Interview with Emeritus Professor Manning Clark

From the ANU Oral History Archive
Interviews conducted 13 November 1990 and 7 December 1991
Interviewed by Daniel Connell
Edited and transferred to web media by Nik Fominas and Peter Stewart

Biographical introduction: Professor Manning Clark was born in 1915 and was educated at Mont Albert Central School, Melbourne Grammar School, the University of Melbourne and Oxford.

He began teaching history at schools in England and Australia before accepting a lectureship at Melbourne University in 1944 in Political Science. In 1946 he was appointed lecturer and then senior lecturer in Australasian History and Modern History.

In 1949 the Canberra University College (later The Faculties, ANU) established its first foundation chairs and Professor Clark was offered the Chair of History. He continued his historical writings and in 1962 published the first volume of A History of Australia. He resigned from the position of Head of Department in 1972 to concentrate on this work and was appointed to the first Chair of Australian History.

Professor Clark also taught Australian history at Duke University and Harvard.

He was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor in 1975 after retiring from the Australian National University. His association with the University continued with his appointment as Library Fellow (1975-81) and as a Visiting Fellow from 1982.

Professor Clark has received numerous awards and medals for his writings on Australian history and was named Australian of the Year for 1980.

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Transcript: Recoeding duration: 2 hours (2 tapes) Transcriber: Diana Nelson

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A

          Identification: this is side one, tape one of the interview with Professor Manning Clark, Tuesday 13 November 1990. This is for the ANU Oral History Project. This is Daniel Connell doing the interview. End of identification.

          Professor Clark, if we could just go back to that period before you came up here when you were still in Melbourne, if you could just perhaps recreate some of the atmosphere for me - some of the attitudes that people had to the discussions going on about the formation of a new national university in Canberra.

Yes. One thing I do remember: Keith Hancock and the man who was the first director of the School of Pacific Studies - he never came out to Australia - Raymond Firth, the professor of anthropology. They ran a seminar in Canberra and they brought a number of people from around Australia to it. I suppose because I was teaching Australian history I was invited to it. I don't remember any explicit hostility to the idea of a national university at that seminar. I think that there was a feeling amongst the academics present whom I knew that here's another - a new opportunity to make a bit of a splash for yourself. I think a lot of the people who went there thought they were the sort of people who should be professors in a national university. It did actually run the risk, the enormous risk, of seeming to be ‚litist in a country which˙.... Well, the ethos is pretty firmly against ‚litism. It then - before it started - and immediately after it started, it ran that risk of seeming to know or claiming to know that they knew better - the people who were on the staff and so on. They knew more than the other people and hence they were always in danger, I think, of provoking those who weren't members of the ANU to put to them - the ANU people - the question, which I think in the Book of Job, 'What knowest thou?', which is not enough: 'What do you know that we don't know?'. 'Why should you be so special?'

          But was it just a risk? In some ways wasn't it actually a statement? I mean the whole idea of a national university, isn't there a connotation which is not just a danger but an actual statement that they are an ‚lite?

Yes, I think that's true. But in the humanities and the social sciences, which is the only field that I knew anything about, I think Keith Hancock, both before he came out and then after he came out, really did his best to break down any resistance to it on the grounds that it was ‚litism. I think the better side of Keith Hancock believed quite strongly that you could pursue excellence without pretensions. Now, I don't want to go into any details about individuals but I don't think all the individuals who first came to the National University by any means achieved that standard. I think it was very tempting for them to think that they were special and therefore to provoke people into wanting to take them down from their seat, as it were.

          To some degree the university in its early days was created around the 'four great men', was it not? Sir Mark Oliphant and Hancock and Firth. I mean this is leading into this danger that you're talking about, is it not? I mean, it's fairly hard given that atmosphere, given the idea of selecting the great men and around them will automatically - or not automatically - but very, very likely just the sheer chemistry and so on and the magnetism of those people will generate the qualities wanted.

Yes, I think that's true. But I think also there was a very great danger that they were saying to the rest of the academic community in Australia that you people haven't done very much so far and now the books, the articles, the lectures are going to start to pour out. Well, that's always a dangerous position to take up in Australia, I think, and that probably didn't do those founding people any good. Not long after an institution gets going it's pretty clear who are the workers and who aren't, who are the producers and who are just talking about being a producer. And maybe not at the time, but now looking back I'd say that you must expect any institution to have ten, fifteen or twenty per cent of people who aren't really making any contribution whatsoever. What probably matters is the quality of the productions that do come out.

          The ANU - essentially it was approved and set up with the backing of Chifley's Labor cabinet. They're a group of men who wouldn't have been inherently attracted to the idea of an ‚litist institution for its own sake. They must have had other ideas. I understand they were very interested in the sciences.

They were interested in the sciences. I can't discuss that side. But I think also - certainly Dr Evatt - was interested in the ANU as being a research factory producing information and material on Australia and the Pacific. After all the whole idea of the Anzac Pact, which was signed in the 1940s - I've forgotten the exact date but it doesn't matter - the whole idea of that was this arc of islands to the north of Australia giving Australia permanent defence against any future Japanese aggression. And I think Dr Evatt felt, and believed very deeply, that the more we knew about the Pacific, the more we knew about the islands in the south-west Pacific, that added to Australian security. So it had quite an explicit political motive.

And in the social sciences, distinct from the School of Pacific Studies, I think they felt that it should be there and other people who'd be in a position to advise the government on economic questions, on political questions, very much as in America. The top people at Harvard and Yale and Princeton have for generations spent time going down to Washington and having a term or a whole year as advisers to the American government and then going back to their intellectual factories, as it were. I think that's worked quite well in America but it's never really worked here.

          The Woodrow Wilsons and the Kissingers, it's not an Australian style is it?

No, it isn't. But when I was teaching for half a year in Harvard in 1978 to '9 I met a number of professors there who had been, or were about to be, advisers to the American government in Washington. And I met a number of professors who had deliberately chosen not to be advisers. But it was open to the top professors to have this experience.

          Just talking about that, one of the traditional Australian feelings on that subject is that academics and intellectuals that get too close to governments compromise the quality of their thinking. Do you think that's a fair description of a certain type of Australian attitude?

I tend to think that there's been too much emphasis on impartiality and objectivity. That the works in history and politics and philosophy, those who attach a high premium to impartiality, objectivity and so on, that this is really a fig leaf to hide their gross inadequacy, to hide the fact that they've got nothing to say if they really had to try. That's my own private opinion that all the works which have lived on beyond the decade in which they were produced have had something pretty powerful to say about life and about the society in which they are living. The so-called objective works, I don't think they live much longer than half a year, or maybe a year.

          Talking of that Labor cabinet just for the moment - you mentioned Evatt - did you know Evatt? Did you know Chifley?

I knew Evatt and I knew Dedman later quite well because Dedman, as you probably know, came over and did subjects at the ANU and he studied in the department to which I belonged. I liked him enormously. In fact I think, if I remember correctly but you'd have to check this, that he took out his BA degree at about the same time as the ANU gave him the honorary doctorate of law, because he was, as Minister for Post-War Reconstruction, and being influenced by Dr Herbert Coombs, he was very actively associated with the whole idea of having a national university.

          Did you ever discuss - I know you came to the college and we'll come to that later - the ANU and those early days with people like Evatt?

No, I didn't really know Evatt until 1953 I think. But then I got to know him quite well. He lived quite close to where we are now. I saw a lot of him then.

          The circumstances of your appointment to the college, how did that happen?

Well, the college decided to have two foundation professors; one in political science - after all said and done Canberra is a political city - and one in history. I applied for the one in history and by some great stroke of chance managed to get it and Fin Crisp applied for the one in political science and he got it, but he'd had a lot of experience in politics. He was active in the Labor Party. He'd been head of Post-War Reconstruction - in fact he was head of it when he got the chair and in fact he was very much a political animal in the best sense of the word. Looking back I think a lot of who gets a job and who doesn't is a bit of a lottery. I don't think there's any such thing as 'the best person'. There's just five people on a committee looking at all sorts of possibilities and why one gets it and the other doesn't, to repeat, is just an act of chance.

          Perhaps more usefully, why were you interested in coming? I mean, Melbourne in some ways was certainly at that time an outstanding place for the study of Australian history, or history generally.

I think there were a number of reasons why I decided to apply. In the first place I had a young family and I would double my salary if I became a professor - there's a very mundane reason for it. Secondly, I think what I had to do in Australian history, I'd really finished it by 1949. I'd been terribly lucky and had those four marvellous, creative years with those students in Melbourne and I needed a change. Canberra offered a lot because it had this very good library in Australian history - a better library than the Melbourne Public Library. It was closer to the other great source of material on Australian history - the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

          Just talking about the library for the moment. Even back in 1949 Canberra had built up a library of the calibre you've just described?

Yes, not anywhere near as good as it is now but from the first decade of the twentieth century to the present day it is a copyright library for Australiana so that every book, pamphlet, et cetera published in Australia, a copy of it must be lodged in the National Library, so it has a great collection. And you've also got to remember that it has Commonwealth money behind it and the Commonwealth is much richer than the States and therefore from say 1910 on when the question came about competition to buy something the National Library had greater resources than the Mitchell or the Melbourne Public Library.

          Could you just talk about the college when you first came to it? What sort of place was it?

Well, it was very small. The Principal was Herbert Burton who had been Professor of Economic History at Melbourne. He actually persuaded me to apply for the position. I'm glad now he did. He had taught me when I was a student in Melbourne and he said he wanted somebody who had the reputation as a teacher that I had, whether rightly or wrongly, seemed to have acquired by then. The only other professor was Professor Crisp and I had known him quite well at Oxford before. And then shortly after I arrived Heinz Arndt arrived in January '51 to be the Professor of Economics, and Alec Hope as Professor of English.

What struck me as very valuable in those early years, if you're interested as I was in the history of Australia, was that here you had six, seven, eight or nine people whom you got to know very well who were very gifted people. There was Alec Hope, there was Heinz Arndt, there was Fin Crisp, there was Burgess Cameron, there was Donagan in Philosophy - he's since left Australia and made a name for himself in philosophy in America. I've probably forgotten the names of others but it was as good as any other place in Australia in those particular fields. Brian Beddie in Political Science is another one, and Murray Todd in English. I think I mentioned a moment ago they had this marvellous library. [Interruption]

          You were just talking about a very interesting group of people that you were here in Canberra with.

Now the other thing, not only were they very interesting people to be with .... Heinz Arndt, I didn't mention him, did I, in Economics? They were likeable. We all got on very well together. We were all working at something over and above the teaching. We all became producers. Looking back some time you may say, 'Oh God knows how that happened', but we did. I mean Heinz brought out these books on economics, Fin on political science, the government, the Commonwealth, the life of Chifley and Alec Hope brought out this poetry and Donagan was to write the life of Collingwood, the philosopher, and Burgess Cameron wrote books on economics and so on. They were all quite creative people.

But the other thing which was very valuable was one portion of them came from Melbourne and another portion from Sydney so that you had in the old common room of the old university college, first in Civic proper and then in Childers Street, confrontations between the followers of Anderson in Sydney, Andersonians, and the followers of Wittgenstein in Melbourne. By then I think the Wittgensteiners, the followers of Wittgenstein, had made a successful takeover bid for the intellectual life of the Melbourne University, that history was on the way down, the philosophers were on the way up. Anderson had dominated the University of Sydney for years. I personally found it very helpful just to sit there and listen when an Andersonian started talking with a follower of Wittgenstein, so that was very helpful.

The other thing I think was very helpful was that there was this beautiful natural setting here in Canberra, that it wasn't just a sort of corrupt city or horribly mercenary and greedy city, you were close to these hills, you could get away to the rivers. In fact in my more poetical moments in those early years I thought if you really felt like being washed clean you could go out to the Goodradigbee. I don't mean washed clean in a physical sense, in an empirical sense when in the more metaphysical sense you go out to the Goodradigbee and go fishing.

          One of the reviewers of your most recent book, I think it might have been Rimmer, anyway a Sydney person, made the comment that some of your feelings about - I think he was referring to your discussions of the class structure - Yarra-side might have been very different if you had grown up in Sydney rather than Melbourne. Was this a significant factor in a sense of coming to a new place, sort of a new start?

I don't know that Professor Rimmer is quite right in that because after all said and done I was born in Sydney and I lived in Sydney until I was seven. And I think there was a very gifted gentleman who said, 'Give me a child until he's seven and I'll vouch for him for the rest of his life', so Sydney also had a very big influence on me, and anyhow I went back to Sydney every year until I went to England in 1938 and then in 1949 I moved to Canberra and Sydney became more important to me than Melbourne. So I think factually .... I think actually now, if you count Canberra as New South Wales and I do, I've spent more than half my life in New South Wales.

          But the other point of, in a sense, shaking off in Australian terms the fetters of old Australian class structures in coming to a new town with presumably hopefully new hopes, was this part of the attraction of Canberra?

Yes. At the risk of sounding unkind about Melbourne, I think it was fairly important to get away from that smugness in Melbourne, their great delusion that they were the intellectual centre of Australia. Sydney, and I got to know it again when I came up here, was much more lively than Melbourne, I think, then and now. And with the passage of time - we're looking ahead a bit now - Canberra was intellectually more interesting than Melbourne. When you think about it, 1950s here in Canberra you had Alec Hope, David Campbell, Judith Wright, and one or two others. It would be difficult for any city in Australia to come up with comparable talent and comparable creativity as that.

          These people you're talking about here in Canberra, how did you actually interact? Presumably the standard thing is dinners together, but was there more to it. Was there a more systematic level of interaction than that?

Well, there was the common room at the old college in Civic, and that was a very lively place for discussion, and I think I said before the common room at Childers Street. When the place got larger and we moved up to the present Haydon-Allen Building something was lost. That old communal feeling at Childers Street was dissipated and I think that was a great loss, and I'm not too sure how you can preserve the communal feeling of a small group of people when that smallness disappears and becomes quite large, something happens to a university department when it's no longer seven or eight members and becomes twenty-odd.

The History Department which I was associated with expanded rapidly to become almost twenty by about 1965 or '6, I think. I think something had gone by then - by 1970 something had gone out of it which would never come back again. But there were gatherings which were important. I mean at the old college there were these inaugural lectures. You've probably seen Alec Hope's inaugural lecture about the teaching of English. That was quite an occasion. There was Heinz Arndt's inaugural lecture on aspects of economics and so on. They were times when these new professors had an opportunity to profess publicly where they stood on certain great issues. I think most of these, were not only published by the college, but they were published elsewhere as well.

Then there were these meetings in the old common room at night, both in Civic and in Childers Street, where pretty big questions were discussed, and where one night Fin Crisp gave a paper on how he wrote the life of Chifley, and how he wrote The [Parliamentary] Government of the Commonwealth of Australia. Alec Hope gave some talk on poetry and so on. And from time to time we had distinguished visitors in to talk. There's a memorable occasion when Guilford Young, the Bishop of Canberra, gave a talk on natural law which very rapidly became a talk on should you or should you not practise contraception, and was very lively.

And of course one other good thing was that if any visitor came to Canberra and generally by then if a person from overseas came to Australia, he or she would go to Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, and maybe all three, but they would come to Canberra because it is the capital city. Canberra was very small with a very small university community and it meant you generally got asked to meet them. I suppose the biggest occasion for me was when I was asked to lunch with Bertrand Russell, which was in the old Blue Room of the old Hotel Canberra, and he held forth there for about an hour and a half. He had a high old time from his own point of view. It was a great experience, at close range, to listen to and hear one of the great minds of the twentieth century speaking. If you'd been in Melbourne or Sydney you might have gone to it but it would have been a huge public gathering, whereas here I think there were only about twenty of us in the Blue Room. I was a bit shy and I didn't dare to speak to him, but most other people did. There would be other examples of, not people of quite the international stature of Russell, but international figures coming. I remember Douglas from the United States of America came and he had been very close to Roosevelt and so on. And he met these people and heard them talk and so on. It was a very rich time in that way.

          You mentioned Alec Hope's lecture on teaching. Just talking about the teaching of history at this time - now, I know you started out with very small classes at the college - but perhaps stepping back a little bit to Melbourne University, how was history taught at that time? What was the desired way in which it was thought that history should be taught?

Well, I taught Australian history in Melbourne and that consisted of two lectures a week and tutorials - pass tutorials, and an honours tutorial. I think there were two honours tutorials. It was quite heavy teaching each year. You were very much left alone to your own devices. No one told you how you were to teach, or what you were to teach. They told you you would be teaching Australian history, or Renaissance history, but I don't remember Crawford or anyone else telling you, 'Now, when you teach this, you will teach it in this way or that way'. I think teaching for me then - I hope this doesn't sound too high flying - was an act of creation. It was a substitute for creating something on paper. I thought of every class rather like a piece of music which would have a definite form. You'd have a statement of the theme, development of the theme, and the recapitulation.

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B

          Identification: side two, tape one, Professor Manning Clark.

          So in a sense we're talking about a style of human interaction that's really been a constant for thousands of years when people are being sensitive to each other, is it?

Yes. People who complain that Canberra was dull or wasn't lively, or there weren't enough people here, I think they were really talking about themselves, because wherever there's about two or three people together you can have an exchange and you can learn something. I mean, you don't have to have a building to have a university, you can have a log of wood and sit on it. If somebody's got something to say and somebody wants to say anything in reply, well, then you're deep into a dialogue, or a collision of truth or error, however you like to present it. I think the big thing for a teacher - I'm talking about the teaching of history and literature because I'm very passionately interested in literature - is that he or she should inspire them to want to find out more for themselves, inspire them to want to write something, inspire them to become teachers. And I hope this isn't too high flying, to join with them in a search for wisdom and understanding.

          In those early days, the students, how would you describe them?

Well, I had the diplomatic cadets. They came from all over Australia. Some of them for a while came from Asia as well. And they were quite good, but they were really interested in their careers and they were career making. This was a first year in making sure that twenty years later you'd be an ambassador. So they weren't really interested in finding the truth about Australian history. They were interested in getting those things about the past and about the present which would help their careers. There's nothing shameful and disgraceful about that, it's just a fact of life.

The students, the people who were doing their degrees, were very few, but some of them were very good, and then by the middle 1950s I started a Master of Arts class at the old college and we had some very, very gifted people doing graduate degrees. By 1960 I'd had people like Ruth Knight who is the wife of a counsellor at the American Embassy and she converted her thesis into a book, a very good book, Illiberal Liberal, the life of Robert Lowe in Australia. There's Michael Roe who did the Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia. There was Tim Suttor who did something about authority in the Catholic church. John Barrett. All these theses became books and quite influential books. So that was very worthwhile. The other thing I enjoyed very much in the teaching was by 1956 I'd begun to write A History of Australia and although there are only nine, ten, twelve, fifteen people in the class I began to give them lectures based on what became volume one of the History of Australia which was .... I hope they liked it - they told me they did - but it was a wonderful way of having a sounding board to see whether you were saying anything that people were interested in. I mean you don't write to a brick wall, you don't address a brick wall, you address human beings and you've got to find out what they're interested in.

          What about part-time students? The fact that the Canberra University College had a high proportion of part-time students, what effect did that have?

I thought on the whole it was quite good, although they were in some ways a bit like the diplomatic cadets. A proportion of them would be doing it not because they wanted to find out more about the history of Australia but because they wanted to increase their salary in the public service. So they were interested in getting a pass and that's quite understandable, but it meant that interest in history wasn't their primary motive for enrolling.

          In your book you mention the course on which you were teaching the diplomatic cadets and you mention how the course was cancelled after a while and you felt that there'd been political interference involved in that. What were the factors? Was there any particular thing you were thinking of when you said that? Any incidents?

Well, it's very difficult to substantiate this either way, produce evidence either way but by then - 1952, 1953 - there'd been a change of government in 1949. They became more and more hysterical about people being radicalised who were going into Foreign Affairs. I think quite mistakenly they thought that I was radicalising some of them. If they read my autobiographies now they'd see that I was consumed by doubt about what was right and what was wrong in these things. And they decided they wanted to have a different way of training these cadets so it was like a football team, in so-and-so, out Clark - you know, when you publish the team on Friday morning in the Melbourne Age, you have in so-and-so and out so-and-so, well I was out. I didn't like it at the time. In fact I think I was quite angry at that happening. I thought it was unjust.

          What did they actually tell you at the time?

They just said they were going to change the content of it all and teach them internally rather than externally. Well, maybe that was .... I don't think they were altogether happy with what they heard about Australia from me.

          Were there any particular things that ...? I mean, for example, the comments that you might have been making about the British connection - just pulling something out of the air - might that have been a sensitive point? But I don't know what you were saying at that time.

Yes, it could have been I think because I came into the teaching and writing of Australian history as a passionate believer in the cultivation of Australian sentiments and the ending of the notion that we were Australian Britons, or the ending of the double loyalty. Maybe that was not popular amongst the higher-ups. I just don't know. I repeat, I don't think you could prove either way now. There were all sorts of talks about interference or somebody said to Menzies that this has got to change and so on but I don't think there's any evidence for it. Incidentally I think it was probably a blessing for me in the long run because it gave me more time to concentrate on the teaching of Australian history and to concentrate on the writing of Australian history. And although it was a bit barren to have those twelve able people suddenly withdrawn from you I think, as I said, in the long run I think it was a great boon for me personally.

          Across the way was the ANU, physically quite close, what sort of connection were you having? It's a small town, people with similar interests in some cases.

Well in history the relations were always quite good. They became admirable when Hancock came back to the ANU and decided to take over the directorship and head of the History Department. He had talks with me and we decided to have joint seminars of those doing history at the college and those - I'm talking about graduate degrees - doing them at the Institute of Advanced Studies, and that worked very, very well. He also invited me to act as a supervisor for people enrolled for the PhD at the National University and I supervised quite a number of those theses, and I enjoyed that. When he stopped being Head of the Department for a while I think the relations deteriorated. Hancock was interested in excellence and in being fair dinkum. He didn't put on side or behave as though he was superior to others. He was also interested in those people who were doing things. And I think he thought, and I hope rightly, that there were people down there at the old Childers Street place who were creators and that it was a community of people interested in history and literature and we should all work together. It was a very rich time and a very, very fruitful time. By the way, he was a marvellous defender of anyone who had actually said something that annoyed other people.

          Was that a problem? That people did come under pressure for making statements that - perhaps in the press, letters to the editor, things like that - was it felt that academics shouldn't be involved in that sort of activity?

Yes, certainly with the first Vietnam episode - let's say the movement in what is now called Vietnam, then called Indo-China, to expel the French from Indo-China - four of us, there was Pat, C.P. Fitzgerald, the Professor of Chinese History, Jim Davidson, who was the Professor of Pacific History, John Burton who had been Head of Foreign Affairs, and myself signed a letter suggesting that the French should get out of Indo-China and that was the cause of quite angry remarks in the Commonwealth parliament. They were, I think, about ignorance, about being left-wing and so on. But I imagine that now, so what's that, it's forty-six years later, isn't it? Thirty-six years later, that we accepted it as just being commonsense that the French should have got out of Indo-China.

          What was the attitude of, say, Joe Burton to members of the University College being involved in those sorts of things, specifically him?

He was very non-interfering and also if anyone was attacked publicly, and there weren't many public attacks, he was very good to them privately. He didn't say anything publicly but he was a very understanding man, and with people who were kicked over the traces in other ways, which I won't name, he extended some great understanding and he was certainly never a punisher. I think we were all terribly lucky to have him because there were about six, seven or eight maestros in the college and if anyone had appointed himself as super-maestro that would have caused a hell of a lot of trouble. One of the troubles, I think, at the ANU when it started was that they had a lot of maestros, and a lot of people also appointed themselves super-maestros and they became the objects of ridicule.

          What about Melville? He was Vice-Chancellor of the ANU for a lot of the time through this '50s period leading up to amalgamation. What did you observe - just looking at this question of maestros versus super-maestros - what sort of role did he play amidst all those people?

He was a very quiet, very reserved man, but he was a very, very strong man and he had, I suppose, a very, very difficult task at the old ANU of making sure there weren't too many clashes between the maestros. There was, as you probably know, one big clash and ...

          This is Lord Lindsay?

Yes. But Lindsay wasn't even a professor. He'd appointed himself a maestro but he wasn't really de facto a maestro, or de jure a maestro.

          What did you observe of the Lindsay affair? Did you know ...? Well, you would have known ....

Yes, I knew him quite well. I had been at Balliol College when I was younger. His father was master of Balliol College, Oxford. I think he had that great problem that a great number of academics have: that his estimate of himself was, say, up there, the estimate of other people of him was on the floor. He was up on the ceiling and they had him down on the floor. That happened with another chap at the ANU - I'd rather not mention names. It caused a lot of trouble in those early days. The truth probably was somewhere half-way between I imagine but once people see themselves as being on the ceiling and not being given a position equivalent to the ceiling, they tend to develop persecution mania, or can develop persecution mania. They can also have delusions of grandeur and the delusion that they are the victims of a great injustice.

Now, the Lindsay affair was handled consummately by Hancock because if you believe that you've been unjustly treated in Australia in the '50s one obvious thing to do was to tell John Anderson in Sydney and he would certainly come out and make a big noise in your favour, be the advocate of the devil as it were. Well, Hancock with great skill decided the solution to this was to write to Anderson and ask him to be a member of the committee investigating Lindsay's case against the ANU so that silenced Anderson because he was on the committee and he had him on side as it were. That, I thought, was extremely astute. He told me about it with a great twinkle in the eye.

          Nugget Coombs is an extraordinary figure in terms of his importance for the ANU. What were you observing of him in this '50s period?

He was very good to us in the College because he had worked with Fin Crisp in the Commonwealth Public Service. He had an enormous admiration for Alec Hope as a poet. He thought very highly of Heinz Arndt as an economist, and if I may be personal, I happened to get on extremely well with him. He took the view right from the start that those people at the old College, the people I'd known, were just as able as the people up the hill, as it were, and that therefore any distinction between them couldn't be sustained for long. So we all got on terribly well with him and he gave great support to us, and we knew we had a great supporter and friend in Nugget Coombs.

          The question of amalgamation and people's attitudes to it waxed and waned through the '50s era. There were a couple of times, as I understand it, when people were seriously considering it and then it went away again.

I was always in favour of it myself. I think partly because I had by then seen the fruits of collaboration with Hancock in historical research. Some were against it. My old friend, Fin Crisp, was against it as you probably know. I think you better ask the others about that. It was a very sort of stormy time in some ways but it always reminded me of what Chamberlain said about the Munich Agreement with the embrace. Let's say the embrace around the College and the ANU was inevitable, if not desirable. I thought it was both inevitable and desirable. Some people thought it was inevitable but not desirable. Some people thought it was not even inevitable and certainly wasn't desirable.

          Hancock's wool project, were you involved in that?

Yes, I went through all those meetings. That was quite good. I think it was quite a good seminar. It wasn't my cup of tea because it became fairly narrowly economic history. I admire the people who are good at it like Noel Butlin but I hadn't the slightest intention to be part of that view of history, although you could take that as an example of the ANU performing a public service with wool being central to the Australian economy.

          There was also, a fair while ago, a lot of talk in the documents I've read about cooperative work, cooperative projects, and trying to structure the people in organisations to encourage cooperative work. My limited understanding as an outsider is that the reality never really matched what the hopes were, what the planners really wanted to achieve, particularly˙.... I mean, I'm not saying people didn't succeed in creating things but I'm saying there seems to be a desire to create things in a cooperative pattern to bring people into inter-disciplinary ways.

I think when it started, that seminar I told you about in 1948 here in Canberra, the emphasis there seemed to be on a group of scholars all working together that were some larger whole. What happened fairly quickly when the ANU got going was they all went away to their separate burrows, if you take their rooms as a rabbit's burrow, and worked away at their own work. I remember at the time that when Hancock took the view as Director, not just Head of the History Department, but as Director of the School of Social Sciences, that he should go round on - if you're familiar with ecclesiastical terminology - metropolitan visitation, ask them how they're getting on and so on, and try to draw them all together, this was resented apparently as interference. They thought they were entitled to go on with their own work in their own way. It may be that that's been one of the disappointing things about the ANU, that you never got very much cooperation - although I suppose the Dictionary of Biography would be an example of cooperation between people within the ANU, certainly between the old ANU and the College, and then the Institute and the School of General Studies, and the larger historial community in Australia.

          I'd like to come back to the Dictionary a bit later, but just talking of Hancock and the teaching of history for the moment. As I understand it he tended towards the idea of history being sort of a mother subject - that everybody needs to be aware of and come from and integrate into their other work whether it's geography or politics or economics, as opposed to just one of the subjects that might be brought together into an inter-disciplinary team. Is that a fair summary in crude form?

Yes, I think he did see it that way. Mind you, when they first started here, both at the old ANU and at the College, the first professors made public, and in some cases passionate, declarations of what their subject was, and you tended to get in those inaugural lectures and in statements around the so-called Professorial Board rather long-winded statements about how important their subject was - I suppose this is uncharitable, and I will say it - and therefore how important they were. But that calmed down after a while. I think the people who made the most extravagant claims for their subject tended to be the least productive. That those who made no claims at all for their subject but just got on with their work, they had the big impact in the long run, I think.

          What impact do you think Hancock had on the teaching of history within the ANU? Was it a case of someone presiding over - although he was that very pre-eminent, very eminent person in that group - a group of people who effectively did things the way that they'd done them in the past and followed old habits and just nodded in his direction and went away and didn't take any notice?

Well, all that occurs to me immediately after what you've said is that he had the gift of teasing out of people the best that was inside them. Secondly, he had the gift of, in a flirtatious way, getting people to finish what they said they were going to finish, by flattery and so on, or if flattery didn't succeed, then being quite tough with them. And you can see if you look at that list of productions some people who had been seemingly unproductive eventually did become productive because he tended to be, not a stand-over man, but to be very firm with them. His own example was quite inspirational. He kept on producing these works and he had these little gatherings in his own house where he'd talk to people and so on. He was quite a 'Mr Chipps' with students.

          What about with staff?

Well, I think you'd have to ask people who worked - I didn't work immediately under him of course, and my relationship with him was a rather special kind because we were both sons of clergy and his father and my father had been quite friendly and I'd known his father very well and I had met Hancock when I was about six or seven. He was ten years older than me, I think, or maybe more. We had that sort of bond so that his yoke was never burdensome or irksome to me because we just had quite a good understanding, I believe, I hope. I think some people did resent his pressure on them to produce but you'd have to ask the ones who were immediately under him about that. You know the remark, 'By their fruits you shall know them', well, he did produce quite a bit of fruit.

          You obviously got on well with him and you said earlier that he dominated your experience of the relationship with the Institute. Outside of history did you observe that other people were getting on relatively well with their colleagues?

Well, we historians got on well with Jim Davidson in Pacific History. We were very friendly with him. We got on quite well with individuals in other departments. I had quite a good relationship with Noel Butlin but I think it was a relationship of mutual respect, as it were, and a recognition that although we were both historians in one way, we were completely different in another way. But I recognised what he was doing was important and I think he extended the same approval to what I was trying to do. There were some pretty angry relationships, but I think you better ask other people about those because I think they ought to have the right to testify themselves how they got on. There were some quite bitter feelings based mainly around this ...

END TAPE 1, SIDE B

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A

          Identification: this is the beginning of the second part of the interview with Professor Manning Clark. The date is 7˙December 1990 and we're resuming our discussions of the ANU.

          Just going back a little bit and thinking about some of the students that you were working with, particularly in the early days of the Canberra University College. You had a lot of part-time students. How did you find those?

Well, some of them were good but the majority of them were doing Australian history, the subject I was teaching, because they wanted to get a degree because to get a degree would increase their salary or give them a case for promotion in the Australian government service. So that they were motivated but motivated by the prospect of promotion rather than any genuine interest in what Australia was all about.

          The experience of large organisations, the Commonwealth Public Service, and politics as seen by a public servant, that didn't - the better ones - that wasn't a positive thing that they were actually able to bring to bear?

Yes, some of them were quite helpful in that way and it certainly was very helpful for me with my own work, or my own aspirations to write a history of Australia. I studied these people very closely at the time. And I studied the people they worked with and learnt a lot about human nature, if you like, and what human beings were really like from seeing how it works and hearing them talk about what they hoped to achieve and realising that they were probably never going to achieve it. That terrible gap that exists for most of us between desire and capacity. I found all those very interesting for the sort of thing I wanted to do which was to tell the story of Australia.

          Just talking about those students for the moment, what were the - if you could just elaborate on that a bit? I mean, what were the particular elements that you were drawing˙- for that larger picture relevant to the history of Australia - from your experiences with students at the time?

Through working with them or studying with them and through working with those diplomatic cadets and seeing a bit of Foreign Affairs I found out a good deal about how governments actually work and it gave me, I think, also a picture of what you might call the field of the possible in Australia - what you can do and what you can't do and so on. It also gave me, I think, a very much more clear picture than I'd had before of Australian conformism with - Australians tend to think of themselves as egalitarians and independents but in actual fact a thing like the Australian government service is very hierarchical and there's a great deal of deference and there was a great pressure to conform because if you don't conform you won't get on and the whole idea is to get on. Well, you conform, that's all.

          Coming back to the university, there's certainly overtly an encouragement of difference, but comparing, say, the environment that you found in the ANU in the '60s and the College a bit earlier, how did you feel that the ANU, hopefully as the pinnacle perhaps of university-type freedom, how do you think it rated?

In Australia?

          As a place where real freedom of thought was encouraged supposedly. That was one of the basic reasons for the institution's existence.

Well, I think when the ANU started - I came up here to the College, not the ANU - that there was a rather, not a stormy, but a rather unsettled time in which they were trying to settle down. During that time a great number of people, whom I don't want to name, saw themselves as super-maestros and began their life here talking about how important their subject was and how important they were. But on the whole people who went on like that didn't do very much. The people who didn't talk about how important they

were, or how busy they were, or what marvellous teachers they were, or what marvellous writers they were, they were the ones who tended to get on and do things and achieve something.

          Of the people that you were associated with and that had an impact on you, who would you nominate as the most creative people in the way that you are now talking?

Well, I learnt a lot from talking to Alec Hope. I learnt quite a lot from talking to Fin Crisp, talking to Heinz Arndt, Brian Beddie, Alan Donagan, Murray Todd, Don Baker, Laurie Gardiner, they all had something to say. But I think I mentioned when we were having our last talk that I think the really valuable thing in those early days was that Canberra was a place where the people influenced by John Anderson in Sydney met the people who were influenced by Wittgenstein in Melbourne and they sort of confronted each other and talked to each other. I wasn't particularly interested in either position actually but I was interested in the collision between them. And again I think in those early days quite a number of people wasted their substance in too much talking, too much arguing. The real test is to get out that blank page and see if you've got anything to put on it.

          There was a thing called the Consortium of Historians, I think, established in 1959. What was that?

Keith Hancock, Jim Davidson and I had these meetings, I think once a week or once a fortnight, in which people read papers and the papers were discussed and I think that was quite a good thing. It gave you some idea of what people were really working at and what they really thought, and later ...

          But this is sort of separate from courses that people are doing.

Yes, it was held at night or late in the afternoon. Later in the early 1960s I started something in the Haydon-Allen Building of inviting people around Australia who had made a bit of a mark to talk mainly to the graduate students and to the honours students. They were very successful. We had Tom Keneally, we had Jim McAuley, we had Alec Hope, we had a Canadian poet called P.K. Page. I think they were quite good, lively intellectual exchanges.

          The distinction between honours students and pass students, was that an important distinction in your view? What I'm really asking is, in effect did you find that there were quite frequently perhaps interesting people who were pass students who for various reasons weren't doing honours courses?

Yes, you did. I think the Australian situation is very different from the British in this way. The British situation - nearly everyone in Arts is doing honours, whereas in Australia nearly everyone in Arts is doing a pass course; [inaudible] doing pass courses. But we had people in those pass courses who were very valuable. In those early days you had quite a number of students from various religious orders - the Dominicans, the Benedictines, and some of the female orders - nuns from the convents - and they were very valuable members of classes, I think. And of course the more elderly people from the public service, they were generally doing pass courses and they sometimes made quite a valuable contribution to a class.

          The sort of preparation that people were getting in high schools, what was your feeling about people arriving at the university? I think there were quite high failure rates in the '50s and '60s with some suggestion being that inadequate secondary training was part of the cause.

I always took the view that if a person had matriculated he was legally entitled to go to the university, that one ought to welcome him, that if they really weren't up to it that you weeded them out at the end of the first year so that you may have a high failure rate in the first year but not after that.

          Was that basically your experience? That policy, I guess, would need the cooperation of your colleagues. Was that effectively what you did?

I think it varied from department to department. I think English was a bit stricter than History in the early days. Economics was very strict. You probably know about the very high failure rate in Economics. I think it all depends on what you think a university is there for - the Arts Faculty is there for. If you think it's there to give a general education to a high proportion of society then you really would expect to have a large number of pass students. But if you think on the other hand a university is a place where the ‚lite train a future ‚lite then you'll have mainly honours students and very few pass students, and what pass students you have you won't take much interest in. I was always a bit of a romantic at that time about education. I thought that you should have the very highest possible standards but I held the rather romantic view that if people tried and if they were adequately motivated that they could reach those standards.

          The ANU after the amalgamation effectively had within it representatives of both views. I mean, the CUC in effect is perhaps an example of an institution that was set up with that more democratic view and the Institute with the other view. Coming at it from that point of view - we've discussed it from other angles - how did you feel that that marriage within the ANU went?

I can only judge from the way it went in the teaching and research in history and in that way I think it went very well mainly because Keith Hancock, who was the Head of the Research School of History, and myself had roughly identical views on what should happen. So we were able to talk about it and work together. And to the best of my knowledge there never was a clash and there never was a situation where either Hancock or myself felt one had let the other down.

          One of the figures .... I'd like to just ask about some of the prominent individuals and Nugget Coombs of course is an outstanding figure in the history of the ANU, could you give me your feelings, your description of the role that he played as you saw it?

Well, I think he played a very big role in improving relations between the old ANU and the College. He held the view that there were people in the College who were worthy, as it were, of associating with the people in what became the Institute. He started discussion groups in University House in which he invited people from either side of the university to join with him in discussing things. We didn't meet all that often but when we did meet I thought it was extremely good. He had Alec Hope, he had John Passmore, he had Trevor Swan, he had Heinz Arndt, Partridge, I think was there, and I was there and doubtless there were others but they're the ones I remember. That was a sort of grain of mustard seed from which I thought it may be possible one day a great tree would grow.

          He was also involved of course behind the scenes a lot. One of the people I've interviewed, it might have been Professor Spate, said that he suspected - and he was saying this positively - that behind every major move in the history of the ANU, very grey and indistinct but very powerfully, Nugget Coombs was in there.

Yes, I think that's true. I wasn't as closely associated with the moves as maybe Professor Spate was but Nugget's been a fixer for forty or fifty years. After all said and done he was Director of the Commonwealth Bank, Chairman of the Commonwealth Bank, and he's mixed with powerful people for about thirty or forty years, so it was very natural when he took over the position of Chancellor of the ANU that he should play a very active role. It would have been impossible for him to be Chancellor and not be active. It was impossible for him to just be a figurehead.

          You mentioned that you were a bit more detached than some other people but the way in which he operated, the way in which he was so effective, did you have cause to observe that? I mean, you mentioned the way in which he got people together to talk and associate in a fairly informal but very important way.

Yes. I didn't find anything that he did troublesome to me because I happened to agree with him.

          I wasn't suggesting negatively.

No, but I can see though that if you hadn't agreed you might have tended to argue that chancellors shouldn't go on like that, that they should just be figureheads. But insofar as he was promoting the two things that I happened to believe in quite passionately; one was cultivation of Australian sentiment and the development of a rich culture here in Australia - intellectual and spiritual culture here in Australia - and secondly, collaboration between all those who were working in the same field. And also of course later on when we got on to the position of the Aborigine, I just happened to agree with him so that nothing he did ever made me feel, 'Well, you shouldn't be doing that', or 'That's not your function'.

          You didn't actually observe him in action all that much?

No, I saw him in the period when I was on the University Council and he presided as Chancellor, and then on various selection committees when it may be for an appointment at the Institute or appointment at the School. If it was a major position he may be there as chairman, and I thought he was a very, very good chairman - a very businesslike chairman, and very effective.

          Melville was Vice-Chancellor at the time of amalgamation and before the College came in, but did you see much of him?

Not all that much because he was a very shy man, I think, and a very reserved man. I admired him enormously and he was always personally very, very warm and friendly to me, and indeed, so was Copland. And I remember both of them - well, this is rather personal - but I remember both of them making the remark that when amalgamation occurred that the new ANU which would emerge would benefit enormously from having people like Alec Hope and Heinz Arndt and so on and myself. Both Copland and Melville, of course, were economists so I couldn't judge that aspect of their work at all.

          A person who perhaps gets a bit lost in the story because of the way it happened is Joe Burton.

Yes. Well, I thought he was admirable as Principal of the college because he had to preside over the college at a time when all these discussions were happening about the future of the college and during those discussions, as you've probably heard from other people, some rather harsh things were said by both sides about the other side. If Burton had been an oversensitive man and a man of over-weening pride or arrogance or vanity he would have lost his temper and said things or threatened to resign or made remarks such as how dare you say that about me and so on or about my colleagues. But he didn't do any of that and I think that, although it was sometimes exasperating that he didn't do very much, that quality he had not to become irrational, not to lose his temper and to retain good relations with people who were saying sometimes quite outrageous things, I think that was valuable.

          What were the sorts of ...? I mean the sensible things in favour of amalgamation I know them. What were the sort of outrageous things that people were saying?

Well, I think that, I suppose the ‚litists, whom I'd prefer not to name, at the old ANU thought that amalgamation would lead to a lowering of standards, that they were the intellectual ‚lite and that to associate with people who were not an intellectual ‚lite would have an adverse effect on them. They also, I think, were apprehensive that they may be called on to take more students and if they had to take more students that this would have an adverse effect on their research and so on. I'm not sure that in that way they were actually right. I think on the whole if you want to write anything - I can't talk about physics and medicine and so on - but in the humanities and the social sciences the presence of students is a plus, is a positive rather than a negative.

          How did Hancock feel about students?

He liked them. He didn't have children of his own, that was one of his tragedies - neither did Burton. They both were in tragic situations in that way and I think for them the student body was their substitute family.

          There was a proposal at one stage, was there not, on the part of Hancock to have a joint overall history department integrating the two sections of the university?

It didn't get very far. I don't think you needed to have it formalised because that was what was actually happening. There was a great deal of collaboration about students - I'm talking about PhD students - about the supervisions of those students, about the division of work between various members of the Department, about seminars, and then eventually of course about the creation of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

          I'd like to come to the ADB in a minute. But one of the things that was part of the amalgamation was, there was a clause in there that said - I think it said - that PhD students were to be prepared by the Institute but not the Faculties for the first ten years. If that's right, do you remember that as being ...?

I don't remember that. There was no inhibition as far as I was concerned because before the amalgamation I had been supervising PhDs for Hancock. In fact some of the best students I ever had were people he got me to supervise. There was Michael Roe, Suttor, Barrett. There were others. I was never made to feel in any way an inferior member of that team.

          What, it effectively just meant that for bureaucratic purposes they went through the Institute rather than the ...?

That's right, yes. I don't think it was .... No, that didn't bother me at all.

          What about the Australian Dictionary of Biography? Its beginnings, did that happen smoothly, or some problems?

There were a great number of rows. There were a number of problems I suppose. One was, was it to be mainly an ANU creation and if so would that arouse the resentments of Sydney and Melbourne and so on? Then there was the vexed question, is there going to be a general editor? Who will that be? And then there were the other terrible arguments about who were going to be the editors of the first volumes and there was a great deal of, I think you'd call it 'jockeying' for position between those who saw themselves as the greatest authorities of all time on the early history of Australia. There were a number of people whom I mustn't name who believed that the early history of Australia belonged to them - it was their paddock. That anyone who presumed to place a foot in that paddock should be attacked as utterly unworthy of being a˙.... So all those things happened. But I thought Hancock was very good. That was one of the things where the better qualities of Hancock came out in handling that. He did actually have a tendency to believe that if only you presented the whole situation that everyone would agree. That's always a very dangerous view to hold. And I think he felt also as a sort of corollary of that in the university world, or in the world of intelligentsia they're all chaps together and chaps would all behave, no chap would be treacherous or disloyal or let the side down. And I believe it was an enormous shock to him when he found out that not everyone was a chap.

          One of the groups, perhaps, that were likely not to be chaps, and in this case not for reasons of personal perfidity, are, say, members of the Communist Party. There have been many important historians in that group. How did he find people from that particular direction in this rather club-like atmosphere that you were describing?

You're thinking of people like Gollan, are you?

          He's one example.

Yes.

          Ian Turner is another - not at the ANU of course.

I think Hancock had this great delusion that 'chapdom' was so strong as to be even stronger than loyalty to a particular party or loyalty to a religious group or loyalty to some irrationality. He and Gollan got on extremely well together. In fact of course, you probably know from other people, he defended Gollan when Gollan was attacked by conservative gentlemen in the Commonwealth parliament.

          There was quite a lot of discussion at that time about the intellectual situation of a communist. Whether or not possibly in some areas .... The argument would go along these lines, possibly in some areas such as physics, but obviously not biology, it might be possible for a communist to think freely and independently in a classical fashion but in the area of history because of their commitments it would ...

I don't think that bothered Hancock at all actually. You're talking about the Dictionary, are you?

          Well, I'm talking generally.

Yes.

          But do you think those arguments apply to the Dictionary?

Insofar as we're talking about his view, I think his view was that the communists, the socialists and the liberals and the conservatives were all under the umbrella of the enlightenment. There may be differences about ways and means but on the question of fundamental values that we're all chaps together, as it were. I think this was a terrible delusion and I think he was quite ...

END TAPE 2, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B

          Identification: this is side two of the first tape of the second interview, Professor Manning Clark.

          Sorry, you were saying just when the tape was running out that Hancock was disillusioned or shocked or surprised.

Yes, I think he was shocked and surprised that it wasn't always unruffled teamwork. But his troubles weren't with the members of the Communist Party. I think that those who were or had been communists were delighted to be accepted by him. I think they were quite flattered.

          I was nominating them as a group ...

Their pride was tickled I think by him. I think he enjoyed the role of being the defender of groups of people who were being attacked by the conservatives.

          Well, without naming names, what sort of shocks in that case did he find most surprising? What were the shocks that disrupted this world that you're describing of chapdom?

You mean with the ADB?

          Well, it happened in the ADB?

Mm. Well, I don't want to go into details about it but I think you ought to ask others about the Ellis affair, M.H. Ellis. When a thing like the ADB starts all sorts of people see themselves as going to be important in it, and after a year or so it emerges that they're not going to have that important role that they thought they were going to have and I think some of those people got resentful about it. I think, for example, in Sydney they thought - I'm not talking of Ellis now. Of course Ellis himself thought he should have written the whole lot. The Sydney History Department thought that the early period belonged to them. I mean, after all Australia as a colony of thieves begins in Sydney, as it were, therefore they thought - to repeat my language I used before - they thought it was their paddock. And when they weren't invited to be all that important in the early volumes I think they were ill at ease with that. I think it came as quite a shock to them.

          Just coming back to the Communist Party for the moment, intellectually they were a very important force ...

In the '40s and '50s.

          In the '40s and '50s. How did you perceive their intellectual role in Australia at that time?

I think probably in the late '30s and '40s and possibly even into the early '50s the Communist Party had a claim to call itself the conscience of Australia. It was presenting a simplistic view about the development of society. It was presenting a view that there were laws of human history and these laws of human history were working towards the creation of a communist society in the whole world and it was the role of the Communist Party and in particular the leaders of that party, the few within the many, to hasten that day. So they tended, the people who were communists, to speak [interruption] .... I think I was talking about the communists being the vanguard of human history and hence their confidence. But because they not only believed they were the vanguard but they believed it was the only possible view to hold and hence they tended to be what I call spiritual popes. Let's say, to claim that they knew all the answers and they believed they were right about literature, about philosophy, about art, about religion and so on. And hence they tended to be promoting and recommending a conformism which I found personally a bit irritating. And although I partly shared their hope that you could get a better society in Australia I didn't want that society to be taken over by these spiritual popes.

          Was their position within the intellectual culture of that time strong enough so in effect people were defining themselves for or against the questions they were putting forward?

Yes. Because they had a definite position the debate tended to be about whether they were right or wrong not what was right and what was wrong, but to what extent one agreed or disagreed with the communists. I suppose the first dent in their role as a conscience of intellectual Australia was with the trials in Moscow in the middle 1930s. And then you had an enormous upsurge of confidence in their point of view during the second world war. But then a withdrawal of that confidence after the death of Stalin and the revelations about what had happened with Stalin with the collectivisation of agriculture and the trials and so on.

          Did you find that within - coming back to the ANU and the History Department - that the debates we are talking about, which were raging across Australia generally, were they an important part of what was happening within the university as well?

Yes, but by the 1950s, after the election of Menzies in '49, the debate often narrowed down to the right of communists to have a voice. The right of communists to be appointed to certain positions. The right of communists to have a position in the university and the school, or have a major role in any of the professions. And also of course, do they or do they not have a right to go to potentially disturbing situations such as New Guinea or Groote Eylandt with the Aborigines and so on. You got a lot of debates about should a man like Worsley be allowed to go to New Guinea. He was here in the ANU at the time. For what it's worth, my view is I think they ought to go. I took the view of Newman, John Henry Newman, that everything a person says or everything he writes, everything he thinks, is part of a greater creation. We must study the whole of creation and not that part of creation which Bob Menzies wants us to look at, or some university vice-chancellor and so on.

          You mentioned Hancock defending Gollan. Did you or did other people perceive a serious threat to the likes of Gollan, or was it a matter of ...?

I don't think so, no.

          In other words, how seriously at threat was academic freedom in that environment, is what I'm asking?

I don't think it was anywhere near as serious as some of those people maintained because really the real test is what you do with your own time. If you really wanted to say something in Australia, wanted to communicate something, I think if you truly tried hard enough you would have been able to do it. There was an enormous temptation I think for radicals at the time to believe that they weren't being fruitful or creative themselves because they were being suppressed. I think the fault was often in themselves rather than in the society in which they lived. I don't want to be too harsh but I think that's ....

          Do you think the ANU - well, I guess this is a general question - too comfortable for serious thought? Now, there's putting an idea very, very strongly.

Yes, I think that's a great weakness in Australia, not just with the ANU, the smugness, the complacency, arrogance are grave evils in Australian society. And our tendency to identify cosiness with happiness was, I think, a great weakness of Australians.

          One of the perennial debates is the business of permanency - tenure - as opposed to five-year renewable, et cetera. What was your feeling on that issue?

I grew up in the Australian tradition which placed a great emphasis on security. I don't mean political security. I mean security of tenure and so on and it wasn't really until I got to know America well in 1963 that I began to think seriously about the advantages and disadvantages of security as against insecurity. The Americans have these short term appointments that don't seem to bother them. They seem to think they're going to move on to something else and it's possible that because you live in a situation where there isn't that guarantee about the future that you do more than you do in Australia where once you've got the security you may do nothing. I remember being told of a Professor of Economics in Melbourne, at an Australian university, I asked another Professor of Economics, 'What's this chap going to do?'. He hadn't done anything for about ten years and the reply was, 'Manning, he'll sit it out'. Now, you wouldn't be able to sit it out in certain parts of America and I think we'll have to have a good look at this question about security versus uncertainty.

          Having somewhere else to go is often even more important.

That's right, yes.

          Harvard, when you went there, it's a different system, what were the parallels or the contrasts that struck you most sharply in a way that reflected back on the ANU?

Well, I think in general they worked harder than we do - I'm talking about the humanities. I think their standard of achievement was higher than ours. I think they had there, at Harvard, something which we seem to have lost and that was a genuine belief and a faith in intellectual endeavour. And they had this notion that if you were to belong to Harvard you must be good so you don't need to justify yourself. What you want to do is to go on with what you want to do. Whereas here, especially the ANU in the beginning, there were a hell of a lot of people spent a hell of a lot of time telling each other how good they were, or how important they were. It was just assumed at Harvard. You don't do this, you don't say, 'My name is Smith and I'm the greatest historian of all time', as it were. I'm exaggerating. They just say, 'What are you doing here at Harvard?'. It's just assumed that you must be doing something, yes.

          One of the things that the founders of the ANU were trying to do was to sit down and initially design on paper a structure, a way of recruiting people, that would create this thing that people admired so much about Oxford and Cambridge. In terms of the business, can you point to anything they particularly got wrong, or that they could have done differently to have made the mix more exciting back here in Australia?

That's very difficult to answer.

          I went over to see University House which particularly, I think, had this idea of creating a meeting place, a society.

I thought Trendall was rather good as the first master of University House, but you're really getting on to the question of why Australians don't really work as hard as others - as Americans and western Europeans, and why there isn't such a strong intellectual and spiritual tradition here, and that takes you deep into what's happened historically in Australia, is to take in the question of influences of climate, influence of space, the vastness of the continent and so on, isolation, and also the extraordinary phenomenon of this very small number of people being able to enjoy this very high standard of living without working very hard. How long that will last I don't know but I don't imagine it will last very much longer.

          You're almost saying there's nothing we can do about the smugness that we were talking about before.

I think there is something you can do about it and that is you can work harder and I think contact between Australian intellectuals and intellectuals from America and western Europe will ultimately persuade Australians that they've got to do a lot more than they've done so far.

          You started out, when you began some of your early steps in your major historical project of your life, there were elements that suggested that you were working with a team approach initially, or there was some suggestion that you might be working with other people, was there?

No, I was always going to do it by myself. I like the remark by Colin Cartwright in Barry Humphries' sketch, 'Colin Cartwright'. 'I'm a businessman, I run my own show, that's the only way believe you me.' Well, I'm not a businessman but I have tried to run my own show. Maybe it was a mistake, who can tell?

          There were efforts with the wool project and things like that in the History Department, there were major integrated projects, weren't there, here at the ANU?

Yes. I went to that wool seminar. It was good but there was no follow-up from it. It was a show in which nothing happened afterwards.

          Why do you think that was?

I think that takes you into the question of why it was that the ANU never really took off as a community of scholars, that it very quickly developed into - or you could say if you wanted to be unkind - it degenerated into people going away to their own burrows, their own rooms and working away at their own work. I gather there was a measure of resentment at a director of a school coming up with a general program for the school. It's the same way as what's happened to Canberra in general. Walter Burley Griffin had this great idea that here in Canberra you should have a blending of individualism and communalism. Well, some of the elements of out and visible signs of what he understood by communalism have survived but in actual fact it's the individualism which has taken root and not the communalism. I think in the same way in the ANU the individualism was much more powerful than the communalism. I say this with a diffidence because I would never like to engage in a joint project myself.

          Do you think the humanities are actually suitable for joint projects?

I've never been able to see that but you better ask some other people because people have different views, that's all, about it. I don't believe anyone is strictly right or anyone's strictly wrong, you just have different views.

          The ANU as it now is, we've been touching on its present state quite a bit with some of these comments, the future of the organisation, the role that it can and should play in relation to Australian intellectual culture, there's quite a lot of discussion about it going on right now.

I'm out of touch with that but I've always thought that Canberra itself, as distinct from the ANU, can and will play a big part in the intellectual development of Australia, partly because you've got a marvellous collection of material here in the National Library, partly because you've got a great number of very interesting people here looking ... [interruption].

END OF INTERVIEW