I heard Manning Clark lecture just once. It was in 1981. He was addressing a hall packed with school students who were attending a history camp at the Australian National University. That night, Clark demonstrated two qualities which distinguish most good lecturers: he played a character who was an enlarged version of himself, and he convinced the gathering that his topic was central to any understanding of the human condition. He told his young audience that they were faced with a great choice. With their help, Australia might one day become millennial Eden – a land where men and women were blessed with riches of the body and of the spirit. But if they were neglectful, he warned, their country would remain oppressed by a great dullness: Australia would continue to languish as a Kingdom of Nothingness. (This speech, it should be noted, was delivered in the middle of that bitter decade which followed the dismissal.)