The Australian National University (ANU) will name its newest hall at the Kambri precinct after Australian historian Manning Clark.
The Manning Clark Hall will be officially opened tonight by ANU Chancellor Professor Gareth Evans AC QC at the 2019 Manning Clark Lecture, will be delivered by David Thodey AO.
Professor Evans said Manning Clark remains 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, the complex of six big lecture theatres named after him in Union Court.
But now the Manning Clark Centre is no more, with its rather cavernous teaching spaces not as well suited to modern practice as they used to be, and with the old Union Court now razed to the ground and transformed into the vital new beating heart of the university we see around us as the Kambri Precinct.
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.
This is a magnificent major events space within the Cultural Centre, with its retractable tiered seating enabling it to double not only as a theatre for big public lectures like this and major concerts, but also as a dining hall for our biggest celebratory events; and above all this 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.
The 2019 Manning Clark Lecture by David Thodey AO will be held from 6:30pm at the Manning Clark Hall in Kambri at ANU.
