‘National Awakening’, Autobiography, and the Invention of Manning Clark

ABSTRACT

In the late twentieth century, Australian historian Manning Clark (1915–1991) was the nation’s leading historian and public intellectual. Clark published a six-volume history of Australia (1962–1987) and was one of a vanguard of intellectuals striving to articulate a new Australian nationalism in the wake of the British Empire’s decline. His best-known volumes of autobiography were published in quick succession. Puzzles of Childhood (1989), which tells the story of his parents’ lives and the ‘nightmares and terrors’ of his childhood, and Quest for Grace (1990), which begins from his days as a student at Melbourne and Oxford universities in the 1930s and ends just as the first volume of A History of Australia is published in 1962. In addition to these two volumes, Clark’s autobiographical writings extended to reflections on historical writing, essays, speeches and interviews. This paper argues that all of Clark’s writing (including his histories) can be seen as inherently autobiographical. As Clark remarked, ‘everything one writes is a fragment in a gigantic confession of life’. Clark’s autobiographical writings point not only to the notorious unreliability of autobiography but also to much larger questions, such as the relationship between autobiographical truth and his invention as a national figure, and the author’s right to own their life story. Finally, perhaps more than any other Australian intellectual of his generation, Clark’s autobiographies narrate his life story as an allegory of national awakening.

KEYWORDS:

• Manning Clark
• autobiography
• memory
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mark McKenna, professor of history at Sydney University, is one of Australia’s leading historians. He has published widely on Aboriginal history, the history and politics of Australian republicanism, and biography. His 2011 biography of the Australian historian, An Eye for Eternity: the Life of Manning Clark won five national awards, including the 2012 Prime Minister’s Prize for Non-Fiction.