Clark's happiest memories of his youth were of the years 1922–1924, when his father was the vicar of Phillip Island, south-east of Melbourne, where he acquired the love of fishing and of cricket, which he retained for the rest of his life.

Here, as an introspective boy from a modest background, he suffered from ridicule and bullying, and acquired a lifelong dislike for the sons of the Melbourne upper class who had tormented him and others at this school.

[11] Through basically sympathetic towards de Tocqueville's liberalism, Clark wrote that his political vision for a just society was flawed by his ignorance of the misery of the masses and by his unwillingness to consider force to ensure justice.

[12] At Oxford in the late 1930s he shared the Left's horror of fascism – which he had seen first hand during a visit to Nazi Germany in 1938 – but was not attracted to the communism which was prevalent among undergraduates at the time.

In June 1940 he suddenly decided to return to Australia, abandoning his unfinished thesis, but was unable to get a teaching position at an Australian university due to the wartime decline in enrolments.

[17] However, Clark himself was critical of "dinkum" Australians, albeit from another direction as he maintained that values such as mateship were mere "comforters" that helped to make life in colonial Australia with its harsh environment more bearable, and failed to provide a means to fundamentally change society.

[17] A major problem for Australian historians in the 1940s was that most of the primary sources relating to the colonial period were held in archives in Britain, making research expensive and time-consuming.

[17] These volumes made an important contribution to the teaching of Australian history in schools and universities by placing a wide selection of primary sources, many never before published, in the hands of students.

When Paul Mortier reviewed the second volume of Select Documents in the Communist Party newspaper Tribune, he criticised Clark for his lack of Marxist understanding: "Professor Clark rejects class struggle as the key to historical development: he expressed grave doubts about whether there has been any real progress: and he has no good word for historians who pay tribute to the working people for their contributions to Australia's traditions," he wrote.

In 1954 he was one of a group of intellectuals who publicly criticised the position of the Menzies government on the war in French Indo-China, and as a result was attacked as communist fellow-travellers in the House of Representatives by the outspoken right-wing parliamentarian Bill Wentworth.

[28] As a result, he was placed under surveillance by Australia's domestic intelligence organisation, ASIO, who over the years compiled a large file of trivia and gossip about him, without ever discovering anything in his activities that posed a risk to "national security".

[31] During his time in London, the nature of the project radically changed as he recalled: "It was going to be very academic, very careful, very much a 'Yes' and 'No' performance, with genuflexions in the direction of Mr. 'Dry-as-Dust', and anxious looking over the shoulder at people I liked, hoping they were not as bored or lost as I was.

In his autobiographical memoir A Historian's Apprenticeship published after his death, Clark recalled that his models were Carlyle, Edward Gibbon and T. B. Macaulay – two conservatives and a Whig – and that he was inspired by the belief that "the story of Australia was a bible of wisdom both for those now living and, I hoped, for those to come after us".

[34] The dominant theme of the early volumes of Clark's history was the interplay between the harsh environment of the Australian continent and the European values of the people who discovered, explored and settled it in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[36] Clark's colorful writing style with its allusions to the Bible, apocalyptic imagery, and a focus on the psychological struggles within individuals was often criticised by historians, but made him popular with the public.

[32]His inattention to factual detail became notorious, and was noted even in the first volume, which drew a critical review from Malcolm Ellis titled "History without facts".

In contrast, many historians, including Max Crawford, Bede Nairn, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Allan W. Martin the official biographer of Robert Menzies, praised the book.

Most readers warmed to Clark's great gift for narrative prose and the depiction of individual character, and were not troubled by the comments of academic critics on his factual inaccuracies or their doubts about his historiographic theories.

The respected historian John La Nauze, author of a highly regarded biography of Alfred Deakin, wrote that the importance of Clark's work "lies not in the apocalyptic vision of our history... which I do not understand, and which I am sure I would disagree with if I did," but in "the particular flashes of interpretation" which gave "a new appearance to familiar features".

While Waten wanted him to admire the achievements of the Soviet state, Clark was more interested in attending the Bolshoi Ballet, the Dostoyevsky Museum and the St Sergius Monastery at Zagorsk.

Nevertheless, he was impressed by the material progress of the country after the devastation of World War II and by the limited political liberalisation which was taking place under Nikita Khrushchev.

[48] On his return he wrote a series of articles for the liberal news-magazine Nation, which were later published in booklet form as Meeting Soviet Man (Angus and Robertson 1960).

Stephen Holt wrote in his study A Short History of Manning Clark: "Though never belonging to a party, he was intensely political, embodying the conflicting loyalties of inter-war Australia...

Volume II (launched in 1968) took the story to the 1830s, and dwelt on the conflicts between the colonial governors and their landowning allies with the emerging first generation of native-born white Australians, many of them the children of convicts.

Clark campaigned for Whitlam in the 1972 and 1974 elections, and was outraged by his dismissal by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, in 1975, after which he wrote an article for Meanjin called "Are we a nation of bastards?".

But the book showed both its age and its haste of preparation, and was savaged by Colin Roderick, the leading authority on Lawson, as "a tangled thicket of factual errors, speculation and ideological interpretation".

Quadrant, for example, asked five of Australia's leading historians to review it, and received five more of less identical replies: 'It's a terrible book, but you can't expect me to say that in print".

While the Courier-Mail devoted much space to people challenging its assertions, the Press Council believes it should have retracted the allegations about which Prof Clark's supporters complained".

Manning Clark House "provides opportunities for the whole community to debate and discuss contemporary issues and ideas, through a program of conferences, seminars, forums, publishing, and arts and cultural events".

The poster featured Clark, holding a set of his History, in a chorus line of significant Australian characters, flanked by Ned Kelly and Nellie Melba.