Two Canberra historians: W.K. Hancock and C.M.H. Clark

His productivity was equally impressive. His first book, on the Risorgimento, published in 1926, was followed in 1930 by his Australia, an interpretative essay that dominated discussion of the country's identity for decades. In Birmingham he took on the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, two volumes split into three tomes. The wartime Civil Histories project was even larger, generating 28 volumes, one of which he co-authored. Then, in 1951, he was commissioned to write the life of J.C. Smuts, a project that also involved assembling (and defending) a Smuts archive. The two-volume biography was completed in 1968. There were other wayside publications, but in 1972 Hancock rounded off his major output with Discovering Monaro, an environmental history of the Snowy Mountains.

Yet, as Davidson demonstrates, the impressive headlines do not tell the whole story. Moving to the Adelaide backwater was an eight-year mistake: notably, he showed no interest in South Australia's excellent archives, which had the potential to show how Victorian England had tried to create a local utopia. He saw the Birmingham job as a long-range stepping stone to Australia's most prestigious History Chair, at Melbourne University, but the vacancy occurred earlier than he had foreseen. Tied to the Survey, he joked that the appointment should go to somebody with a weak heart. In 1945 he failed to be elected Warden of All Souls. Worse humiliation soon followed. One of the four "maestros", distinguished antipodean exiles who advised on the establishment of ANU, Hancock hoped to launch its social sciences programme. His informal recruitment style alarmed the Canberra authorities and, worse still, few of the geniuses he called from the vasty deep of British academe would consider All Souls in the Bush. Hurtfully, his move to launch the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, very much a second-best, was interpreted as a hard-nosed decision to prefer a metropolitan opportunity. Hancock was stung into autobiography, his 1954 Country and Calling: Australia was his country, but History was his mistress, and the two had pulled him apart. Widely described as the longest job application is history, it angered some in Canberra but secured his appointment to ANU.

The three biggest components of Hancock's mighty output, the Survey, the Civil Histories and Smuts, were all commissioned projects. Only in his early years, writing about Italy, and at the end, when he discovered Monaro, did he choose his own topics. His project for a book on Machiavelli and the modern State never happened. He pre-eminently defined himself as a historian (a second volume of autobiography was called Professing History) but he wrote mainly about events in his own lifetime. Even the exceptions were present-focused: his first book analysed Ricasoli, an authoritarian nationalist, through whom Hancock hoped to understand Mussolini. The Monaro project supported a contemporary conservationist agenda which culminated in Hancock's failed crusade against the building of a communications tower on Canberra's Black Mountain. The Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs retains its authority, but the Civil Histories entomb rather than enthral. The Smuts story begins as boys'-own adventure, but the hero becomes less appealing as he failed to confront South Africa's real "race" question, not the reconciliation of Briton and Boer lauded by his biographer but the role of the country's Black majority. Hancock's myopia is inexplicable since, in 1954, while working on Smuts, he had his own proconsular experience when he brokered a plan for keeping Buganda within a self-governing Uganda. There was a similar lacuna in Discovering Monaro which made worthy remarks about Aborigines but somehow never engaged with their removal from the high country. However, his massive output was not the result of sausage-machine productivity. He delighted in a riposte to a put-down dismissing one of his secondary works as only a short book. Yes, he had replied, he had had time to write a short book.

Hancock homed in on Smuts's attempt to reconcile Afrikaner nationalism with the wider British Commonwealth because it paralleled his own assimilation of Australian origins with a British academic career. I once asked a senior ANU colleague if, as a biographer, Sir Keith had effectively turned himself into Smuts. Definitely, came the reply, but harder to handle had been a phase when he studied Gandhi and took to sitting cross-legged on the floor. (Hancock was interested in the South African Gandhi: Commonwealth scholar though he was, he never tackled India.) Written as much to conceal as to reveal, Country and Calling posed a simple duality; Davidson's biography suggests greater complexity. Born in 1898 and the son of a clergyman, Hancock's Melbourne birth made him a Victorian in the geographical as well as the temporal sense but, although Hancock's father had an establishment job, he lacked the wealth of Victoria's powerful elite. Young Keith attended Melbourne Grammar in the uncomfortable role of scholarship boy: he did not revisit the school for forty years. Although the mildly conservative Hancock encountered Robert Menzies at Melbourne University, they were not close, even in the Canberra decade when the ANU grandee might have sought influence with the seemingly eternal prime minister. Alienated from the Melbourne power structure, Hancock conjured his Australian identity from a proclaimed idyllic childhood in Gippsland, but the family returned to the city before he was ten. (They moved to Moonee Ponds. In his eighties, he mildly indulged the cult woven by Edna Everage around that nondescript suburb but, unlike his fellow Canberra historian, Manning Clark, he never embraced the Barry Humphries cult. There was always more of lèse-majesté than Les Patterson about Sir Keith Hancock.) Thus Hancock's Australian identity partly constructed, projected on to an idealised rural Victoria where lashing rain hammers the tin roofs. Western Australia was an offshoot of Victoria; Adelaide replicated Melbourne's Protestant elite on a smaller, stuffier scale. When Hancock left for his 23-year exile in 1934, he hardly knew New South Wales (and its northern extension, Queensland). His Australian identity was Victorian; his rural roots partly imagined.

The Hancock family came from Wiltshire. His mother's family were Scots, and there was an Ulster grandmother (he never knew her, nor that she died by suicide). In the British pole of his dual identity he showed no interest in these origins. Davidson shows that his English loyalty was an outward projection from three artificial institutions – Balliol and All Souls at Oxford and, in later years and thanks to Nicholas Mansergh, the Tipperary Irishman who also personified the Commonwealth, with St John's College Cambridge. Also important was the intellectual influence of the Round Table movement. Indeed, the Round Table was a rare source of informed comment on world affairs. Inevitably, All Souls brought Hancock into contact with Lionel Curtis, and we would not be surprised had he accommodated his own duality within the Round Table's evocation of Commonwealth. In fact, he steered his own course, breaking away altogether in the 1930s over Appeasement.

Knighted by both the British and Australian governments, Hancock roguishly dubbed himself a "surly" person. But he did not welcome enquiry into his internal boundaries. When a young ANU historian cheerfully told him that he had found a description of the early Hancock in the papers of a pioneer Australian intellectual, the atmosphere cooled: Sir Keith liked to be the custodian of his own persona. My colleague dropped the subject – the description had identified Hancock as an Englishman. Another vignette still leaves me puzzled. During the 1975 constitutional crisis, Hancock poured out his unease to me about the right-wing leader, Malcolm Fraser. Suddenly, he referred to Fraser's party as "the UAP", a curious allusion since Menzies had refashioned the United Australia Party into the Liberals thirty years earlier. It was not a deliberate archaism, nor (sympathetic though I now find myself to the possibility) did it seem a senior moment. Rather I felt I had glimpsed an expatriate who had never fully "re-assimilated" – his own term – to the country he had left in the 1930s.

Davidson's biographical insight sees Hancock not simply in terms of his Australian-British duality, but as living a "three-cornered life". Through Ricasoli, he fell in love with Tuscany, which remained his ideal landscape. Later, he transferred this affection to the western Cape, which somehow embodied the spirit of Smuts. Eventually he patriated the sentiment to Australia, explicitly likening the man-made Monaro environment to the terraces of Tuscany. His landscapes had their own life, transcending the mere people who swarmed over them. And that raises perhaps the ultimate issue: what role did real people play in Hancock's world?

His first marriage remains a no-go area. He barely mentioned his wife in Country and Calling, and even his donnish Oxford friends marvelled that they never met her – although knowledge of her abrasiveness contributed to their rejection of Hancock as Warden of All Souls. With supportive cross-referencing, Davidson has corralled the marriage into a discrete chapter. Hancock met Theaden Brocklebank at Melbourne University. Their courtship was carried on by correspondence, but she followed him to England where they married in 1925. An early (and unexplained) hysterectomy put paid to their hopes of children, and their rocky relationship probably ruled out adoption. The marriage was sometimes confrontational, with Theaden even sabotaging the husband's ambitions, for instance snubbing the vice-chancellor of ANU to block a move to Canberra. The couple made their peace as she lay dying from cancer in 1960. As Davidson relates, the story was widely told that Theaden counselled him that he would need a wife. She vetoed certain women thought to covet the role and nominated Marjorie Eyre, his secretary (in a loyal but entirely professional relationship) since Cabinet Office days, who had obeyed his summons to Canberra. They were married in 1961. The second Lady Hancock was a charming person, "ordinary" in the nicest sense of the word, and she undoubtedly humanised her husband.

A "difficult" person, no doubt, but Theaden had a cross to bear. Immersed in those remote third corners of his being, Hancock was frequently unreachable. His long-range career moves were paralleled by an odd refusal to put down local roots: at times, the Hancocks moved house almost annually. Twice in their British years, they bought a house, and Theaden channelled her creativity into planning a garden. Each time, some reason arose to sell the property within a couple of years. During that privileged evening in Cambridge, one incident shook me. Where books are concerned, I have always conflated ownership with scholarship, so I was chilled when Hancock casually announced that he had given away three personal libraries during his career. Intercontinental moves doubtless explained some of his divestments, but his last gift was to help establish Macquarie University, which was founded in 1964. I regard each published work as a provisional finding, which I may seek to revise in the future. Hancock, I suspect, published authoritatively, literally closing the book on each topic that he devoured. Even so, closing the book on a subject I can understand, but giving the books away still strikes me as bloodlessly Olympian.

Hancock once listed "kindness" among the necessary qualities for an academic. He acted on that principle, and I never felt that his kindness was artificial. It is often said that he founded no historical "school", but he did mentor the careers of younger colleagues and, creditably for his acculturation, several of them were women. Yet the impression remains that he was the ringmaster in his own circus. The spouse of one of his ANU protégés insisted that his patronage was manipulative. Hancock, the student of Machiavelli, would probably have responded that patronage was ever thus.

But we can move beyond the workaday interplay of mere human beings, for W.K. Hancock can be located in that ultimate confrontation of unadorned identity, the relationship between homo sapiens and cat. It was part of the Hancock mythology that he was a cat person. ANU legend, not cited by Davidson, related that Melbourne University's Trinity College had to relax its no-pets rule because the young student could not be separated from his companion. Yet we do not know whether his migrations chimed with feline life cycles, although Davidson reveals that his last cat bore the Trollopean name, "Planty Pal". And Davidson also validates one of my most memorable encounters with the great man. 

At ANU, I taught an extra-mural course on South African history and my students were mostly young public servants. I invited them to a social evening at my brick-veneer bungalow, and easily persuaded the biographer of Smuts to meet them. The guest of honour arrived just as my large tabby stalked out of the gathering, rightly miffed that a Canberra bureaucrat had called him a fat cat. Greeting the beast, Sir Keith turned to me and asked, with a slight italicisation of the unfamiliar verb: "do you mind if I swinge your cat?" Intrigued, deferential and full of anticipation, I assented. Hancock placed a thumb firmly on the animal's backbone, hauled him up by his tail and dangled him in midair. Although bewildered, the creature felt no pain, but do not try this at home. How Hancock anaesthetised the spine, how indeed he had ever mastered the technique, I have no idea. Presumably there is a wealth of meaning in that episode but, if so, it eludes me still.

Jim Davidson's biography tells me that I no more "knew" Sir Keith than I have truly comprehended hundreds of other people who have orbited, through love, distaste or indifference, around my personal galaxy. In Hancock's case, failure of understanding may not have been wholly the fault of my own narcissistic conceit, for the man himself relied upon protective layers of myth which were perhaps aimed at himself as well as others. By revealing, biography tends also to diminish, but greatness is not the same as sainthood. Davidson's impressive biography reminds me that it was a privilege to have encountered Sir Keith Hancock, even if, half a lifetime later, it remains a challenge to penetrate his identity.

An Eye For Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna. Carlton, Vic.: The Miegunyah Press, 2011, pp. x + 793, Hardback, ISBN: 978-0-522-85617-0

Manning Clark was professor of History in Canberra from 1949 until his retirement in 1974-5. Some found the man and his writings inspirational; to others, he was a mountebank. Mark McKenna has produced a magnificent biography, in which even the unanswered questions (how did Clark qualify for a funeral in a Catholic cathedral?) are deliberately left hanging. Big books sometimes scoop awards before second thoughts consign them to semi-oblivion. If McKenna's book should recede from prominence in years to come, it will be because he has extracted the opium from the tall poppy of his perplexing subject.

Since McKenna never met Clark but understands him well, it seems egotistical to outline my own slight encounters with "Manning", as he was known to friend and detractor alike. In the 1970s I was a research fellow in History in the Research School of Social Sciences – part of the original Australian National University of 1946. Clark's appointment had been to Canberra University College, an offshoot of Melbourne. In 1960 it was merged into the ANU, a clumsy solution which subordinated the teaching departments as the School of General Studies. There was little contact with "our colleagues across the creek", as the SGS staff were dubbed with formal politeness: the divide was purely mental, for no creek separated the Coombs and Haydon-Allan Buildings. My senior colleagues distrusted Clark: in a moment of impish confidentiality, J.A. La Nauze remarked that he was not really a historian but a novelist. Among the younger crowd, mention of his name triggered ribaldry about the 'fatal flaw', Clark's formula for skewering the personalities he portrayed. I wanted to meet the author whose Short History of Australia I had first read across the world, although even then I had been puzzled by the confidence with which he had described his subjects. You might deduce character from portraits by Raeburn or Reynolds, but how could you discern "darker forces" in Arthur Phillip from a giant cigarette card of a corner-shop painting?

I was warned that Clark might not welcome me, since – a rash and brash young Pom – I dived into the controversy over the founding of New South Wales. In fact, I found him friendly and, when I edited a collection of readings on the Botany Bay debate, he permitted the inclusion of his Historical Studies article. My last contact was a postcard approving the transfer of book's small income to the Menzies Centre in London: "Readers are better than royalties." My lingering image of Manning Clark was of an amiably narcissistic eccentric, defined by his goatee beard and a wide brimmed and jauntily angled hat.

I first handled McKenna's biography in wine-connoisseur fashion, skimming the pages and looking at the photographs. Here was my first shock. The early Clark was usually hatless, and definitely clean shaven, not the Manning of memory, but a doppelganger for the herbivorous primary school teacher who steered me through the Eleven Plus. The beard, grown on a visit to Russia, was a tribute to Lenin, while McKenna believes that the hat was an echo of Thomas Carlyle, author of a grand narrative history of the French Revolution. Both the identifiers that a cartoonist would have highlighted were artificial add-ons. More than in most biographies, McKenna's task has been to separate the superficial from the core reality.

Through his mother, Clark was descended from Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain in early New South Wales. This link probably explains his sense of ownership of early Australian history: he was transfixed with veneration when shown Marsden's signature in the Admissions Register of Magdalene College Cambridge in 1964. Clark the historian was tough on Marsden – as he was censorious of his own faults – but he probably back-projected himself into his forebear. In Volume II of his massive History, published in 1967, Marsden (like Clark) was in his fifties, the age "when honour, the respect of his fellow-men, and recognition of his achievement should have been his". Instead, his hard labour of twenty-seven years (about the time Clark had been in Canberra) had yielded Marsden only the "curses not loud but deep" of his enemies. Clark's father, a working-class Londoner who retained a Cockney accent, became an Anglican clergyman thanks to a mentor, Reverend James Manning, after whom Clark himself was named.

In 1921, Clark's mother suffered a breakdown, and the six year-old Manning and his siblings were sent to maternal grandparents for several months. Decades later, Clark discovered that his father had begotten a child by the housemaid – but there were clues to a sex scandal, enough to explain his fixation with fatal flaws. Clark once related that his grandmother remembered the pastoralist John Macarthur visiting her family home, adding with Manningesque flourish: "So young is Australia!" Although he was capable of colonising memories, for instance annexing his wife's experience, in her students days in Bonn, of Kristallnacht, the overlap was possible: Catherine Hope was born in 1825 (and lived to be 92); John Macarthur died in 1834. Perhaps during those bewildering months when his parents separated, the frightened child anchored himself to the reassurance of Australia's earliest years?

Clark suffered from epilepsy, with attacks severe enough to make him drop out of school for some time when he was fifteen. Epilepsy is an affliction still wrapped in embarrassment, and McKenna effectively disentangles the slight evidence. It drew Clark to Dostoyevsky, a fellow sufferer, and excused him from wartime military service. Epilepsy also disqualified him from the Rhodes Scholarship, but in 1938 he went to Oxford by other means. Although he spent only a year at Balliol, where he recalled Edward Heath as contemporary, Clark briefly took the place by storm. In the freshmen's cricket match, he "kept wicket remarkably well", and impressed with fluent array of strokes with the bat. He was immediately selected for the University team, and played three matches against county sides. Unfortunately, Clark was a Twenty20 player sixty years ahead of the game. Against Yorkshire, he was "itching to 'have a go'" but, despite the prediction of The Times that "he looks to have plenty of runs in him", his performances in both innings were disappointing: Leyland bowled him for 12 – after he had been dropped in the deep – and Verity for 10. Alarmingly, too, he was "far from being a good judge of a run", over-keen on snatching a risky single. His downfall came against Middlesex, where there was a faint chance of batting out a draw if Clark could build a stand with the University's last specialist batsman. Instead, he made a poor call and ran his partner out. Being dropped meant more than "wounded pride" (172): a cricketing career that collapsed inside two weeks was a public humiliation that probably explains why he was keen to leave Oxford. For Cricinfo, it was a life sadly wasted: "He returned to Australia in 1940 to teach history and played no more serious cricket." If there is one element in McKenna's biography where I should have liked more, it is cricket. Clark coached at Geelong Grammar, and later played in recreational matches. Yet, in all his explorations of the Australian soul, Clark wrote very little about the game. The Short History was written for Americans, but does that explain why it is one of the few overview studies to omit mentioning Bodyline?

Clark was not simply a selfish person, but the cynosure of his personal universe. It was immaterial that his parents could not read the annual letter that he taped to their gravestone: the devoted son was the admiring audience of his own star performance. He treated the naming of his six children as an exercise in memorialising his muses. It took some insensitivity to attempt to call his son "Wolfgang" in 1940; left to Clark, a later child would have become "Dimitri Alyosha". As lecturer, tutor and mentor, he could be inspirational, but he despised the routine administrative detritus, writing "lordly one-line references" (507) and dismissing essays with enigmatic mottos. Bright undergraduates saw through the pose. Greeted in passing with a pretentious Latin tag, one student upstaged Clark by riposting that it sounded better in the original Greek. He did not like that.

McKenna's biography is a portrait of a marriage. Typically for the era, Dymphna Lodewyckx, daughter of a Flemish intellectual, sacrificed her career to become wife, mother and helper. Clark's attitude to her was ambivalent, ranging from pathetic dependence to the unleashing of angry criticism in his diary – often simultaneously. She left him three times, the first time after Clark's shattering affair at the milestone age of forty, subsequently in response to his symbiotic interconnections between publication and flirtation. Although her children were hostages that drew her back, she kept a bag permanently packed for a final exit. In 1973 Clark denounced the limitation of women's roles to kitchen and bed. A year earlier, when a student had protested against gender bias in his department, he told her she had a nice arse and did not need first class honours, pinching her principal asset as he spoke. McKenna argues that post-Pill Canberra was a sexual jungle, but male academics were not all bed-hoppers, and in the liberation culture, "no" was supposed to mean "no". Did Clark exploit his god-professor status? Distastefully, he boasted of his behaviour, although some of his bragging was fantasy. He told a colleague that he delighted in putting his hand up skirts to fondle suspender belts. She lacked the heart to explain that women had been wearing tights for years.

Clark's scholarly standing forms a major theme in McKenna's study. It is too easy to dismiss him because his monumental History of Australia is now derided. The Short History brought the Australian past to readers both at home and overseas. Clark was arrogant in claiming that he invented Australian history, but the Select Documents did offer the first production-line course structures in the subject and – inaccuracies aside – they remain rich in material. Publication of the magnum opus spanned twenty-five years of rapid change: Menzies was prime minister in 1962, Hawke by 1987. Despite their faults, the first two volumes of the History formed part of the new national culture of the 1960s. His popularity made him a public intellectual and an ALP guru. It was Clark who spotted that December 2nd 1972 was the anniversary of the defeat of a ramshackle coalition at Austerlitz, a coincidence that appealed to Whitlam's Napoleonic self-image. I recall sitting in the stalls during a Barry Humphries one-person show, watching Edna Everage lobbing her trademark blooms to the Canberra identities in the front rows, with the refrain, "wave your gladdie, Manning". In-groupish and off-putting, the cameo perhaps helps explain why the Right came to hate him, taking posthumous revenge with the preposterous charge that Clark was a Soviet agent.

At first reading, I devoured McKenna's book, wishing it to go for ever. Then I set out again, having taken my reviewer's oath to niggle and grump, but my impressions hardly changed. One of Clark's colleagues once published a work of florid prose that was unkindly characterised as 'pidgin Manning': McKenna empathetically engages with Clark without once lapsing into echoes of his grandiose style. Could this massive study have been shorter? There were discursions where I endorsed R.M. Crawford's plea for "plain blokes who have never read a word of Dostoyevsky" (336). In time, this biography might merit an abridged edition, if only because Clark will fade in memory. The determining factor has been the enormous size of the Manning Clark archive. Most biographers must uncover episodes their subjects preferred to conceal. By contrast, Clark preserved even the evidence of his infidelity. He annotated documents to guide future interpreters, evidently assuming that biographers would celebrate his greatness, while simultaneously resolving his contradictions. McKenna has avoided the danger of becoming a "ventriloquist" (39). Sheer bulk creates problems not just of quantity but of meaning. It is easier to memorialise crises than to immortalise contentment: it is the laughter in their parents' marriage that his children remember. Clark's correspondents were sometimes mystified by the contrast between his angst-ridden letters and his cheerful demeanour. After his death, some readers of his diaries could not recognise their writer. Hence the fundamental question about this paper mountain: does it reveal an inner Manning or an invented Manning? After 700 pages, McKenna ends with an intriguing cameo. On a Canberra road on a sunny afternoon two years before Clark's death, a colleague caught a momentary glimpse of husband and wife driving in the other direction, sealed in the silent capsule of a saloon car, "their faces cascading with laughter" (703). Were Manning and Dymphna mocking the elaborate imposture they had perpetrated on the world? It is an enigmatic conclusion to a magnificent biography.