The Australian Country Party is a small group that has achieved a political success quite disproportionate to its size. That success, in the author{u2019}s opinion, is due largely to the quality of its leaders. The Colonel is the political biography of one of those leaders, Sir Michael Bruxner. Dr Aitkin presents Bruxner against the background of New South Wales politics between 1920 and 1960.

This book gives a lively account of the growth of the city of Hobart from its earliest days as a convict settlement to a metropolis with wide streets and fine buildings. It is the story both of the city and of the people who built the city, its saints and sinners, its rich and its poor: the Franklins, who inspired the cultural life of the town; Farrell, who could not keep out of gaol; Henry Propsting, the goose-stealer who made good through chapel and charitable society.

North Queensland is the most successful example in the British Commonwealth of a tropical region settled by Europeans. Here the Australian way of life has been transplanted almost intact. But one hundred years ago, when North Queensland was settled, it was taken for granted that white men could not work in the tropics. Sugar plantations were founded on imported Pacific Island labour. Meanwhile, inland North Queensland was developed by squatters and miners whose way of thinking differed widely from the planters. How could these two traditions exist together in one community?

In the highlands of Papua New Guinea there exist widespread legends concerning a 'Time of Darkness' in which there was no light and ash fell from the skies. The author investigates these legends and, in conjunction with measurement and analysis of the ash, which covers a large area of the highlands, determines that 300 years ago there was a cataclysmic volcanic eruption on Long Island and that the legends are essentially accurate accounts of this gigantic upheaval that is unrecorded in any written records. There are several unique elements in this book.

The first firm step towards independence for the people of Papua-New Guinea was taken in 1964 with the election of a representative legislature. This book describes how the Members of the House of Assembly were chosen. Officials conducting the elections were confronted with the difficulties of making the electoral process comprehensible to men and women who had had no previous contact with the institutions of modern government. At the same time the local candidates lacked a party organization or a nationalist movement or ideology through which to appeal to the voters.

Mangroves have intrigued naturalists for more than a century and, until relatively recently, were regarded largely as a scientific curiosity. These trees and shrubs which live in the intertidal zone along tropical and subtropical coastlines have been used widely for timber and firewood, but in the last decade or so there has been a growing recognition that mangroves may be important biologically as a nursery and source of food for many marine organisms. This book reviews recent research, much not yet published, on the distribution, biology and stability of mangrove ecosystems in Australia.

Although Australia{u2019}s relations with Asia have been the subject of many recent books and articles, less has been written about economic relations. That is the subject of this book. The selection of essays presented here reflects the author{u2019}s recent research interests. Almost half are about trade with 1 ndonesia and that country{u2019}s economic problems. The remainder deal with past and future Australian trade with Japan and China and with some broader aspects of economic relations with southeast Asia.

On Economic Man is a speculative essay upon the adequacy of the traditional assumptions about economic behaviour that underlie the bulk of economic theory and much of the thinking of economists about basic policy issues: the assumptions that men are self-regarding, rational, and well-informed. The author recognises that both in theory and in practice economists require a simplified 'model' of economic psychology, and that this cannot be realistic.