Cirrus@Austlit

Manning Clark was born in Sydney and attended Melbourne Grammar School before completing a BA at the University of Melbourne in 1938. Clark studied for a short period at Oxford, beginning a thesis on Alexis de Tocqueville, but returned to Australia without a degree. While working as a history teacher at Melbourne Grammar School, Clark completed his thesis and was awarded an MA from the University of Melbourne in 1944. By this time he was teaching at the University of Melbourne. In 1949 he was appointed professor of history at Canberra University College (now the Australian National University) and remained there for the rest of his career.

In Canberra Clark began to concentrate on Australian history and published a number of bibliographies in the 1950s, but his best-known work, A History of Australia, began its multi-volume publication in 1962. Five more volumes appeared during the next three decades, the last in 1987, completing the coverage of the years between 1788 and 1945. Despite this momentous achievement, Clark has been criticised for his pessimism, inaccuracies and idealism. But he has also drawn an equal number of supporters who point to the power of his personal view of Australia's development.

While Clark's reputation is based primarily on his historical writing, his other writing includes a biography of Henry Lawson, a collection of short stories and two volumes of autobiography. Clark's view that Australia is Henry Lawson 'writ large' is expanded in the fifth volume of A History of Australia. Other writers, such as Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson and James McAuley (qq.v.) significantly influenced Clark's vision of Australia.

Clark won a number of awards, including several for his biography The Puzzles of Childhood, and was made AC in 1975. During his career, he was one of Australia's few high-profile intellectuals and academics, appearing regularly in support of many national, environmental and cultural movements. Manning Clark died in 1991.