This is a familiar theme in Clark’s addresses – perhaps it characterises most great political and religious speeches. The populace is confronted with a moment of decision. It must choose between good and evil, between meaning and vacuousness, between the light and the darkness. But for Clark, the choice was not simple. He was no ideologue proffering ready-made solutions. Rather, he urged his students and readers to wrestle with the fundamental question: in what can a person believe? As this collection shows, Clark was preoccupied with this quest as early as 1940. It was still driving him half a century later. His style is easy to parody. In his speeches and in his epic History, Clark repeatedly intoned certain favourite phrases; his work reverberates with ‘the River of Life’, the ‘ancient continent’, the ‘vision splendid’, ‘the black bottle’, ‘the flaw in the clay’, and’ Old Australia’. He also called on a stock of quotations drawn from, among others, Dostoevsky, Lawson, Carlyle, Eliot, Homer, Shakespeare, the Prayer Book and the Bible. These glowing phrases helped him to illuminate his personal cosmology: they revealed a universe in which a passion for life blazed in the midst of an unfathomable darkness. No one else could have got away with talking like this. But that’s partly because so few people really thought like this.

Clark was a singular writer – a powerful, lone voice. He achieved his life’s project: he transformed Australian historical writing, imparting to it a new weight, scale, and spiritual intensity. But he was not a writer whom many chose to ‘follow’. He was an artist who had created an imaginative space which other writers could enter – but only in order to say their own piece. In fact, it was part of Clark’s credo that every writer and student of history should be encouraged to formulate their own understandings. As he explained in a 1948 lecture, history teachers should remember that ‘the truth comes from the contributions of all sorts and conditions’. The effective teacher believes ‘that you can learn from anyone’. Now it’s obvious that Clark’s writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea: no writer appeals to everyone. But that scarcely explains why the conservative name-callers have been so vicious in their attacks on him. Over the last ten years, they have promoted the notion that there are merely two schools of Australian history: the Clark school and the Blainey school. The first is bad, because it is ‘pessimistic’; it harps on about evil and promotes leftie causes. The other is good, because it is cheery, up-beat, and patriotic. This schema has nothing to do with understanding the complex networks of Australian historiography. It is a function of the conservative’s need to reduce the world into two opposing camps – the acceptable and the unacceptable. It is part of a strategy to silence critical thought – to possess Australian history and whitewash it for political ends. If we are to reach any informed appreciation of Clark’s contribution to Australian historiography – or of Blainey’s for that matter – we have first to see beyond the effigies which conservative ideologues have set up in each historian’s place.

Clark’s ‘pessimism’ deserves some comment. Clark’s gaze was drawn to human folly and to human suffering – both of which he tried to see ‘with the eye of pity’. But there is also running through Clark’s History, and through these speeches, a deeply optimistic principle, which he called ‘the River of Life’. This expressed his sense that there was an underlying momentum in human affairs towards fairness, justice, and some kind of salvation. But it was a momentum with which individuals and societies could lose touch – plunging them into the barbarism or banality which prevail in the Kingdom of Nothingness.

This selection of speeches was made by Manning Clark himself, not long before he died. They are published here for the first time, with useful footnotes added by his widow Dymphna (whose contribution to Clark’s work deserves wide recognition), an index by his son Sebastian, and a moving and insightful foreword by Stuart Macintyre. No doubt the cold warriors in the tabloid press will seize gleefully on the several references to ‘1917’ in this collection – notably in Clark’s controversial ‘Cleansing Fire’ speech. He was tantalised by the view – common on the left after 1956 – that there was a moment of glorious purity in the Russian Revolution before it all went grotesquely wrong – a moment when Lenin and the people were united in a single transcendent endeavour.

This selection, leaves no doubt: Clark wanted to be seen as a man who wondered whether revolution was necessary to deliver us from evil. In several speeches, he set the eternal deliverance promised by the Christian faith against the hopes of ‘1917’, and asked aloud where salvation was to be found. It’s clear that radical gestures set Manning Clark’s blood racing. But he was no gun-toting revolutionary. He always disowned ideologues and bully boys. He always wrote about actual violence with a sense of terror and pity. His heart, as he liked to say, was with ‘lovers and believers’.

I gather that the cover design of this book is intended to be stylishly retro. To me it just looks dull and old-fashioned. But don’t be put off. This is a pacey and illuminating collection. It resonates with the voice of an Australian nationalist who was, by turns, mischievous, theatrical, formulaic, idealistic, enigmatic, and profound. It is not a book of sermons. Yet, ultimately, it is a collection in search of faith.