Charles Manning Hope Clark AC (1915 - 1991)

Born 3 Mar 1915 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Ancestors

Husband of Hilma Dymphna Lodewyckx — married 1939 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Died 23 May 1991 at age 76 in Australian Capital Territory, Australia

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Biography

Manning Clark AC is Notable.

Manning Clark AC was born in New South Wales, Australia

Manning Clark AC was an Australian historian and the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia. He has been described as "Australia's most famous historian", with his work being the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative and classical liberal academics and philosophers.

formative years

Charles Manning Hope Clark was born on 3rd March 1915 at Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. ^[1] He was the younger son of the Reverend Charles Clark, an English-born Anglican priest from a working-class background (he was the son of a London carpenter), and Catherine Hope, who was directly descended (3x great grandson) from Reverend Samuel Marsden, the 'flogging parson' of early colonial New South Wales, and Rowland Hassall one of the Tahiti missionaries who evacuated to New South Wales. Known as Manning to avoid confusion with his similarly named father, Clark had a difficult relationship with his mother, who continued the Marsden pretension of superior social origins, and came to identify her with the Protestant middle class he so vigorously attacked in his later work.

Charles Snr held various curacies in Sydney including St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney and St John's, Ashfield, where Catherine was a Sunday School teacher. His family moved from Kempsey, New South Wales, to Melbourne, Victoria, when Charles Jnr was five years of age. He was educated at state schools at Cowes and Belgrave, and then at Melbourne Grammar School. Here, as an introspective boy from a modest background, he suffered from ridicule and bullying, and acquired a lifelong dislike for the sons of the Melbourne upper class who had tormented him and others at this school. His later school years, however, were happier as he discovered a love of literature and the classics, and became an outstanding student of Greek, Latin and history (British and European). In 1933 he was equal dux of the school.

By this time he had rejected his father's Christian faith but was not attracted to any of the secular alternatives on offer. His writings as a student explicitly rejected both socialism and communism. ^[2]

In 1937 Clark won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, and left Australia in August 1938. At Oxford he shared the Left's horror of fascism – which he had seen first hand during a visit to Nazi Germany in 1938 – but was not attracted to the communism which was prevalent among undergraduates at the time.^[2]

In 1939 in Oxford he married Dymphna Lodewyckx,^[3] the daughter of a Flemish intellectual and a formidable scholar in her own right, with whom he had six children: Andrew, Axel, Benedict, Katerina, Rowland, and Sebastian.

academia

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Clark was exempted from military service on the grounds of his mild epilepsy. He supported himself while finishing his thesis by teaching history and coaching cricket teams at Blundell's School, a public school at Tiverton in Devonshire, England. Here he discovered a gift for teaching. In June 1940 he suddenly decided to return to Australia, abandoning his unfinished thesis, but was unable to get a teaching position at an Australian university due to the wartime decline in enrolments. Instead he taught history at Geelong Grammar School, and also coached the school's First XI – a highly prestigious appointment.

While at Geelong he began systematically to read Australian history, literature and criticism for the first time. The result was his first publication on an Australian theme, an open letter to the 19th-century Australian writer "Tom Collins", on the subject of mateship, which appeared in the literary magazine Meanjin. In 1944 Clark returned to the University of Melbourne to finish his master's thesis, an essential requirement if he was to gain a university post. He supported himself by tutoring politics, and later in the year he was finally appointed to a lectureship in politics.^[2]

In July 1949, Clark moved to Canberra to take up the post of Professor of History at the Canberra University College (CUC), which was at that time a branch of Melbourne University, and which in 1960 became the School of General Studies of the Australian National University (ANU). He lived in Canberra, then still a "bush capital" in a rural setting, for the rest of his life. From 1949 to 1972 Clark was Professor of History, first at CUC and then at ANU. In 1972 he was appointed to the new post of Professor of Australian History, which he held until his retirement in 1974.^[2]

The History of Australia

In the mid-1950s Clark conceived a new project: a large multi-volume history of Australia, based on the documentary sources but giving expression to Clark's own ideas about the meaning of Australian history. Originally envisioned as a two-volume work, with the first volume extending to the 1860s and the second volume ending in 1939, as Clark began to write, the work expanded dramatically, both in size and conception. The History of Australia eventually reach six volumes when published between 1962 and 1987.^[2]

Together with Meredith Hooper and Susanne Ferrier (illustrator) Clark also wrote The Ashton Scholastic History of Australia, published in 1988 by Ashton Scholastic; ISBN 086896686X.^[2]

honors and awards

Manning Clark was deservedly the recipient of many honours and awards, including:

• Moomba Book Award (1969)
• Henry Lawson Arts Award (1969)
• Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (1970)
• The Age Non-Fiction Book Prize Award (1974)
• Companion of the Order of Australia^[4] (1975)
• New South Wales Premier's Literary Award in 1979
• Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction (1979)
• Australian of the Year^[5] (1980)
• honorary doctorates by the Universities of Melbourne, Newcastle and Sydney
• Emeritus Professor of Australian National University from 1974 until his death^[2]

death

He passed away on 23rd May 1991 at Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.^[2]

After Dymphna Clark's death in 2000, the Clark's home in Tasmania Circle, Forrest, designed by Robin Boyd, was turned into Manning Clark House, an educational centre devoted to Manning Clark's life and work.^[6]

Sources

1. ↑ New South Wales Birth Index #2131/1915
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7} Wikipedia profile: Manning Clark; accessed 17 Feb 2019
3. ↑ UK FreeBMD Marriage Index Mar qtr 1939, vol 3a, page 2185
4. ↑ Australian Honours: Charles Manning Clark AC; accessed 17 Feb 2019
5. ↑ Wikipedia: Australians of the Year; accessed 17 Feb 2019
6. ↑ Manning Clark House; accessed 3 Aug 2019

See also

• Wikipedia profile: Manning Clark; accessed 17 Feb 2019.