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AI Gemini response to modern opinions of Charles Manning Clark’s History of Australia

ideaswithanne.com 10 July 2025 No Comments

Modern opinions on Manning Clark’s A History of Australia are mixed, with both strong praise and sharp criticism. While lauded for its literary style and contribution to shaping a national identity, it has been criticized for historical inaccuracies, subjective interpretations, and neglecting marginalized groups like Aboriginal people and women.

Here’s a more detailed look at the perspectives:

Praise:

Impact on Australian Identity:Clark’s work is widely acknowledged for helping Australians develop a sense of national identity by exploring the nation’s past through a compelling narrative.
Literary Merit:Many admire the poetic and engaging style of his writing, which elevated Australian history to the level of literature.
Influence on Subsequent Historians:A History of Australia inspired many subsequent historians and shaped the field of Australian history, even if some disagreed with his approach.

Criticism:

Historical Inaccuracies:Critics point to factual errors and inaccuracies in Clark’s account, particularly in later volumes.
Subjectivity and Interpretation:Clark’s strong personal interpretations and use of narrative, myth, and philosophy are seen by some as detracting from the objectivity of history.
Exclusion of Marginalized Groups:A major criticism is Clark’s limited focus on Aboriginal Australians and women, which reflects the historical biases of his time but is now seen as problematic.
Lack of Social and Economic History:Some critics argue that Clark’s focus on individuals and political events neglected the broader social and economic context of Australian history.
“History Wars”:Clark’s work became a focal point in the “History Wars,” a debate about how Australian history should be written and interpreted, with some historians arguing he overemphasized certain narratives.

In Conclusion:

Manning Clark’s A History of Australia remains a significant work, but its legacy is complex and contested. While it undeniably shaped Australian historical consciousness and is celebrated for its literary quality, it has also faced substantial criticism for historical inaccuracies, subjective interpretations, and its limited scope.

Manning Clark, Carl Bridge – Melbourne University Publishing

Manning Clark’s work provokes violent reactions for and against. His majestic six-volume A History of Australia ‘helped us to know who we are’. Yet attacks on C…

Melbourne University Publishing

On reading Mark McKenna’s biography of Manning Clark – Inside Story

25 Aug 2011 — Though Clark regretted the factual errors in his History, they alone don’t vitiate his broader intent, which was to write a history that would live a…

Inside Story

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Making Australian History by Anna Clark

ideaswithanne.com 10 July 2025 No Comments

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59752203-making-australian-history

First review is worth a read

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59752203-making-australian-history

https://historicalragbag.com/2022/03/06/book-review-making-australian-history-by-anna-clark/

Why is this important? For this review it is essential. Making Australian History is about the history of History in Australia, how it has shaped our national identity, but also how History has been shaped.

Clark firmly positions the creation of Australian History at the same time as Australia was forming a national identity, but also at the time the study of History was being formalised and professionalised internationally.

This ‘scientific’ concept of History, where facts are immutable, personal opinion should not come into it, where History is unbiased, is at the core of the book.

Largely, the sidelining of non traditional sources including: oral history, First Nations history (through oral history and art work amongst other sources), family histories, local histories, non professional histories, fiction (including poetry), and other unwritten sources. By bringing these voices and sources back into the traditional view of History Clark makes the History richer, and explores how these alternative sources enable alternative voices to be heard.

First Nations art work, to convict songs, to photographs, to poetry, to fish traps. This is not say Clark excludes traditional sources with: speeches, early histories of Australia and other books also receiving the spotlight. Clark places these alternative sources on the same standing as traditional sources.

It is easy to see First Nations history as being suppressed completely once colonisation occurred, but Clark tells the story of its continuation as First Nations people continued to tell their own stories in many forms to advocate and fight for their rights. Their history is there, even in colonial sources, it is just often put aside by broader History.

Clark’s chronology follows History in Australia. She works from contact through to Federation (where the nation building drove a more blinkered version of Australia national identity that you see in the 1800s).

Continues through convict stories (as in the reality not the romanticised version) and their displacement as a ‘stain’.

Then through the White Australia policy and how History facilitated Australia’s national narrative as white.

On to protest (with an especially illuminating looks the the extremely constructed national History on display at the Australian sesquicentenary).

Along to The Great Australia Silence (the deliberate exclusion of First Nations people from Australia’s history).

Into family history (including her own- Clark is the granddaughter of Manning Clark) with a special focus on Judith Wright’s work.

Along to gender and women’s history, being both written into History but also looking at History overall from a domestic female lens. Continuing to emotion and ‘bias’ and the History Wars.

On to the importance of imagination in History, looking especially at Tony Birch’s poems that draw on the letters of First Nations people living on reserves.

Then examining Country, looking at the concept of ‘Country’ and whether it can be expressed in Western History but also the affect of landscape on History.

Concluding with time looking, at the concepts of deep time and how it supersedes modern Australian History by thousands of years.

Clark concludes with “our understanding and practices of History reflects values and beliefs at a point in time as much as it does any knowledge about historical time: histories shift and change with each iteration, according to their context, author and audience

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Telegraph (London) article by Andrew Graham Dixon, art critic, journalist, (2000)

‘“The historical novel has always been a literary form at war with itself. The very term, implying a fiction somehow grounded in fact — a lie with obscure obligations to the truth — is suggestive of the contradictions of the genre”’ (R.Lee, 2000, quoting Dixon).

Lee, however, countered by reminding his audience that Dixon’s claim can just as easily be said of something contemporary’. He asked his audience

to think of Trainspotting (1996) or Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996). No one think of these two books are true: ‘Yet no-one would bother to read them if they didn’t believe that they were in some way drawn from life.’ Lee claims this may be a ‘contradiction’ but ‘it’s an absolute fundamental — perhaps the absolute fundamental quality of art. Not just fiction, but sculpture, painting, poetry ….all art’. For Lee, in this sense ‘all art is, to use Dixon’s words “at war itself”’. For Lee, ‘It [historical fiction] seeks, at the same time, both accuracy and illusion. It is ludicrous to say this is only a defining characteristic of historical fiction — it’s a defining characteristic of all fiction’