Manning Clark
| Manning Clark | |
|---|---|
Clark in his study, circa 1988
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| Native name | Charles Manning Hope Clark |
| Born |
3 March 1915 Sydney, New South Wales |
| Died | 23 May 1991 (aged 76) Canberra, Australian Capital Territory |
| Awards |
Moomba Book Award (1969) Henry Lawson Arts Award (1969) Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (1970) The Age Non-Fiction Award (1974) Companion of the Order of Australia (1975) Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction (1979) Australian of the Year (1980) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater |
University of Melbourne University of Oxford |
| Influences |
Thomas Carlyle Edward Gibbon Thomas Macaulay |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions |
Australian National University (1960–74) University of Melbourne (1944–60) |
| Notable students |
Frank Crean Geoffrey Serle Ken Inglis Geoffrey Blainey |
| Main interests | Australian history |
| Notable works | A History of Australia |
| Influenced |
Geoffrey Serle Lyndall Ryan |
Charles Manning Hope Clark AC (3 March 1915 – 23 May 1991), an Australian historian, was the author of the best-known general history of Australia, 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 been the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative and classical liberal academics and philosophers.
Clark was born in Sydney in 1915, the son of the Revd Charles Clark, an English-born Anglican priest from a working-class background (he was the son of a London carpenter), and Catherine Hope, who came from an old Australian establishment family. On his mother's side he was a descendant of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the "flogging parson" of early colonial New South Wales. He had a difficult relationship with his mother, who never forgot her superior social origins, and came to identify her with the Protestant middle class he so vigorously attacked in his later work. Charles 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 to Melbourne when he was a child; and lived in what one biographer describes as "genteel poverty" on the modest income of an Anglican vicar.
Clark's happiest memories of his youth were of the years 1922–24, when his father was the vicar of Phillip Island, south-east of Melbourne, where he acquired the love of fishing and of cricket, which he retained for the rest of his life. 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. 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.
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