Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

A tidy little earner

Peter Ryan meets his match
by
January–February 2022, no. 439

History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark controversy by Doug Munro

ANU Press, $55 pb, 229 pp

A tidy little earner

Peter Ryan meets his match
by
January–February 2022, no. 439

It was one of the most notorious episodes in the annals of Australian publishing. In September 1993, writing in Quadrant, Peter Ryan, the former director of Melbourne University Press (1962–87), publicly disowned Manning Clark’s six-volume A History of Australia. Clark had been dead for barely sixteen months. For scandalous copy and gossip-laden controversy, there was nothing to equal it, particularly when Ryan’s bombshell was dropped into a culture that was already polarised after more than a decade of the History Wars.

One month before Ryan’s blistering attack, Quadrant, edited by Robert Manne, ran Geoffrey Blainey’s essay ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of our History’, in which the wily historian identified his former teacher Manning Clark as one of the chief architects of what Blainey labelled the ‘Black Armband’ view of Australian history. Now, in his essay and others that followed, Ryan chimed in with more vindictive intent, describing Clark’s work as ‘gooey, subjective pap ... a vast cauldron of very thin verbal soup’. He mocked Clark’s literary style as ‘bad to the point of embarrassment’, and cast his entire multi-volume history as little more than ‘a construct spun from fairy floss ... a fraud’. And this from a publisher who, when Clark was alive, had lavished him with nothing but fawning, unadulterated praise. Ryan had inherited Clark’s project, then shepherded and cajoled him to complete each successive volume, from Volume Two in 1968 through to the publication of Volume Six in 1987.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Comment (1)

  • Thanks to Mark for a characteristically great review of Munro's tome. After having defended Manning and his work (and despite his 'human, all too human' flaws) when Ryan published his attack in Quadrant so many, now, years ago, McKenna's review and references to the book merely reconfirm for me that Ryan was basically a coward when it came to the controversary further to him not having told Clark what he really thought to his face! But then, as with so many middle-aged men who crave admiration from their peers (and in Ryan's case, the right) further to their own T.S. Eliot 'hollowness', Ryan didn't have the guts to do that further to AHOA being a nice little earner for MUP. Suffice to say that, AHOA (and the rest of Clark’s great and arguably still unappreciated legacy – and this especially from the aspect of its mythopoetic greatness) will live on – even if it is in some respects currently in hibernation further to the newer anti-narrative and more partisan history interest emphasis in universities nowadays - and this long after Ryan has sunk into the dirt in his sub-quisling capacity as, in Paul Keating's phrase, “just a wayfarer on history's long road”.
    Posted by Marcus Bede Adamson
    07 August 2022

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.