Barrie Macdonald graduated from Victoria University of Wellington in 1967 and completed his PhD in 1971 at the Australian National University. Cinderellas of the the Empire was written at Massey University, New Zealand, where the author is Senior Lecturer in History, and at the Australian National University where he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Pacific and South East Asian History.

AUSTRALIA IN PEACE AND WAR is the first work to trace the development of Australia's external relations from their colonial origins to the present. It shows how successive Australian governments have seen the world, what their attitudes have been, their actions and (much more often) their reactions. This important and controversial book details the successes and failures of Australian foreign policy over two centuries.

Irish-born John Hubert Plunkett, descendant of an ancient family and a Trinity College-trained lawyer, came to New South Wales in 1832 to take up the position of Solicitor-General. A quiet, cultivated man, and a Roman Catholic, he was an incongruous figure in the hurly-burly of colonial life. He was an idealist, a man of determination and integrity, a liberal before his time.

This book gathers together for the first time in one place annotated descriptions of manuscripts held in Great Britain and Ireland relating to Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. The geographic range of the manuscripts extends from Western Australia to the Galapagos and Juan Fernandez, and a curve embracing the Marianas and the Hawaiian Islands to the Antarctic. In time, the work spans from the earliest Spanish voyages to the Pacific to the 1960s.

During 1968 a massive reshuffling of electoral boundaries took place, the first for thirteen years. The redistribution reflects the changes in population that have occurred in those years: in the New Parliament to be elected in 1969 New South Wales has one seat less and South Australia and Victoria each one more; new seats have been created and old ones abolished; only five constituencies remain unchanged.

North Queensland has long been a frontier province of Aboriginal Australia. Well before Europeans penetrated to the south-west Pacific, the Torres Strait Islanders had regular and extensive contact with Aboriginal groups in Cape York Peninsula and the Dutch had visited the coast at intervals since 1606. Not till the coming of the white settler in the mid nineteenth century, however, did {u2018}invasion{u2019} begin. When it did, the Aborigines were dispossessed of their land and, since in British eyes they had no title to it, resistance was considered a criminal activity.

Throughout the nineteenth century there were many, including scholars, who believed that the peoples of Polynesia were doomed to extinction. The reasons suggested for the supposedly dramatic declines in population numbers were many and varied, but few authors questioned the reality of the declines or their universality.

One of the most important aspects of China's foreign policy throughout its entire history has been its attempt to contain the threat of the warlike peoples of Central and Northern Asia and, when possible, to turn their vast power to China's advantage. In the years leading up to An Lu-Shan's attempts from 755 to overthrow the ruling T'ang dynasty, the Uighur people amassed great power in the Mongolian steppes, and their military aid contributed largely to the defeat of the Chinese rebels.