Manning Clark

Charles Manning Hope Clark, AC FAHA (3 March 1915 – 23 May 1991) was an Australian historian and the author of the best-known general history of the country, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987. He has been described as "Australia's most famous historian", but his work has also been the target of criticism, particularly from conservatives and classical liberals.

Quotes

• Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations.
  • A History of Australia, Vol. 1 (1962), Ch. 1

• By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch had written the very first page in the history of European civilization in Australia by stating that there was no good to be done there. William Dampier popularized this idea amongst the English reading public half a century later.
  • A History of Australia, Vol. 1 (1962), Ch. 2

• The proposals for the use of a southern continent had a history almost as long though by no means so distinguished as the history of its discovery. Some saw it as land dedicated to the Holy Spirit; some saw it as a land fit only for the refuse of society, on the principle that the political body, like the human body, is often troubled with vicious humours, which one must often evacuate.
  • A History of Australia, Vol. 1 (1962), Ch. 4

• The inhospitable environment and the past had predisposed the minds of its European inhabitants to hand over the government of their country to men who were wary of visionaries and all those who held out a promise of better things for mankind. Australians seemed chained for decades to come to the role of being a New Britannia in another world. The young Henry Lawson and all the other prophets of Utopia were doomed to a bitter disenchantment.
  • A History of Australia, Vol. 5 (1981)

• Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New Britannia, the Millennial Eden, or the new demesne for Mammon to infest.
  • A History of Australia, Vol. 6 (1987)
  • Cp. Bernard O'Dowd, "Australia", in A Southern Garland (Sydney: The Bulletin Newspaper Co., Ltd., 1904), n.p.:

    Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place?
    Or but a Will o' Wisp on marshy quest?
    A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
    Or lurks millennial Eden 'neath your face?

• A turbulent emptiness seized the people as they moved into a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment era. No one any longer knew the direction of the river of life. No one had anything to say.
  • A History of Australia, Vol. 6 (1987), Epilogue

See also

• Malcolm Henry Ellis