Epiphany
It was in Brisbane that Clark converted to Roman Catholicism which, he insisted, suited his social and moral outlook. Taking that leap meant that he dropped his Fabian beliefs, replacing them with Catholic social teaching.
Critics noted that while Clark declared that his research was untainted, they suspected that he subordinated his thinking to the tenets of the Church. A keen observer of Clark's work, Heinz Arndt (1979: 123) noted that Clark's writings after his conversion, ‘explicitly or implicitly', supported the teachings of the Catholic Church. One graphic example of this was when Clark served on the Papal Commission on Population, the Family and Birth Control. On that panel, he strongly upheld the Church's opposition to birth control outlined in the 1968 Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae released by Pope Paul VI. The appointment to the Papal Commission was costly to Clark's academic reputation with critics drawing an association between his views on population and his allegiance to the Church. For his part, Clark held that his views on population growth were based on economic reasoning and not religious belief.In post-war Australia, Clark had already caused controversy by advocating aggressive land settlement and denounced the protectionism afforded to manufacturing at the expense of the primary industries. Australia’s food production was faltering because labour was being spirited away to facilitate an obsession of politicians to have industrialisation (Clark 1952: 68-69). In what was his last letter to Keynes, Clark reported how his relationship with Australian politicians and indeed economists had soured:
As a prophet of greatly improved terms of trade for primary produce I ought to be very popular in Australia, but I am not. Everybody has his mindset on making Australia a manufacturing country. Not many people have realised that if we exclude imports of manufactures, we shall lose our ability to export primary produce (Clark to Keynes, 18 February 1946, RESP, LSE).
When his advice about decentralising economic activity and land settlement was squarely rejected by the Queensland government, Clark resigned from his executive post. For a few months, he dabbled in economic journalism and opened Australia’s first business forecasting agency. Years earlier Harrod had asked Clark whether he ever considered returning to England (Harrod to Clark, 3 November 1944, RESP, LSE). He replied that he would willingly come back to England, ‘a country for which I have great affection, but would I fit into it?’, before adding that he had always felt ‘a bit of a misfit’ at Cambridge (Clark to Harrod, 5 May 1945, RESP, LSE). Clark’s reference to ‘fitting in’ was reflective of the fact that he had undergone a huge change in ideological outlook. Certainly, to his old colleagues at Cambridge, Oxford and the Labour movement he was manifestly not the same man that had gone out to Australia in 1937. For his part, Clark always maintained that he had not changed his mind; it was the world that had moved on. Either way, it was as an Oxford economist that British audiences would soon see this new Colin Clark.
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