Anna Clark took seven years to write her latest book, Making Australian History, but it seems a wonder it didn’t take her twice as long. During her many years of research, the 43-year-old celebrated author and historian wasn’t at all sure what her opening chapter ought to be.
Perhaps that’s not surprising when you consider the almost limitless scope of the ambitious challenge she set herself: to write what is, effectively, a history of Australian history.
A chronological approach common to so much academic and popular history wasn’t going to cut it. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience – those thousands of generations, those 60-plus millennia (and counting) of human experiences that span time, place and cosmology in a way that challenges non-Indigenous sensibility and intellect – is, of course, omnipresent.
But how to explain that in any “traditional” chronological history that aimed to examine what we call “Australian history”, with all its vagaries and ongoing cultural skirmishes, political captivations, blind spots and deliberate omissions?
“For example, the term ‘Deep Time’ – history that’s tens of thousands of years old – has only come into use relatively recently,” Clark ponders in her early pages. “Does that mean it goes at the beginning or the end of a history of Australian History?”
Clark, whose previous work has won major history awards and who holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship at the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS, Sydney, says she “just didn’t know how to do it”.
“And then I thought, ‘What if I did chapter 1 as a history of chapter ones which shows how the idea of chapter ones change over time?’” she says.
This, in turn, helped her to devise a structure whereby each chapter – among them “Nation”, “Memory”, “Contact”, “Colour”, “Family” (about which, more, shortly) and “Gender” – is propelled by the interrogation of a text or image.
So, for example, “Chapter 0, Making histories” contemplates the Dyarubbin (Aboriginal) rock engraving Woman in a crinoline dress, while “Chapter 1, Beginnings” launches off from The History of New Holland, From Its First Discovery in 1616 to the Present Time – published in London in the pre-invasion year, 1787.
Chapter 1 begins: “How’s this for a beginning?”
Not bad, you’d have to say, given the inherent provocation of The History of New Holland, this country’s first “history”, published before the cataclysmic clash of civilisations that gathered pace with the First Fleet’s arrival a year later.
It works. Clark is a wonderful historian, one of her generation’s best. As a writer she is also an admirable stylist. Possessed of a novelist’s eye for detail, her tone is distinctively, laconically, Australian, her elegant prose marked by clarity and an absence of old-school academic pomposity and verbosity.
This won’t surprise any who know of Clark’s commitment to democratising what she does in the name of “public history” and of her other work including Private Lives, Public History and her wonderful story of Australian fishing, The Catch.
Clark will tell you that she is an obsessive “fisho” and is most comfortable about – or under – the sea.
Once she’d nailed the structure of Making Australian History, Clark spent precious, memorable months writing at a secluded south coast New South Wales family property, Ness, near Wapengo. Her family lived there during her long service leave in 2019, then through the Covid lockdown in 2020.
“I wrote according to the tides so that I could go fishing. And I thought about place a lot. And particularly, you know, Country. And changing conceptions of Country,” she says.
“I was really struck by living in the bush for that long and how much it affected how I thought about the past. You know, walking down to the beach you would be walking through middens every day – so someone had obviously been there thinking about this place and eating from it and even making histories on it for a really long time – several thousand generations.
“And it definitely made me think about the timelines and that question that I brought up earlier – you know, when does Australian history begin? And if it begins in deep time, how do we register those histories of Australia from back then?”
Making Australian History is replete with that pervasive tension between the stories of the past that early colonial historians – and many of the 20th century – chose to record as having happened on the continent and those they thought a “proud” new nation shouldn’t remind itself of.
The violence of Indigenous dispossession – the land grabs, massacres and attempted genocide – and the unsavoury convict experience wouldn’t do. And federation in 1901, she says, did not feel like a relatable human experience. Gallipoli filled the breach.
“They [early 20th-century historians] were really looking for an origin story … They had a nation and it clearly had a history but it wasn’t really up to scratch … with the convict legend and frontier violence. Those two profound origin stories weren’t the uplifting national narratives that a proud Australia should have,” Clark says.
“It [Anzac] shows that even though that history is confected and highly curated, obviously for it to have that endurance it does hang on many threads of genuine connectedness to many people, as opposed to the federation narrative, for example, which is not really about the people.”
Another tension Clark had to wrestle was how her history of Australian history would deal with the work of Manning Clark, this country’s pre-eminent 20th-century historian – and her paternal grandfather. It was not an easy emotional hurdle for Clark who, as an undergraduate Arts student, avoided doing history until a timetable clash made it unavoidable.
How did she reckon with the titanic legacy of Manning when she began, finally, studying – and loving – Australian history?
“I pretended I wasn’t connected to him. I just sort of didn’t talk about him. Ever. I’ve tried to totally separate my professional life from my family life and he died when I was 12 so to me he really was just my granddad … it was almost like I had just managed to separate it somehow,” she says.
“And even when I conceived of this project – and I can’t believe I’m saying this now – I sort of didn’t really think that I would have to mention him, or that if I did, that I would have to mention him in a particular way.”
It is a mark of Clark’s modesty – well known to friends and colleagues – that she was concerned detailing her grandfather’s legacy (on her and the nation) might be misinterpreted as “self-indulgent”.
Ultimately, she dealt squarely with Manning Clark’s contribution to the nation’s understanding of itself throughout the book – not least in a chapter on family histories.
She says, “I don’t have any misgivings about my love for him. You know, I really did love him very much. But in order just to feel like I was making my own mark, I suppose, I didn’t always want to be known as Manning’s granddaughter.”
Making Australian History by Anna Clark is out now through Vintage Australia
