Suspect History: Manning Clark and the Future of Australia's Past
By Humphrey McQueen
Wakefield Press, 1997
238 pp., $17.95(pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Australia's history, if a certain resident of Kirribilli House is to be believed, has been one of quiet achievement with no extremes of division, conflict or inequality to confound the comfortable, relaxed calm of all of Australia's solicitor-politicians.
Those who insist on bringing racial oppression and class exploitation into the frame are guilty of adopting the "black armband view of history", in the words of Howard's favourite historian, Geoffrey Blainey. Manning Clark has recently loomed as one of these gloomy spoilers to Blainey and Howard.
With Clark now safely dead, revenge can roam free. Clark-hunters are now immune from libel actions and, as Humphrey McQueen argues in his book on Clark, are also free from any such restrictive journalistic practices as historical accuracy, ethical integrity or consistency of standards.
McQueen unpicks each moth-eaten thread in the tapestry of lies, innuendo and anticommunist spleen that were stitched together by Brisbane's Courier-Mail to stitch up Clark as a Soviet spy, recipient of the Order of Lenin and poor historian who was pushing, in Howard's words, a "partisan political cause".
The Order of Lenin? Well, there was one "earwitness" (Geoffrey Fairbairn, a lecturer appointed by Clark to his ANU history faculty) who claims to have been told about it by Clark but never saw it, and one eyewitness, the poet Les Murray, who claims to have seen some medallion but who turns out to be really a second "earwitness" relying on hearsay.
With exhibit A gone in a puff of allegation and fantasy, the Courier-Mail pack turned to more desperate smears.
The Australian-born "international intelligence expert", Brian Crozier, was an appropriate underwriter for the indictment of Clark, impeccably credentialed as he was as an adviser to Thatcher, Pinochet and the shah of Iran. He was also able to sniff the KGB at a hundred paces, including their fiendish responsibility for introducing the drug problem into the USA.
Clark's trips to the eastern bloc (as historian and lover of Dostoevsky) is a cause for alarm only to those who wave the double standards flag. Clark made more frequent, longer and host-funded trips to the USA, which should, on the same logic, have made him an actor on the other side of the Cold War fence.
The "police conception of history", if it is used to imply guilt by travel destination, should also convict anyone as "an agent of Soviet influence" who has ever travelled to the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, including a younger Geoffrey Blainey, who criticised western democracy for providing more extensive choice "in shops than in polling booths" and for being "freer in commodities than ideas".
As well as dying a death from inconsistency, the case against Clark fails the reading test. A biased skim-reading of Clark's 1960 pamphlet Meeting Soviet Man to pick quotations out of context may make a case for Clark as a red sympathiser — Gerard Henderson called the pamphlet "disgraceful" and Clark a "barracker for Soviet totalitarianism" — but the work contains "no fixed opinion", disappointing both Communists and anticommunists for "not confirming all their prejudices at once".
As well as Clark's less than fulsome condemnation of all things Soviet, what also appears to have upset the baying hounds of the conservative pack is Clark's pro-ALP and anti-British Empire politics.
This was never any stronger than a critique of Menzies (though even that was tempered with "tenderness and praise"), a dislike of Fraser and the Kerr coup, and a siding with Whitlamesque reformism. Never any threat to capitalism, these politics are nevertheless anathema to the hard right that still imputes an equals sign between "ALP" and "socialism".
The smear job the right have done on Clark was as dirty as any in the tradition of conservative muck-raking, and McQueen makes much sport with his witty demolition of their jerry-built jeremiad.
Whilst we learn, however, what Clark was not, we don't learn much about what he was. Clark was not a Soviet spy. He was not a sloppy historian — his errors of fact were trivial, and his accusers should pause, before throwing stones, to examine their own empirical sinfulness.
Clark was not a Marxist historian — he gave primacy to ideas and individuals, to religion and psychology, whereas a Marxist historian like McQueen places the emphasis on material forces and social classes.
What Clark (and his six volume history of Australia) is, is an old-fashioned Australian nationalist with middle-of-the-road ALP sympathies.
His sneers at the Australian bourgeoisie derive not from a class-struggle perspective, but from a contempt for the Protestant Ascendancy which was the bastion of British Empire grovellers denying a distinct Australian national identity and a history that was not just an adjunct to the history of the empire.
To the extent that this stands to Clark's credit (and even this suffers, as Clark acknowledged, from a lack of attention to Aboriginal, ethnic and gender issues), it hardly warrants the right-wing vendetta against him.
But in the "surge of disputes" over Australian history that has opened up since Howard's election, says McQueen, everyone who is not unequivocally on the side of the ruling class that Howard represents, is a target for political correction to yield a ruling-class history.