The Punch and Sparkle of Peter Ryan

One of the more revealing public issue spats of recent decades was Peter Ryan’s attack in Quadrant in 1993 on the quality of Manning Clark’s six-volume History of Australia. Ryan’s view was not so different from what many people, including me, thought of the great opus if they actually read it, but like some financial institutions, Clark had seemed “too big to fail”.

This review appears in the latest Quadrant.
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His “magisterial” work had attained cult status, with the boldness and vision of the enterprise and Clark’s self-promoting publicity for it. The New Left, with childhood memories of cowboys and Indians and the presence of Watergate and Vietnam, seized on it as the long-awaited book that would rip away the smug surface of imperialism; it would reveal brutal colonial officials whipping convicts and red-coated troops and police helping upper-class squatters to drive Aborigines from their land and kill them.

The ridiculous legend…