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.

In recent years the study of modern South Asian history has been extended beyond the range of older accounts of British administration and the growth of the Indian nationalist movement. This book is the first fruit of the close co-operation between a group of young scholars who worked together at the Australian National University in Canberra. A wide range of topics is dealt with, and the nature of the contributions typifies the new attitude to the history of South Asia.

Of all the enigmas of archaeology, the megalithic complex is probably the most intriguing; it is regarded today by some scholars as the first world-wide religious movement, by others as a well-defined stage of civilization, while still others deny completely its existence as an identifiable, meaningful cultural entity. Elements of this complex appear to have spread over the entire globe, but Southeast Asia is one of the few regions where they can still be found both as part of living cultures and in the form of prehistoric remains.

The great division in the world today, says Michael Lipton in this outstandingly important book, is not between capitalist and communist, black and white, east and west, or even between rich and poor nations. It exists within the poor countries themselves, and it is the division between city and country. In developing countries especially, wealth is drained from the country, where a little investment would produce big increases in desperately needed food production, and channelled into the cities where people who are often far better off put it to far less productive uses.

In 1803, William Buckley was trans ported to Australia, and soon after landing, escaped with a number of fellow convicts into the unexplored area of what is now Melbourne. Buckley survived and spent the ensuing thirty-two years living with the aborigines of the area, and when discovered in 1835 had become entirely assimilated into aborigine culture. This book gives an account of his experi ences, as well as a nearly unique description of aborigine culture before European contact.