Manning Clark had a long association with the Library and much of his research for
A History of Australia was carried out in the Library. In the final volume he wrote, ‘The Petherick Room, the Manuscripts Room, and the Newspaper Room are present in every page of this volume, just as they are always present in my heart’. In 1989 he donated the first instalment of his papers under the Taxation Incentives for the Arts Scheme. Further papers were transferred in 1990–91. He bequeathed his remaining papers to the Library and they were received in 1994–95.
The photographs of Manning Clark and his family were lent for copying by Dymphna Clark in 1995. The papers of Dymphna Clark were donated by her son Sebastian Clark in 2003.
This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia’s earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city ‘built on water’. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney’s provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies,