This book takes a multidisciplinary and multicultural approach to studying the relationship between human societies and food- yielding tropical palms. A joint effort of four people whose special ties complement each other, it provides a broad and thorough examination of palm sago, a starch that has potential for small-scale, low-cost development in marginal areas of the tropics. Information on the extraction and production of palm sago in insular and mainland Southeast Asia, the tropical Americas, Melanesia, South China, and South Asia is presented here.

This book of essays honours Professor O.H.K. Spate of The Australian National University. Occupying the second University Chair of Geography to be created in Australia, Oskar Spate built a Department in the Research School of Pacific Studies there. Later, after serving for five years as Director of that School, he moved to its Department of Pacific and South Asian History where, as a Visiting Fellow, he is writing a three- volume history of the Pacific. The first volume, The Spanish Lake, was published by the ANU Press in mid- 1979.

To survive as a species man must adapt. But genetically he is largely the same as his Stone Age ancestors. It is not surprising that drastic modifications of the environment which have taken place have given rise to many signs of man's maladjustment. The impact of civilisation on the biology of man, evidenced by the effects of diet, crowding, noise, the changing nature of disease, and the stress of modern living, was the subject of critical examination by distinguished scientists at a symposium sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science in 1968.

The Saddharmapundarlkas{u00FC}tra is a representative work in the Buddhist (Hybrid) Sanskrit and has had a profound influence on religious thought in Asia. It is one of the nine treasures of Buddhist texts in Nepal and was introduced into China in the third century A.D. and to Tibet at the beginning of the ninth century. It has since spread throughout Asia. Many Sanskrit manuscript versions of the Saddharmapundarlkas{u00FC}tra have been found and are now scattered throughout the world.

Works of literature are not created in isolation. They are formed by the interplay between personal and national identity, between the background of the writer and the ethos of his time. This book explores, through the lives and works of four writers and their friends in Melbourne in the first forty years of this century - Vance Palmer, Frank Wilmot, Louis Esson and Frederick Sinclaire - the struggle to identify what was unique and valuable in Australian life. Palmer and his associates sought to realise an Australian literary nationalism.

Up to the end of last century, landforms were viewed largely as expressions of the structure of the earth's underlying crust. But such interpretations were concerned for the most part with generalities and broad effects; the subtleties of structural factors became overshadowed first by cyclic explanations and then by the modern emphasis on process and climatic geomorphology. This book arose from the neglect of structural factors in geomorphological interpretation.

Which Canberra church was once a railway station? Who is the famous bushranger associated with Lake George? How did Captain's Flat get its name? Who sang the National Anthem at the opening of Parliament House? This book will answer these questions and many more for everyone interested in the history of Canberra and the surrounding area. As well as descriptions of tours to places of historical interest there are many useful hints for the amateur historian, including chapters on recognising local styles of architecture and discovering history from graveyards.

Until now, the effects of uncertainty on location patterns have remained largely unexplored. Theories about the way in which firms make decisions to locate have long been restricted by the assumption that those firms know all the relevant facts when the decisions are made. This book is an attempt to generalise location theory to take account of the fact that firms are uncertain when they make their decisions. Among the topics discussed are the location of duopolists, the patterns of towns, the production decisions of firms, and the impact of the diffusion of innovations on location.