Manning Clark House is a national scholarly and cultural organisation based in the former home of historian Manning Clark and his wife Dymphna, in Canberra.
In the eyrie of the Robin Boyd-designed house in Tasmania Circle, Forrest, Manning Clark wrote his monumental six-volume A History of Australia, while Dymphna managed the day-to-day care of their house, garden and children. After her husband’s death in 1991, Dymphna resumed her career as a linguist and translator that she had set aside when she married Clark in England in 1939, when he was studying at Oxford.
In one of the great Australian stories of late-life intellectual flowering, Dymphna published, in 1994, an exhaustively researched translation into English of The New Holland Journal 1833–34, by the Austrian diplomat and botanist Baron Charles von Hugel.
Dymphna was a woman with an uncommon gift for the common touch. In retrospect she reminds me of no-one more than of my own grandmother, to whom she bore an uncanny physical resemblance; yet they were from vastly different worlds. My grandmother was a poorly educated, semi-literate farmer’s wife whose world was restricted mostly to the few hundred acres that she and my grandfather farmed; Dymphna completed honours at Melbourne University, where her father, Augustin Lodewyckx, was head of Germanic languages. She was fluent in eight languages and could ‘get by’ in another four.
One thing they shared, however—in addition to their physical resemblance—was a love of good, simple, healthy, tasty food; and, even more than that, the sharing of it with others—in my grandmother’s case mostly family, but in Dymphna’s case a wide circle of friends and colleagues extending well beyond the family to include such influential Australians as Patrick White, Sidney Nolan, David Campbell and Barry Humphries.
The spirit in which Dymphna delivered food to the Clark table was perpetuated last year through a series of 11 dinners at Manning Clark House, Continuing the Great Conversations, whose featured speakers included Justice Michael Kirby, Bishop Pat Power, Janet Holmes a Court, Peter Sculthorpe and Helen Garner. Among the many wholesome and hearty recipes in Food for Thought are some from those dinners, which will continue this year in Canberra, as well as in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Adelaide.
For those who, like me, were lucky enough to share a meal at Dymphna’s table, Food for Thought at Manning Clark House will evoke special memories of a special woman and a special time. For those