Manning Clark > Quotes

“A turbulent emptiness seized the people as they moved into a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment era. No one any longer knew the direction of the river of life. No one had anything to say.”
― Manning Clark, Manning Clark's History of Australia

“Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New Britannia, the Millennial Eden, or the new demesne for Mammon to infest.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, VI: 'The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green', 1916–1935

“The inhospitable environment and the past had predisposed the minds of its European inhabitants to hand over the government of their country to men who were wary of visionaries and all those who held out a promise of better things for mankind. Australians seemed chained for decades to come to the role of being a New Britannia in another world. The young Henry Lawson and all the other prophets of Utopia were doomed to a bitter disenchantment.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, V: The People Make Laws, 1888–1915

“By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch had written the very first page in the history of European civilization in Australia by stating that there was no good to be done there. William Dampier popularized this idea amongst the English reading public half a century later.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, I: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie

“Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations.”
― Manning Clark, A History of Australia, I: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie