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HISTORIANS - THE OLD DEAD TREE AND THE YOUNG TREE GREEN |
| Review: History of Australia, vol. VI "The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green" C. M. H. Clark (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987) 522 pp. $35.00. In the twenty-five years between the
publication of the first and sixth volumes of A History of Australia
(1962-87), Manning Clark's achievement has altered the criteria by which
his opus is judged. One index of this success is that he no longer has
to stress that the title is 'a' not 'The' History of Australia: the
indefinite rather than the definite article. Most reviewers judged
volumes V and VI against a standard set by Clark himself in Volumes III
and IV, prefacing their praise by an acknowledgement that the work
before them was sui generis. The extent of this peculiarity is clearer
when one ponders what has been necessary to produce rival surveys. A dozen or more individuals have
attempted a "Short History" of Australia. A score of others
have produced accounts of one aspect of Australian society, for example,
Bernard Smith on painting, Edward Shann on economics, Roger Covell on
music and H.M. Green on literature. 1 These specialist accounts have had
more to say about the meaning and shape of Australian experiences than
several of the short histories. By contrast, Frank Crowley's five-part
documentary history was often little better than a scrapbook of
newspaper clippings - for example, the establishment of the Petrov
Commission is given from the report in the Brisbane Courier-Mail. The
Australians is a five volume set, with five supplementary source books,
which boast of 200 contributing authors; even that vast crew took a
decade to deal only with slices such as the years 1838, 1888 and 1938.
The Oxford history will be another five volume set, albeit with only
five authors attempting to portray the entirety of human settlement. The personal and generalising elements in
Clark's History had to be sustained against an academic tide of
scientistic specialisation. Behavioural psychologists demonstrated by
ratiocination that history was bunk. The PhD industry turned the
brightest and the best into masters of the trivial and the non-telic.
Would Russel Ward or Robin Gollan have been allowed to start their
theses in the 1970s when the head of the history department at the ANU
research school told a student that the quality of his doctorate would
depend upon his locating facts that no one had previously uncovered? In shifting the terms of debate about his
own writing, Clark has also helped to change the perception of his
subject, Australia. When he began to collect material for his first
publication, the 1950 volume of Select Documents, 1788-1850,2 academic
study of Australia was considered justifiable only as a sidelight on
British Imperial history. That bias existed when the first volume of
Clark's History appeared in 1962 and continues into 1988, although the
put-downs have attained new levels of sophistry. If the notion of writing a multi-volume
history of Australia was seen as eccentric, Clark's approach to his
material was seen as bizarre. Received opinion understand that
Australian history was about things: land, sheep, gold. Events were few
and far between: foundation, the rum rebellion, Eureka, the maritime
strike, Federation and Gallipoli. Personalities were more common, that
is to say, there were too many governors and premiers. Whatever
Australian history might have been about it definitely was not about
'great ideas', or ideas of any kind. Clark accepted that view of
Australia until the late 1950s. The shock in Volume I was its treatment
of Australia as a place where answers could be sought to questions about
the meaning of human existence. Instead of European Australia to 1821
being a chronicle of convicted and unconvicted criminals, Clark pictured
a struggle between Roman Catholicism, the Protestant Ascendency and the
Enlightenment. The villages of Sydney and Hobart assumed the
significance of Athens or Bethlehem. Traducers could make no sense of an
approach which failed to hold the mirror up to what they thought they
already knew. Clark's redirection of his subject-matter
can now been seen as part of a wider transformation in the perception of
European Australia. Hostility towards his History had been matched by
resistance to White's rescuing of the novel from dun-dreary naturalism.
That Australia could be a mythopoeic site had been shown by the
Melbourne expressionists and Surrealists - the Boyds, Perceval, Drysdale
and Nolan; and hinted at by playwrights such as Lawlor and Seymour.
Bernard Smith's European Vision and the South Pacific3 showed how the
antipodean world could sustain the most rigorous intellectual
discussion. None of these creators was without some contrary feature,
yet their works established a base-line beneath which the investigation
of Australia - intuitive or scholarly - need never again sink. By 1987,
no one was perplexed because Clark's sixth epistle posed problems about
Australian civilisation. Many disagreed with his implied answers. None
thought the asking impertinent. Volume VI differs from its predecessors
by not settling on two competing protagonists. Photographs of Menzies
and Curtin are at the front but their careers before 1935 were but
overtures for the contests of the following decade. Hughes dominates the
opening chapters as he did Australian politics from 1916 to 1920, he is
too spiteful to convey the moral burden of Clark's counterposing of
Australia against the Empire. Hughes embodied that conflict but in terms
of corpses, base metals and bombast. His downfall was managed by that
other unappetising figure, Stanley Melbourne Bruce who presided over the
1920s, to be followed by the lacklustre Scullin and the lickspittle
Lyons. Federal politics attracted characters and clowns - Anstey
battling the Money Power in the "Kingdom of Shylock", or
Walter Marks telling the House of Representatives that Armageddon would
be fought in 1934. None of these could serve Clark's vision in the way
that Deakin and Lawson had done. The problem was exacerbated by looking
too much at the Federal sphere. 'Red Ted' Theodore was the coming man in
politics and business, moving from Queensland to Canberra and out into
Fiji gold and the Women's Weekly with Frank Packer. Other premiers
dominated their domain for a time -'Moo Cow' Mitchell and
'Mightier-than-Lenin' Lang. Clark's inability to find a spokesperson to
convey 'the Young tree Green' of Australia, or an attractive voice for
the 'Old Dead Tree' of England, confirms his thesis about a people who
could call 'home' a country they had never seen. The interwar years were
a cacophony of choruses over which big men belted out pop-songs but were
soon booed off-stage. None had the power of Parkes or Menzies to rewrite
their scripts. Volume VI is the part of the story that
Clark has most wanted to tell for it covers the first twenty years of
his own life. Volumes I to V are not prologue because they explore 'the
old Australia' that Clark inherited as a descendent of Samuel Marsden.
Clark appears in this volume as a source for his own information. There will not be a volume VII or VIII to
bring the narrative forward to 1975 or 1988. One reason is that Clark
made himself ineligible for research grants by turning seventy in 1985.
In the USA, a foundation or university would long ago have endowed his
enterprise with a personal award of a million dollars to keep him
producing at full steam for as long as he chose. The impoverishment of
intellectual life in Australia is epitomised by the virtual monopoly
which universities have had on research funds, and which the tertiary
sector will inherit under the Dawkins rearrangements.ÊÊSupport from
the Australia Council is limited. Otherwise, there is almost no source
of funding for research in the humanities. Labelling Clark as a 'literary historian'
has rarely been followed by any textual analysis. Historians are rightly
fearful of examining Clark's devices since their empiricism is
predicated on the inviolable primacy of texts. According to that
orthodoxy, visual sources are suspect, to be treated as little better
than illustrations. Words exist to be quoted, perhaps in the context of
other words and occasionally after allowing for the bias of their
author. In fact, words are connected by implicit structures, not merely
by conjunctions. The context is also rhetorical, not just verbal.
Meaning is immanent in structure, tone of voice, and imagery, which have
as much right to be cited and footnoted as the words which carry them.
To overlook those metaphorical contents is to misinterpret every primary
source. Labelling Clark as a 'literary historian' has been a safe way of
avoiding a key question: is any other kind of historian possible? In recent years, academic analysis has
been infected with the opposite naivete. The fact that writing is
constructed is used to support the false claim that all writing must be
equally remote from what actually happens. Sometimes this position
extends into a statement that nothing actually happens except writing.
For the devotees of that outlook, the literariness of Clark's history
has had a special charm. In Politics and the Writing of Australian
History, John Lechte coupled Clark's A History with Patrick White's
Voss, for possessing not only "a kinship of themes, but also a
profound kinship in modes of representation." 4 Lechte was so
excited by Clark's History that he wrote about "inertia that is set
in motion": anyone who could leave that solecism uncorrected is not
likely to be a guide through the demands of the writing trade. In reviewing Volume IV, I saw Clark's use
of repeated phrases as an application of Homeric practice and hence a
sign of his mythologising intent. Reading Volume VI has led me to
reassess this element in Clark's style as a musical technique, the motif
that allows the reader to know where they are in a forest of
information. Clark describes his structure as symphonic, noting that
even Sibelius found it impossible to drive more than two principal
themes. The biblical allusions of the earlier
volumes appear in the latest one where they continue their task of
reproducing the texture of public debate and private reflection. A new
element of popular song has been added, if not as successfully
integrated as the language of the Testaments. Positivists seize on Clark's errors of
detail to disprove any idea that truth can be greater than the facts.
Deconstructionists delight in what they have to be told are Clark's
howlers for they take these mistakes as confirmation of their prejudice
that history is another fictional genre. What neither extreme can
appreciate is how those errors come to be constructed through the
writing process, that the slips of the pen might be prose-slides. Good
writing is almost always rewriting. Clark moves through several drafts.
Each time a phrase is repositioned, or its inflection altered, the
connection to its original source shifts one or more degrees. The more
rewriting, the greater is the likelihood of sentences coming adrift from
the minutia that spawned them. Clark has compensated for this liability
by multiplying the instances so that mis-sightings might redress each
other. The politics of Clark's volumes is
expressed in his reputation as the embodiment of Australian history. The
prestige of that position affects what he can say in reviews where warm
appreciation will read like wild enthusiasm and mild reservations
resound as mortal blows. Clark has avoided silence by recycling a
limited repertoire of quotations - for instance, he is fond of Goethe's
contrast between the greyness of theory and the greenness of life. An
occasional reader of these smaller pieces may not detect the nuances in
Clark's usage. Taken en masse, an apparently trite remark can convey a
riveting judgement. A Professor of Fine Art replied to inquiring artists
with the single word 'Lovely'; those who knew the speaker well enough
could interpret that seeming praise on a scale of one to ten. Clark's historiography has had its
epigones, but no enlargers. His concern with belief and faith has been
debased into a warrant to apply the methods of political history to the
body of churches. Instead of suggesting a variety of religious
experience, the results chronicle another bureaucracy. Less happily
still, Clark's style has found its imitators. John Molony'sÊprose reads
so much like Manning Clark's that it could have been written by John
Ritchie. Literary criticism has to deal with an
apparent ubiquity of flaws in masterpieces. If Madame Bovary and Anna
Karenina are less than perfect, should we throw out the standards that
judge them so, or embrace imperfection as a necessary component of
excellence? Historiography faces a similar dilemma when its great names
are also the most wayward. Much as I admire Glen Lewis's A History of
the Ports of Queensland (1973), I would not place it in the top category
of historical writing. Why must perfect doctoralÊtheses be rewritten
for publication? Certainly, such exemplars of scholarship cannot
dislodge Blainey or Ward when they have synthesised their information
around human purposes. The inheritors of those whom Clark has
chastised as 'straightners' and 'measurers' tell their students that
while Clark is a mighty phenomenon, he is not, strictly speaking, an
historian. They, like Xavier Herbert, see him as a novelist who has
failed to think of a plot. Elsewhere, these guardians have decided that
Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle should not be on the reading list. If Clark
is not to be allowed into the first rank, the question arises where to
place those lecturers whose own writings are known to no more than a
handful of specialists? In The House of Intellect (1959) , Jacques
Barzun reported that he: once had occasion to tell a group of
graduate students that any of them would be lucky to achieve the fifth
or sixth rank among historians. The remark was prompted by their
dissatisfaction with all they knew: Gibbon was a bore, Macaulay a
stuffed shirt, Hegel and Michelet were fools, Carlyle and Buckle frauds
- this from students who could not write ten pages of readable and
properly documented narrative. Pointing out that even second and
third-rate men, such as Milman, Bancroft, or Grote, were the superiors
of these students' own instructors, who were by definition superior to
the students themselves, was a sobering thought quite foreign to their
experience. 5 In comparison with writers of fiction,
few historians are read long after their death. The 'great historians'
do not retain anything like the audience held by novelists and poets.
Homer is preferred to Thucydides, Shakespeare to Plutarch, and Dickens
to Engels. Historians are remembered for their style as much as for
their narratives. That Clark is read at all distinguishes
him from his colleagues who depend on the discipline of exams and essays
for their works to be taken off a library shelf. Moreoverr, Clark's
History has passed the Cyrill Connolly test by still being sought ten
years after publication. Yet Clark cannot be unaware that he too has
been writing in sand. The chances of his being read in 2088 are slim.
Perhaps some of his public appearances result from a recognition that in
order to have his books remembered he must do things about which others
may write. His growing readership has resulted, in part, from his vatic
stance. Asked to explain his public role, Clark could well proffer the
concluding passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native: Yeobright had, in fact, found his
vocation in the career of an itinerant open-air preacher and lecturer on
morally unimpeachable subjects; and from this day he laboured
incessantly in that office, speaking not only in simple language on
Rainbarrow and in the hamlets round, but in a more cultivated strain
elsewhere - from the steps and porticoes of town-halls from
market-crosses, from conduits, on esplanades and on wharves, from the
parapets of bridges, in barns and outhouses, and all other such places
in the neighbouring Wessex towns and villages. He left alone creeds and
systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his
tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men. Some believed
him, and some believed not; some said that his words were commonplace,
other complained of his want of theological doctrine; while others again
remarked that it was well enough for a man to take to preaching who
could not see to do anything else. But everywhere he was kindly
received, for the story of his life had become generally known. Clark's observation that the victors
write history has been misinterpreted as a defence of 'spiritual
bullies'. The danger is not that Kerr's reputation will be manipulated
by political regimes. The danger is that political regimes will decide
that memory of any kind of subversive, an insight at the heart of
Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984; a
subtler treatment of the politics of memory and imagination is in M.
Barnard Eldershaw's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. 6
Clark's reputation in 2088 will depend on the value which future
generations will be encouraged to attach to knowing about the efforts of
those who laboured here before them. Notes |