The newest hall in the Australian National University (ANU) Kambri Precinct will be named after Australian historian and Australian of the Year, Manning Clark.
The Manning Clark Hall was officially opened by ANU Chancellor, Gareth Evans with the 2019 Manning Clark Lecture delivered by David Thodey.
Professor Evans said Manning Clark remained Australia’s best known and loved historian.
“It is a great pleasure and privilege to take this opportunity on behalf of the university to announce we will further recognise Manning Clark’s legacy at ANU,” Professor Evans said.
“Manning Clark’s enormous contribution to the ANU, as a teacher, a researcher and writer, a contributor to the national public policy debate on multiple issues, and simply as a great, iconic Australian, was for a long time given very visible bricks-and-mortar recognition on the ANU Campus in the form of the Manning Clark Centre.”
However, the complex of six big lecture theatres named after him in Union Court was now no more.
“The Manning Clark Centre, with its rather cavernous teaching spaces, was not as well suited to modern practice as it used to be, and the old Union Court is now razed to the ground and transformed into the vital new beating heart of the university we see around us as the Kambri Precinct,” Professor Evans said.
“So we put on our thinking caps with the Clark family and decided together that the best way we could possibly think of to continue to physically honour Manning Clark’s legacy was to name after him this heart-within-the-heart of Kambri.”
He said the major events space within the cultural centre, with its retractable tiered seating, enabled it to double not only as a theatre for big public lectures and major concerts, but also as a dining hall for the biggest celebratory events.
“Above all, it is the new home of the magnificent Sidney Nolan mural, Eureka Stockade, donated to the ANU by the Reserve Bank of Australia and commemorating that seminal event in Australian history about which Manning himself wrote so movingly and inspiringly,” Professor Evans said.
