An Australian looks back

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 26

An Australian looks back

A History of Australia, Volume VI: The Old Dead Tree and the Young Green Tree, 1916-1935. By C. M. H. Clark. Melbourne University Press, 1987. 522 pp. Illustrations. (Reviewed by Ruth Zanker) Manning Clark writes history for those of us who like it with a dash of prophetic vision rather than tables of statistics. The publication of the final volume of his “History of Australia" in paperback reflects the popular appeal such a history is guaranteed in the bicentennial ' year of Australia’s settlement as a penal, colony. The subtitle is a quotation from a poem by Henry Lawson, “A song of a Republic,” which goes: Sons of the South, make choice between, & (Sons of the South, choose true) The Land of Mom and the Land of

’en, The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green, The land that belongs to the lord and Queen, And the land that belongs to you. It honestly declares Clark’s selfconfessed bias in Australian historiography. His attempt, in this volume, to impose order on the chaos of the forces that contributed to an Australian national identity can be of intense interest to New Zealanders. After all, the First World War and the Depression shaped this country, too. The book is, above all, an engrossing read about a passionate people. And Manning Clark,Mhe selfstyled grand old man of Aussie history, is a passionate writer.