During the conservative depths of the 1950s and 1960s – what Clark calls the years of unleavened bread – this intense ambiguity of feeling about Australia was a common condition among the intellectuals. The hopes engendered in the last years of World War II and immediately afterwards had been dashed. The underlying optimism of the left nationalists had been confounded by the return of Menzies and all he stood for. One response was to submit the radical tradition to a critical reappraisal, and Clark’s own essay on ‘Rewriting Australian History’ (1956) was an important part of this process.

That essay is included in this collection and stands out all the more clearly as the only occasion on which Clark engaged in substantial historiographical discussion. For with Clark, as with other writers and artists, what began as a critical interrogation of the radical tradition ended as a wholesale abandonment of it and all its procedures. (Indeed, most such writers simply bypassed the outworn past, and Clark’s own deeply-felt need to settle accounts with it is indicative to his credit, of its lingering hold on him.) There was a turning away, from themes of national life and away from realist modes of presentation. The new concerns were more pessimistic, more figurative, more private and inward-looking. Clark’s own aspiration ‘to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for’ captures a common mood of fatalism. Writers and artists sought existential meaning in the aridity of the Australian environment and the intractability of its people, yet even this solace of comprehension was denied to the multitude.

The mentality was not wholly new, nor was it altogether remarkable in the circumstances of the time. Those circumstances have changed and so has the intelligentsia. In this respect it has been suggested that Clark is unfortunate to be working as a historian and not in some other medium because in his case the timelag between conception and execution is especially protracted. Humphries could present living death in Glen Iris in a five-minute sketch; Nolan could apply paint to canvas in a day; Robin Boyd or Patrick White might take twelve months or more to realise their intentions. But poor Clark has occupied two decades to get this History of Australia to the end of the nineteenth century. Hence while others could move on and respond to new realities, Clark is condemned to rework the outdated themes of the 1950s.

The comparison is unkind and unfair, but not wholly mistaken. In its conception Clark’s History is unmistakably a product of the 1950s – even down to the author’s first putting pen to paper in a tiny box of a room in Oxford on a golden day in May of 1956, as he tells us in another essay in this collection. Would he write Mr Dry-As­Dust’s academic work characterised by caution, judiciousness, and balance, or would he allow the gale inside him to become audible to the reader? ‘The decision was to attempt to communicate a vision of life.’

It is a story of folly, of the inner compulsions and torments that shape human conduct, of the awesome majesty of nature and of the naivete of those who sought comfort in religious or secular doctrines. It is a story of tragedy: ‘the author would be writing on the assumption that the world should belong to the Prometheans, to the visionaries, to the men of hope, while knowing that such men were always likely to be crushed in Australia’.

Speaking in my professional capacity as Mr Dry-As-Dust, I do not object to such a project simply because it asks the grand questions. In every volume of the History there are passages that grip my imagination. What I find ultimately disappointing is that this work of passion, craftsmanship and immense scholarship should work with so limited a range of stylistic devices and interpretative categories. Devices such as the biblical phrases, the classical references, the borrowing of sentence structures from the Anglican liturgy, the tags from Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, are used over and over again until they lose all their impact. The rich panorama of historical life is forced down into a handful of stock types.

Of course, there are new developments in more recent volumes of the History. It is hardly surprising that volume four, published in 1978, adopts a much sharper attitude towards the colonial mentality and reveals a marked sensitivity to the constitutional prerogatives of viceregal representatives. The same volume displays an enlarged awareness of class and an increased understanding of the position of women and Aborigines. But these sympathies are constrained within the old framework and the History of Australia remains a phenomenology of Australian society as seen by its rulers. Workers, women, and blacks are mistreated and exploited, but they remain victims whose relationship to the ruling class is essentially passive sexual desire. Sexuality, for example, as a male prerogative and the women either offer themselves for money or else submit out of a desire to give gratification. In any event, they are incapable of genuine lust. Women, like convicts, blacks and proletarians, appear on Clark’s historical stage as cardboard cut-outs, representing a condition with which he can sympathise but into which he cannot enter.

Clark’s History is a history of conflict, but the principal element of contestation is not between classes and sections of society but rather between society in a collective sense and nature. This clash of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the Bush and Industrial Civilization, takes place in the spirit of the Australian people and in individual human hearts, and all social relationships are subordinated to it. Clark therefore remains as pessimistic in volume four about the chances of real human progress as he was in volume one. His literary techniques of accumulation and repetition serve to reinforce the sordidness and pettiness of a political culture in which the mean man must always defeat the visionary. Vision is displaced into the realm of literature and the creative arts, where it is associated with figures like Marcus Clarke, Kendall, and Lawson, whose lives are doomed to tragedy. Their inner demon is that metaphysical anguish that prompts the lonely search for an answer to the question ‘what it’s all about’.

What then of Clark the activist and terror of the Australian Broadcasting Commission? It is evident that the Whitlam era and the manner of its downfall galvanised him, as it did Patrick White, Donald Horne and others. The new sense of engagement emerges in the present collection of essays, the clear majority of which were written after 1972. This book tells us much about Clark’s present commitment, but its treatment of the years of unleavened bread is thinner and mostly retrospective. We are given the ‘Letter to Tom Collins’ (1943), ‘Rewriting Australian History’ (1956), and ‘Faith’ (1962), but not the essays in literary and cultural criticism which appeared in early issues of Overland and Meanjin. (These remain interesting and surely are more worthy of inclusion than the long essay on ‘The Origins of the Convicts’ which is more dated and in any case is fairly readily available.)

It is also true that the younger Clark was more private and reticent about public commitment. As he himself puts it, he always ‘stood a pace or two apart from the rest’, he ‘listened but did not participate’, he ‘did in part believe but never joined any organization, party or group’. This temperamental attachment to the role of spectator is explored further in the short stories that Clark wrote during the period, afterwards brought together under the title Disquiet and Other Stories.

All this makes his conversion to political activism seem the more remarkable. As he explains it here, he became convinced in 1972 that the years of unleavened bread were over and something might be achieved. Characteristically, his expectations were Promethean in character: ‘At long last we had a teacher who had a chance to lead us out of the darkness into the light, always provided THEY did not cut him down, that THEY spared him a little before he went forth from hence and was no more seen.’ When Whitlam was cut down, Clark’s response was equally consistent. ‘Are We a Nation of Bastards?’ he asked, and answered that ‘History will be kinder to Labor than the People’.

It is not easy for an individual to carry on a public campaign against our rulers. When that individual takes on such an unaccustomed role late in life, and with other tasks still to be completed, he commands our admiration. So I find it all the more disappointing that Clark’s interpretation of the issues should be so limited. His cult of the leader avoids consideration of a series of difficulties that were only magnified by Whitlam’s political style, difficulties concerning democracy in the labor movement and methods of mobilising that level of mass support that might overcome entrenched opposition to social change. And Clark’s response to Whitlam’s fall – which is alternatively to reiterate with gloomy satisfaction that we are indeed hopelessly wedded to petty-bourgeois values, or else to make enigmatic references to ‘blood on the wattle’ and the ‘dustbin of history’ – offers little assistance in the present task of constructing a movement and a strategy that might effect such change.

Few readers will approach this book with such expectations. They will read it because they have already read some or all of the History and want to know more about its author, because they heard the 1976 Boyer lectures or because of some other earlier acquaintance. The Manning Clark they will encounter here is the one depicted on the cover. The hat is missing, the forehead is of Leninist proportions, the eyes are narrowed and fixed on a point somewhere to the left of the drawing, a multicoloured aureole is pencilled in around the head the expression is remarkably similar to the frontispiece portrait of Carlyle in Froude’s Life. It is the sage of Forrest.