Crime fascinates many members of the public. They are eager to know what forms it takes, whether kinds of crime change, what measures are taken to combat it. Sydney in Ferment draws widely on primary sources, many previously unpublished. It focuses on trends in criminal behaviour, political dissidencc, collective violence and crime control polices in New South Wales from Phillip{u2019}s landing in 1788 to the early 1970s.

Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) is one of the most important novelists Australia has produced, though her achievements cannot be measured in terms of quantity. Maurice Guest, The Getting of Wisdom, the three books of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The Young Cosima, and some short stories make up her published fiction. She has been criticised as a mere chronicler of facts. On the contrary, as this book shows, she was an imaginative writer who, working within the European literary tradition, created an autonomous world.

Dr Albert Hahl first sailed to German New Guinea in 1896 and took up residence in Herbertshohe, a primitive little settlement on Blanche Bay dominated by autocratic planters and merchants. Later he served as Governor in various posts in the Protectorate, including eighteen months as Vice- Governor on the turbulent island of Ponape. After eleven years as Governor of the whole Protectorate, he finally sailed from Rabaul for good in 1914, a few months before World War I ended German rule in the Western Pacific.

The small-scale pastoral ancl commercial community of Victoria in 1850 did not need a stock exchange; by 1900, however, the institution was a well-developed one. How did this change come about? Throughout the greater part of the period 1850-1900 the predominant business of the share market was in mining securities. Gold-mining developments made possible the formation of Melbourne{u2019}s first stock exchange in 1861. Increasing activity in gold-mining shares enabled its successor (1865-84) to establish itself in a more enduring way.

The Emigrant Family was first published in three volumes in 1849, with a second edition, titled Martin Beck after its villain and dominant character, appearing in 1852. The appeal of this romantic novel set in New South Wales in the 1830s is no longer limited to literary historians.

Covering an area of the Pacific Ocean larger than the continental United States, the more than 2,000 islands and atolls of Micronesia - a United Nations strategic trust territory under U.S. trusteeship - are emerging as a political entity. Their history since the Spanish discovery in the seventeenth century is a parade of colonial rule - Spanish, German, Japanese, and now American. Today, the many islands and their diverse peoples are confronting the awesome task of determining their political future.

This is a study of kinship and conflict among a group of Aborigines who only recently abandoned their nomadic existence to live on a government settlement. Given the current rate of change in Australia, it will be among the last first-hand accounts of traditional Aboriginal social life. The book has two main aims. The first is to correct the impression that Aborigines are automata mechanically following tribal law in everything they do, or, as it has been put recently, 'algebraic electronic computets ticking away with no problem to solve.

Mekeo is a study of the organisation of a Melanesian village society. Dr Hau'ofa lived for some time among the Mekeo, a people from the Port Moresby area, studying their society and learning their language, and this book reports the results of his work. It contains valuable insights on their attitudes to such matters as sorcery, marriage and notions of good and evil. The book{u2019}s central theme, however, is the ascribed inequality in Mekeo society.