AND ANOTHER THING
The Queen, Mr Keating and the case of the fraudulent historian
PAUL JOHNSON
If the Queen wants to needle Paul Keat- ing, the uppity Australian Prime Minister who is her unwelcome guest this weekend, she might do worse than ask, 'Mr Keating, what is your opinion of Manning Clark now?' Let me explain. Keating is a street- wise bruiser of Irish descent, who left school at 14 and has educated himself while eye-gouging his way to the top of Canberra politics. One thing he has learned is that, at any rate in Labor circles, porn-bashing pays. It takes many different forms, and such boring things as historical facts are rarely allowed to get in the way of the rhetoric. For instance, Bill Hayden, the Governor-General, the sort of begrimed politico who would become president of Keating's proposed republic, has just launched a furious attack on Field-Marshal Haig, British commander-in-chief in the Great War. This monster, said Hayden, sent poor Aussie lads to their death because he hadn't troubled to learn the lessons of trench warfare, invented in 'the American Revolutionary War'. He meant, of course, the Civil War, but what is 80 years or so between pom-bashers? Recent- ly, too, a left-wing academic from Sydney had a go at another pom, poor Neville Car- dus, the great Guardian writer on cricket and music, whom he accused, with no justi- fication whatever, of being a 'fascist admir- er'.
The founder of the porn-bashing indus- try, at least in its modern, pseudo-academic form, was Professor Manning Clark, author of the six-volume A History of Australia, standard fodder in many state schools. Clark's hatred of the English dated from his time at Balliol in the 1930s where, said a contemporary, he was severely snubbed, `badly scalding his pride'. From 1946 Clark began to teach the then new-fangled sub- ject of Australian history, and his huge tomes were a by-product of this course. His theme was the noble struggle of a revolu- tionary 'people' striving to break free from British oppression, and threatening repeat- edly to rebel against their wicked masters and their time-serving Aussie collaborators, such as Sir Robert Menzies.
In sober fact, the history of Australia has been remarkably peaceful, the nearest approach to revolt being the 'Eureka Stockade' affair in 1854 during the Victori- an gold rush. Last month I visited the site of the stockade, which has been recon- structed. It is a reflection of Australia's happy and largely uneventful history that this picturesque but trivial episode, which would have gone unrecorded in the history of less fortunate lands, has to be raised to the status of a major event. The truth is, the Australian settlements, whether originally convict or free, prospered mightily from the start and continued to get richer until, by the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, Australia had the world's highest living standard. Melbourne was then the wealthiest city on earth, per capita, and is still to this day a monument to Victorian prosperity and good government. All this has been accurately chronicled by Aus- tralia's great living historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey. The country's relative decline set in at the end of the 19th centu- ry, with the rise to power of the Australian Labor Party and the even more disastrous trades union movement.
However, Manning Clark told a different tale, and one more congenial to the ears of the Australian Left, with its Irish folk- memories and its chippy outlook on life. As each succeeding volume of Clark's History appeared, his standing with the Labor establishment rose, his fame spread and the Melbourne University Press zealously pushed his books. Clark, in turn, developed a left-wing celebrity persona, growing a sage's beard, wearing a huge black hat, cloak and broad leather belt, pronouncing on public events, genuflecting to the Soviet Union, and surrounding himself with ador- ing followers. His work became wilder and noisier, and less and less anchored in any historical facts. He himself was inclined, during his drinking bouts, to roam the uni- 'We make use of acupuncture.' versity campus, shouting, 'Bloody poms! Bloody poms!' But none of this did him any harm, either with the Labor Party or the academic Left. On the contrary. People like Hayden and Keating were brought up on his message, and saluted him publicly when, covered in honours, he died two years ago. His pupils found their way to top jobs in the university history departments, where they waged ferocious warfare against scholars who disputed the Clark line. One victim was Geoffrey Blainey himself, driven into early retirement from his Melbourne chair by a vicious campaign of campus vili- fication.
Clark's inflated reputation did not go wholly unchallenged in his lifetime. In 1982 Claudio Veliz of La Trobe University pub- lished a review of Clark's fifth volume, under the simple heading 'Bad History', a masterpiece of demolition which ought to go into the anthologies. But most Aus- tralian academic historians were too cow- ardly to risk the fury of the Left by pointing to Clark's countless factual errors, appalling prose and sheer inventions. His followers ruled the historical roost and today form the spearhead of the republican movement.
Now, however, Clark's work has received a death-blow from an unexpected quarter: the man who published it. In the Septem- ber issue of Quadrant, Australia's leading intellectual magazine, Peter Ryan, who ran the Melbourne University Press throughout the gestation period of the History, admits that he knew all along that Clark was a fraud and his books largely works of fiction. Now an old man, Ryan seems unwilling to go to his grave without admitting his share in a large-scale imposture on the public, perhaps the most successful — and tragic — of all Australian hoaxes. He writes: 'Of the many things in my life upon which I must look back with shame, my chief shame is that of having been the publisher of Manning Clark's A History of Australia.' His confession is an extraordinary document, unique in the story of publishing. Where it leaves the Australian republican movement is the big question, since it shows that the school of history on which its case rests is fundamentally bogus. In reaction to Ryan's apology, there has been some angry splut- tering from Messrs Keating, Hayden and Co., followed by an embarrassed silence. That is why it makes an intriguing topic for the Queen to raise at Balmoral.
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