To Moore Theological College, Newtown

by Professor Manning Clark.

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Mister Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, it’s always difficult to know where to begin and always very difficult to know what one ought to say or what one is expected to say, and I’m going to begin by quoting to you two remarks by Anna Karenin, from Tolstoy’s work ANNA KARENIN. (If you haven’t read ANNA KARENIN, you should certainly do so before you die ‘cause everything you can possibly say about being alive is in Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENIN.)

The first remark is by Anna at the end of the work when she has been punished or has suffered for, presumably Tolstoy believed were her transgressions against the laws of God and the laws of Man, and she meets Kitty. Kitty’s young and setting out in life. Anna makes to her the most wonderful remark : she hoped that she wouldn’t have to live through what she had lived through, and may God preserve her from that. May God preserve her from that. That’s a remark I feel like uttering after being so foolish as to write six volumes on the history of Australia. May God preserve anyone else for what you’ll have to suffer in (word indecipherable) Australia if you’re so foolish to do that.

The second remark though will take me to what I want to say to you this afternoon. It’s a remark early in the novel. It’s again by Anna. And she’s seated at a party in St Petersburg. Veronsky is anxious to hear what Anna would think about love. Anna says, “if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there is many kinds of love as there are hearts”. There is many kinds of love as there are hearts. Now I’m saying that because I’m going to present what I want to present to you this afternoon in the form of a story, and I do this because I believe the only kind of history I can write and teach is history as a story.

I will tell it to you as a story. I’m deeply aware and very conscious of the warning given in the Book of Job, that it’s great arrogance to assume one man’s wisdom is of use to anyone except himself. I’m going to present it as a story. I have in mind that all great stories do three things. I think one of the greatest stories is the story of Noah. If you just take that for a moment, Noah and the ark, it’s a great story, partly for three reasons, because Noah seems to have lost contact with reality. The story begins with the imagination that men’s hearts were evil from the start. Now you can agree or disagree with that, it’s a point of view about the human situation. Secondly like all great stories, it creates human characters. Do you remember…it does it very quickly. (Not like people writing PhDs take four hundred pages to tell you [words indecipherable].) It actually starts…it says about Noah and it creates him in just half a sentence. Remember Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. What a wonderful [words indecipherable] he would have made. Noah…he’s the sort of person who gets on with people. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. He also perceives [word indecipherable] by creating scenes. You tell the truth about the human situation by creating a scene. Do you remember that after Noah has gone through the great ordeal of being in the ark for forty days and forty nights, or whatever it was, during all the rain. As usual after a great ordeal, Noah needs relaxation, and Noah’s relaxation is to drink of the fruit of the vine, and he became very drunken, and he lay in his tent. And he had no clothes on. It’s a marvellous theme, it’s caught the imagination of every great artist from the Renaissance to the present day. In one version we have of that of Noah lying naked in his tent. Of course in the Book of Genesis his sons look at him, but in one version of the story one of the sons laughed at him. That I think is a particularly good twist to the story of Noah and the ark. So when you tell a story, if you’ve got something to say, you create characters and you create scenes.

Well I’m going to tell you a story this afternoon which I hope will answer the question you have in mind. It may not, of course. I’m going to begin on the seventh of September 1975. It’s a story about myself…I hope you don’t mind. In 1975 Mr Whitlam’s government decided to create a Chair in Australian Studies in the United States of America, and before Mr Whitlam was defeated in December of 1975 in the election, he had asked me to go to the United States and negotiate about this Chair. I found myself as a clergyman’s son with, metaphorically, a million dollars in my pocket and being feted and entertained by various American universities. Being a clergyman’s son I was wonderful at concealing the truth, and I didn’t tell them Mr Whitlam’s government had already decided that the Chair was going to be established at Harvard. I also didn’t tell them that at Harvard, they were most anxious to do anything I asked, so I asked them to take me to New Bedford. I wanted to see the seamen’s bethel, or the [word indecipherable] chapel at New Bedford. I’d seen it before in 1963, and the reason I wanted to see it was the most marvellous plaque just inside the chapel in honour of Herman Melville, the author of MOBY DICK. Now I think it sums up everything that could be said of our own pilgrimage in trying to find out the truth about life. The plaque erected in recognition of Herman Melville, seaman extraordinary, whose voyages lured him across the stormiest of all seas within the heart of man, where he discerned the primordial beauty and the horror of this world, and the danger [words indecipherable] .

Well now I was interested to see it, and I saw it again. I was also interested to go on from there, if I could persuade them to allow me to do it, to go to Jerusalem because I was interested in many things there, but especially in the remark by Herman Melville. (He also went on a great journey to Jerusalem.) This remark is related to the remark in honour of him at the seamen’s chapel in New Bedford. Melville, on seeing Jerusalem and the surrounding country, noted in his journal a simple remark, that ghastly countries produce ghastly theologies. Ghastly countries produce ghastly theologies. Now I was interested in that because of course as soon as you go from Jerusalem to Jericho, as I did, you will see the whole point about Christ asked by the Devil to turn those stones into bread. We know about that.

I was interested to see that, but I was specially interested in [words indecipherable] and possibly will be for a long time, that in my own country, in Australia, which had the same harsh, inhospitable environment as the territory around Jerusalem, why it was we had produced no theology in Australia. Why it was that in Australia, unlike every other country I’ve ever been to (I’ve never been to South America), why in Australia no-one had reproduced the face of the mother of God as an Australian face. Why it was that in my own country no-one had produced the image of Christ as an Australian face. I had been around south-east Asia and everywhere I went, the image of the Buddha was the image reproduced in the image of the people so that the Buddha in Burma is quite different from the Buddha in Malaysia and, later on in life, I found the Buddha in China.

Not only no reproduction of Christ with an Australian face, but why there were no legends or stories of visits to Australia from any member of the Holy Family. Do you remember the Russian remark, bearing the Cross in savage dress [words indecipherable] and holy Russia came and through our land went wandering. Here in Australia there is no record that any [word indecipherable] saints of the Church had been, not even a legend. Now another reason of course for why I was there, that I was always interested in the metaphorical side of the remark which Christ made to Peter at or near Calpurnium. When they were having trouble catching fish (and as I’m a life-long fisherman I’ve often had trouble catching fish), made the marvellous remark, “launch out into the deep”, Launch out into the deep. I was interested in that remark, I wanted to see where it had been made ‘cause it seemed to me (and I hope you don’t think I’m having a go at you, I’m not, I’m talking to myself as much as anyone) that’s the one thing we don’t dare to do, launch out into the deep and let down the nets.

Well I want to see also, of course, the country where all the great remarks had been made.

I hope if you hold different religious beliefs from the ones I hold, that you won’t be upset if I tell you that I was terribly disappointed with the [word indecipherable] of Gallilee. It always seemed to me the most marvellous place, I wondered since I was a child, what in the name of fortune happened there. I was terribly sorry to see it was terribly run-down place, was broken-down stone cottages and so on, the place where allegedly the first miracle was committed. I want to see Magda because that’s the place name from which the word Mary Magdalene comes. I want to see Calpurnium. I want to see the Sea of Gallilee, and I hoped that there’s a wrong time of the year to see the lilies of the field.

But, above all, I wanted to make the journey from the northern end of the Sea of Gallilee (if you can place it in your mind’s eye) to Jerusalem.

I was anxious to work out something that puzzled me for a long time, and I’m going to try to explain this afternoon why, which I think is relevant to what you’re interested in. Because it seemed to me always that in that trip from Gallilee to Jerusalem, the last trip, that something happened, and I was intrigued to find out what. (Not, of course, one ever finds out.) Now let me explain why I was so interested in that. The generation to which I belonged was a generation which was given things with authority. When I was young I met groups of people who had something to say. I met groups of people who believed themselves to be correct. (I’m saying “correct” slightly ironically, for I don’t believe you can be correct about anything.) There were people who were profoundly convinced they were correct, they knew all the answers to life. There were, for example, the Catholics, the Communists , the psychologists. There were many others. There were people who were artists and painters and so on. When I was young there were a great number of spiritual bullies who were always most anxious to tell us where we were wrong.

Now it seems to me (and you may well disagree with me) we now live in a time, in our .own country, where like the United States of America, Germany , Russia, so on, no-one [words indecipherable) has anything to say . No-one is speaking with authority. And there’s a simple reason for this. Now, unlike the time when I was young, we are all citizens of the kingdom of nothingness. We all belong in the kingdom of nothingness. And we’re trying to make our own separate solutions as to how we’re going to endure the kingdom of nothingness, what we’re going to do. What has happened? Well you will know all about this, probably much better than I do. All I can say, is now, we live in an era which is characterized by doubt about everything. We live in an era which is characterized by the slogan that everything is allowable. (Not quite everything, because every now and then you get surprises, don’t you? Someone’s told, you really shouldn’t do that.)

We began, when I was young (and earlier), with a faith. The faith, either in Judaic-Christian world, or in the world of the Enlightenment . Let’s say we had two possibilities, either some branch of the Judaic-Christian view of the world or secular Humanism as represented by the Enlightenment. Now all the dreams, all the visions which were brought to Australia at time when Australia was occupied by human beings, at the time when the Aborigines came here, to the present day, all those dreams have been stripped away. (I’m not sure whether you can say that about the Aboriginal time of the Dreaming, but certainly all the great dreams of the Europeans and all their myths, have seem to have been destroyed.) The myth, or the great dream of that marvellous maniac Decyros, who’d wanted Australia to be a land dedicated to the Holy Spirit. All the great dreams of the Dutch and English Protestants who saw Australia as a country with her souls for Christ , and also a source of uncommonly large profit. (It’s a wonderful expression, isn’t it…’uncommonly large profit’?)

All the great dreams of the Enlightenment, that Australia would be like other countries in the New World, would be a case where at long last, there would be human harmony. Where human beings would know happiness without any sense of guilt. Where they would know brotherhood (and of course if we live in the 1980’s, we’d have to add, wouldn’t we, “sisterhood”?). What remains now in 1987, or seems to remain if one can judge by looking around Australia, is that we have become a place for the pursuit of uncommonly large profit .

We’ve lost our vision of Eden, either in the life of the world to come or in the here and now. What has happened is that we’ve become what the [word indecipherable] O’Dowd called, a new domain for Mammon to invest. What we have now is what I call (and I hope not harshly) a greed and titillation culture. All human beings (and I’m not sure if I can say this about Aboriginals), but all other human beings in Australia seem to have been robbed of their great expectations. The great expectation of perfectibility , either in Heaven or on Earth. We no longer see, have a vision, of a new Heaven or a new Earth. Man has killed God, Man has killed the idea of human perfectibility.

 It’s not surprising that at the end of the First World War, the editor of a Socialist newspaper in Melbourne, Robert Ross, put the question to God, “Father, what did you do in the Great War?”.