The Australian Republican Movement recently paid
tribute to Faith Bandler AM and Colin Lanceley AO, two of the Movement’s 14 Foundational
Members in 1991, who passed away in early 2015.
Ms Bandler, who was awarded an Honoured Life Membership of the Australian Republican
Movement in 2002 for her lifetime support for an Australian Republic, was also
instrumental in the success of the 1967
Referendum to remove constitutional discrimination against Aboriginal
Australians.
Faith Bandler
A descendent
of South Sea Islanders, brought as forced labour to work in the Queensland
cane fields, Ms Bandler was instrumental in the success of the 1967 Referendum
to remove constitutional discrimination against Aboriginal Australians before
becoming one of 14 Foundational
Members of the ARM in 1991.
In a 1993 interview for the Australian
Biography project Ms Bandler explained her support for an Australian republic:
"I'm a republican because
I feel that Australia is adult enough to make its own decisions without
consulting someone 12 000 miles away. I'm a republican because I think we have
a great need now to be an independent nation, mainly because we have a large
population of people who have never known the monarchy, it's meaningless to
them, absolutely meaningless. That they have to swear allegiance to something
away over on the other side of the world to me, I think that it's unreal,
completely unreal."
Ms Bandler was awarded an Honoured Life
Membership of the ARM in 2002 for her lifetime support for an Australian
Republic. ARM Chair Professor Geoff Gallop AC said
“Faith Bandler’s life and words remind us as to why
Indigenous recognition in the Australian constitution is an essential first
step in a republican future. On behalf of the Australian Republican
Movement I extend our sympathies to her family and friends,”
The Australian
Republican Movement also acknowledges the contribution
that artist Colin Lanceley AO has made to the republican cause in Australia,
following his recent passing. ARM Chair, Professor Gallop also paid tribute to Colin Lanceley, who
Colin Lanceley
“was a
tremendous contributor to the republican cause and a great believer in the
importance of a republic to concepts of Australian identity and culture. He was
a passionate Australian and his vocal advocacy and support of great Australian
institutions for artists such as the National Gallery of Australia's council
and National Art School will be long remembered.”
An iconic
Australian painter, printmaker and sculptor, Lanceley
was a dedicated advocate of an Australian Republic and became one of 14
Foundational Members of the ARM in 1991.
This year sees
the centenary of the birth of Charles Manning Hope Clark (born 3 March 1915),
Professor of History at Canberra University College and later the Australian
National University, from 1949 to 1974. Manning Clark was one of the ANU’s most
distinguished academics: a gifted teacher, brilliant historian and deeply
influential public figure up to the time of his death 0n 23 May 1991. His legacy is that his A History of Australia continues to be
one of the most passionately debated visions of Australian history.
Australian historian Professor
Charles Manning Hope Clark AC was one of the most significant 20th century
Australian figures. Clarkwas the author of the best-known general history of
Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962
and 1987. He has been described as "Australia's
most famous historian”.However, Clark was a controversial figure, a
staunch defender of Australia's right to be a nation independent of Great
Britain, and the target of much criticism, particularly from
conservative academics and philosophers.
Born in Sydney in 1915, son of an Anglican clergyman, Manning Clark won
scholarships to Melbourne Grammar School and the University of Melbourne. He
later attended Balliol College, Oxford. There he married Dymphna Lodewyckx from Melbourne and visited Nazi Germany
on the eve of World War II. In the early 1940s taught history at schools in England and
Australia. Ineligible for wartime
service, he returned to teach at Geelong Grammar School, earned a great
reputation as a teacher, and was poached by the University of Melbourne to
teach the first course in Australian history. He was then senior lecturer at the
University of Melbourne, and later Professor of History in the School of
General Studies, Australian National University.
In Canberra he lived with Dymphna and their six children in a house
designed by Robin Boyd. He became one of the local identities, conspicuous in
broad-brimmed hat, spade beard and capacity for disconcerting comment. In 1972 he became the
first Professor of Australian History. He held honorary doctorates awarded by
the Universities of Melbourne, Newcastle and Sydney. In June 1975 Clark was
made a Companion of the Order of Australia in recognition of his monumental A History of Australia. He was named
Australian of the Year for 1980. Manning Clark died in May 1991.
Manning Clark was one of
the most influential Australian intellectuals of the last half century. His
Manning Clark's desk in his Canberra home, where he
wrote the six volumes of A History of Australia
most enduring legacy, however, was his magisterial six-volume A History of
Australia. In 1962,
the first volume of A History of
Australia appeared. For the next two-and-a-half decades Clark unfolded his
tragic celebration of white Australian history. Today, the six-volume history
is one of the masterpieces of Australian literature. It is also one of the most
passionately debated visions of Australian history.
In it he reshaped the now
familiar story of our nation's modern evolution; from the First Fleet's
arrival, the convicts, the rum rebellion, gold, the sheep's back, Federation,
and the glorious defeat at Gallipoli, up to the nation emerging from the Great
Depression and on the threshold of a new world war. Within the dramatic
narrative, which he envisaged as an epic, are highly original and insightful
portraits of its great men with their tragic flaws: Phillip, Macquarie, Burke
and Wills, Bligh, Wentworth, and above all Henry Lawson. His heroes had flaws
and often his villains had redeeming qualities. For Clark life – and indeed
history – was not just about what we said and what we did bit also about our
doubts and uncertainties on the one hand and our hopes and dreams on the other.
His critics saw his approach as an unwarranted intrusion into the search for
facts about winners and losers. History was for the historians and intruders
like Clark were not welcome.
But behind this ambitious historical
work - with its more than a million words and twenty-five, long slogging years
of research and scholarship - was a man as flawed as the historical figures he
was presenting, figures in whose personalities and life events he often saw
himself dauntingly mirrored. He was wracked with self-doubt, and dogged by
fears of failure and personal weakness, and wrestled with an elusive Christ in
whom he longed to have a secure faith. Behind the signature broad hat and the
stern unsmiling visage was a tortured man.
The theme running through
his six-volume A History of Australia
was religion. Clark would show how the settlers of Australia brought with them
three great faiths, Catholicism, Protestantism and the secular traditions that
he described as the Enlightenment, and would chart what happened to those
faiths in the ancient and unresponsive Australian environment. However as the
volumes progressed, the theme shifted away from religion to Australia’s failure, in
Clark’s eyes, to generate an authentic nationalism.
Manning Clark seemed disappointed that
Federation was achieved by middle-aged lawyers and politicians talking about
constitutional details instead of through a republican war of independence.
Australians rushed to fight Britain’s wars; Australian public men grovelled for
British honours. This theme of an Australia divided between those who took up
the call of freedom and those who wallowed in all things British seemed to really
bother his critics. For Clark the call of freedom was a call to take Australian
history – its creations and failures and its heroes and villains – seriously.
In this endeavour Britain was part backdrop and part script but not the whole
story. Aboriginal Australia, geographic location and the local environment had
to be in the mix as well.
Manning Clark in his study, circa 1988
Clark came to republicanism in search of an
Australian identity that recognised a diversity of influences was receptive to
criticism and more open to the wider world and its future. Deep in the soul of
too many of their fellow Australians they saw an internalised colonialism that
acted as a barrier to ethical judgement and creative endeavour. Such
personality analysis was seen by many academics and politicians as an insult to
many.
The National Dictionary of Biography obituary commented:
Thus he
told our story with pride, while seeing our miserableness and failings, and
excoriating them for what they were. To Manning, place was sacred, not only
because the mighty dead had stepped there but because it was our native place
from which we had drawn our being. He went on countless journeys through
Australia, walked countless miles to see, to feel and to taste that place. He
is the historian of the Australian place as well as its people.
In his biographer Professor Brian Matthews Manning Clark: a life (2008)
is drawn a compelling portrait of the great historian, who attracted both
critics and acolytes alike in equal number.
Manning Clark is renowned for his factual errors
in his A History of Australia. It seems
Clark disliked breaking the flow of composition in order to check facts, and
his memory sometimes let him down. These errors were mercilessly denounced by Malcolm Ellis, an accomplished but cranky
historian of colonial NSW but others also followed. Professor Ross Fitzgerald wrote that Clark:
was never an
objectively inclined academic scholar. Thus his magnum opus, the six-volume A
History of Australia, had more in common with the vision of 19th-century
English writer Thomas Carlyle, whose three-volume History of the French
Revolution was inspired by a distinctly personal vision spelled out in an epic
narrative style.
Matthews argued in Manning Clark A Life that these factual errors in the end did not matter
very much to the overall narrative endeavour.
Clark’s most recent biographer,
Professor Mark McKenna also acknowledged in An
Eye for Eternity (2011) that Clark was a historian who placed narrative
ahead of facts. In “Being There. The strange
history of Manning Clark”, The Monthly, March 2007, McKenna wrote:
Clark warned historians not to read what others had to
say until they'd completed their early drafts, "and maybe not then".
The duty of the historian was to create history anew from primary sources; he
insisted that historians should never "start arguing with what others have
to say". But Clark went much further than merely shying away from
argument. In his histories, he could not even bring himself to discuss the
research and work of others. To do so would only obscure the individuality of the
historian's voice …that of the artist-hero who stands alone on the cliff and
gazes out to sea, seeking sublime inspiration.
‘It is not the “facts” of history that shape us, but
images of the past embodied in language.’ … Clark understood that the true
power of stories lay not in their fidelity to factual accuracy but in the
impression—emotional, intellectual and spiritual—that they left behind. Stories
that resonated, stories that demanded retelling and stories that carried
allegorical power were indeed the stories that shaped us.
The ANU Reporter, 12 June 1991 quoted
from his friend and colleague from his teaching days at ANU, Professor John
Moloney who said of Clark that:
In him
coursed the blood that made Australia – an Australia “he so passionately wanted
to get up and ‘have a go’ at being herself”.
Professor Manning Clark’s contribution and
legacy continues in the ways that history figures in the public sphere. History
is ultimately all about people, about individuals and how the great ideas
instruct the narrative of their lives.
