For years of Manning Clark. (History).(historian's multivolume history of Australia)

HAVE YOU READ the books?" The conversation turned, as it still so often does, to Manning Clark and especially his six-volume A History of Australia. With that challenge, I had to withdraw a little from a caustic comment and admit that I had lost interest after Volume Two. Volume One had started off well, promising great analytical themes and vision, but faded, and in Volume Two the material seemed to be getting on top of a struggling author. In a word, I found it boring, which I rarely do with history.

So I took up the challenge and read the lot, the six volumes of A History of Australia, as well as Michael Cathcart's one-volume condensed version and both editions of the Short History. The imminence of the fortieth anniversary of the first volume (published in 1962) seemed a further reason for doing so.

Since the name Manning Clark still excites so much publicity, so much derision and admiration, it seems permissible to throw in a few more opinions. The first confession is that I actually enjoyed reading most of the books, partly because at their best they were good and partly because at their most, well, Manning Clark, they were so infuriating. But they are uneven, struggling at the start, at their best in the middle, and most eccentric and opinionated towards the end.

My overall impression is that the six-volume history should have been compressed into four volumes. The author is over-indulgent of paper and reader patience with hobbyhorses, generalised insults against both people in authority (which largely means people taking responsibility)--"straiteners" "measurers", "men in black" and so on--and the fickle, philistine masses. This opinion was reinforced by "Manning Clark's History of Australia, abridged by Michael Cathcart", which is a quite good condensed, mildly leftish and idiosyncratic history of Australia and a useful alternative to more conventional work. It says most of what Clark had to say in about a fifth of the space of the original.

Here is another opinion: Clark's alleged Marxism and softness on communism is one of the least important things about his work. The six-volume history ends, except for a short epilogue, in 1935, so it touches only fleetingly on the Soviet period and there is only a trace at the end of a communist bias, as distinct from, in the last two volumes particularly, the fulsome bias of a 1930s "Labor man".

Clark has a frequent preoccupation with social class, but it is mostly decorative, bereft of serious analysis and seldom more than raspberries for the ruling class, bourgeoisie and squatters. Except for occasional references in the last two volumes, published in 1981 and 1987, there is not much in common with the latter-day left, with its unrealised quest for the triple holy grail of Australian history: evidence of government-sponsored extermination of the Aborigines; systematic oppression of women; and piratical origins for the ruling class. Clark is mostly just not like that, although he has helped fuel some fashionable misconceptions.

Peter Ryan's famous assessment in Quadrant that these later volumes were "thin soup" was a bit harsh. The amount of information amassed is more than adequate for most conceivable readers outside the historical profession. But nor can I accept that there is anywhere a great "vision", grand theme, striking "insights"; nor much virtue in his "history from the heart" approach. Clark's impressionistic style, with daubs of fact and quotation building up a picture, often works for him, but I hope there are not too many imitators.