historians value documents, but they are not necessarily good at keeping their own papers. Clark was not a meticulous or obsessive record keeper, but he did not discard papers lightly and he took some trouble over his files, especially as he grew older. Domestic arrangements also have a bearing on whether papers are kept or lost, including such factors as the tolerance or exasperation of a spouse, the demands of children, the size of one’s home, and the frequency of house moves. The long residence at the house on Tasmania Circle, and the value that both Manning and Dymphna placed on papers, were major reasons why the Manning Clark archive is so large and so wide-ranging.