Mate, I wish we’d spoken before you made an ass of yourself again in your memoirs over the Manning Clark business. We’ve had our differences over the years but I hate to see you doing this to yourself as you sail off into retirement.

Given the chance, I reckon I could have persuaded you the whole thing – the secret Order of Lenin that never was and the deep mission for the Soviets you never proved – was a cluster, a mighty cluster, and maybe 20 years later was the time to apologise to the old historian’s memory.

Instead you’ve doubled down. It’s very you, but not a great move.

You write: “Many falsehoods have been published about what the Courier-Mail actually printed that day. We did not allege that Clark was a spy … ”

But, Chris, you did.

On 24 August 1996 you published in the Courier-Mail one of the greatest axe-jobs in the history of Australian journalism. Spread over five pages of the Saturday paper were claims that Clark was secretly rewarded with the Order of Lenin for his work as a Soviet agent of influence or, indeed, a spy.

Remember me ringing you that morning? At first you stoutly maintained that the paper said nothing about spying. But I had a copy in front of me with a former KGB agent, Mikhail Lyubimov, quoted saying: “If it is kept secret, then it’s got nothing to do with agent of influence; it’s got to do with a spy.”

That, you explained, only appeared in the first edition. “I pulled it because I wanted to be careful about not making an allegation of spying.”

“Why weren’t you careful before the first edition,” I asked.

“I was.”

I had, by that time, already rung Les Murray, the only living witness to Clark sporting the Order of Lenin. The poet was surprised, even appalled, to hear his sighting was the paper’s proof that Clark was on a mission for the Soviets.

“I wouldn’t want to go right out on a swaying plank and destroy a man’s reputation for something I’d seen casually at a dinner party,” he told me. He added that to base allegations of communism and spying on what he’d said was “dirty pool”.

For 25 years Murray had been telling a great yarn: one night in the 1970s he turned up at the poet David Campbell’s house to find Clark sitting there with a medal on his lapel. “A biggish coin with a red and yellow ribbon and Lenin looking into the future. It looked like the Order of Lenin.”

I asked the poet: “Are you a scholar of Soviet medals?”

“Not really. I went and had a look in a book years later.”

“When you were talking to the Courier-Mail, did they show you a book of Soviet medals and get you to identify it?”

“No.”

“Well, did Manning tell you he’d been awarded the Order of Lenin?”

“That’s the part I’ve been racking my brains to recall. I won’t say he did say it. But he did say it was the real thing.” Murray added, “It could have been puckish.”

“A joke?”

“Yes. Puckish. We all get puckish from time to time.”



I’m right, aren’t I, Chris, that the only other “evidence” you had for the existence of the medal was the cold war warrior Peter Kelly’s memory of hearing something along those lines from the late historian Geoffrey Fairbairn.

Fairbairn taught under Clark in the history department at the Australian National University. His widow, Anne, told me she’d never heard her husband say anything about Clark having a Soviet medal.

“If Geoffrey had thought this story was true he would have walked out of the department.”

And, Chris, what’s this you say in the memoirs about Clark’s widow referring, the night before publication of the big spread, “to an ‘Order of Lenin’ Manning had been awarded”? How does that square with what you quote her saying in the paper at the time: “It couldn’t possibly be the Order of Lenin. There would have been a lot of hoo-ha.”

Great woman, Dymphna Clark.

When the Soviet archives were finally opened up, you sent researchers in to scour the joint for any evidence that Clark has been awarded, along with about 400,000 others, the Order of Lenin. And you found? Nothing.

He had, as the Clark family told you at the time, a commemorative medallion awarded when he turned up at a historian’s conference in Moscow in the centenary year of Lenin’s birth.

Chris, you despised Clark’s lefty views, his spiritual take on Australia’s history, his sentimental – and dashed – hopes for the Russian revolution and, perhaps above all, his beatification by the Labor party. But it never added up to proof that Clark was on the job for the Soviets.

I remember asking you all those years ago how Clark advanced the Soviet cause in his six-volume history of Australia and you said: “Words like ‘bourgeois’ are classic Marxist words and they’re all through the histories.”

In the memoirs you’re still asking questions as if it’s someone else’s responsibility to prove your story. That’s not the way it works. You’ve had 20 years and you’re only left with suspicion.

Chris, you went on to have a remarkable career. Somehow this spectacular snafu didn’t hold you back. You’re a genius of sorts: a great newspaper man who ran, at the same time, a political killing machine. You excelled at both.

But on Manning Clark? If we’d had a chance to sit quietly and talk this over I would have whispered in your ear Kerry Packer’s famous report from the afterlife: “There’s fucking nothing there.”

All the best for the years ahead,

David Marr