Browsing by browse by HERDC Category Description "D2 A Review of Several Works"

'Australia's Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era', by Babette Smith, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 408 pp., $49.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781741146042. 'A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal', by Babette Smith, 2nd ed., Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 328 pp., $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 9781741755510. 'Voices from Tocal: Convict Life on a Rural Estate', by Brian Walsh, Tocal, C.B. Alexander Foundation, 2008, 144 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780731306107. 'Closing Hell's Gates: The Death of a Convict Station', by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008, 324 pp., $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781741751499. 'Tour to Hell: Convict Australia's Great Escape Myths', by David Levell, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2008, 296 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780702236860. ... If convict history is Australia's 'beloved burden', as Marian Quarterly claims, then in the early years of the new millennium there were relatively few historians willing to share the load. It is now twenty years since Robert Hughes rummaged through the closet of Australia's penal past and paraded its contents before an international audience; twenty years, too, since we were invigorated by the assertive revisionism of the 'Convict Workers' project and the Bicentenary's official ambivalence towards the criminal component of our national story. While these developments briefly re-energised interest in convict history, they also appeared to have exhausted it for a time. Admittedly, some wonderful work arose out of postgraduate research in the years after 2001, and a miscellany was sprinkled through peer-reviewed journals. But otherwise it seemed that the topic had fallen from favour, as if there was little more to be gained from interrogating the most distant chapter of our national story. As an anonymous assessor indelicately noted on my grant application a few years ago, 'surely there can be nothing left to say about convict history'. It was therefore most welcome to see 2008 bring a flurry of new scholarship, with several excellent works exploring the rich and instructive world of Australia's reluctant pioneers.

The series Australian Screen Classics is an exciting initiative from Currency Press. Jointly published with the Australian Film Commission's National Film and Sound Archive, this series recalls the British Film Institute's acclaimed Film Classics and Modern Classics guides to individual films. Under the stewardship of series editor Dr Jane Mills from the Australian Film. Television and Radio School - these neat, concise studies of single films make a rich contribution to Australian film culture that belies their small size. Recognising the role that cinema plays in our cultural heritage. the series pairs iconic Australian films with some of our leading writers and thinkers in culture, criticism and politics. These have included film critic Adrian Martin writing on the Mad Max movies: playwright Louis Novvra exploring Walkabout; novelist Chrislos Tsiolkas revisiting The Devil's Playground: and historian Henry Reynolds critiquing The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Two recent additions to the series are The PianoAlvin Purple, by feminist cultural commentator Catharine Lumby.

Taking on board Samuel Johnson's recommendation that "What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure", these two concise books urge writers to deal seriously with the business end of writing – addressing in particular the task of writing a winning book proposal and other ways of making writing pay its way. Authors Rhonda Whitton and Sheila Hollingworth offer a mass of basic information in the now-classic self-help format, presenting foundational information in bite-size chunks, this fare seasoned with humour and a series of cartoon illustrations.'A Decent Proposal: How to Sell your Book to an Australian Publisher' deals with the elements of writing and formatting a book proposal – from the tone and contents of the covering letter to advice on how many sample chapters to include. It also incorporates information on the various publishing options open to writers (commercial, on-line and self- and vanity-publishing) as well as on book contracts, advances, royalties, copyright, agents, manuscript appraisal services and writing centres.'Mission Possible: How to Make Money from your Writing' surveys the traditional areas of the pen-for-hire marketplace such as freelance journalism, corporate writing, and book publishing and reviewing, together with less immediately obvious opportunities. These include ghostwriting and speechwriting alongside the specialist niche markets of greeting card captioning, menu writing and teaching into the corporate marketplace. There are also brief sections on grants and writing competitions.

Review of Brennan Keats 'A Poet's Composer: The Biography of Horace Keats, 1895-1945' Wollongong, NSW: Wirripang, 2011, xiv, 246 pp. and 2 audio CDs ISBN 978 1 87682922 3, Lynne Douglas 'The Golden Age: Clive Douglas, Composer, Conductor' Wollongong, NSW: Wirripang, 2011, ii, 51 pp. and audio CD ISBN 978 1 87682921 6, and Patrick Thomas 'Upbeats and Downbeats: A Conductor's Life' Wollongong, NSW: Wirripang, 2010, x, 267 pp. ISBN 978 1 87682920 9. "Music is a divine art, but a dirty business" (George Bizet), muses Patrick Thomas in his autobiography 'Upbeats and Downbeats' (p. 180). There is a touch of bitterness in his recollections, born from the frustration of setbacks, rejection and bureaucratic insult he endures. This underlying theme is reflected in 'A Poet's Composer' and 'The Golden Age' biographies of composers Horace Keats and Clive Douglas, which were written by their children Brennan Keats and Lynne Douglas, respectively. The latter two books include representative CDs of compositions, and all three contain worthwhile general information about musical life for players, composers and conductors in Australia from 1917 to recent times. They present, almost as a subtext, history of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, later the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as the careers of all three men were inextricably linked with 'Aunty' (the ABC). While strong in their portrayal of the musician's dilemma, the books are, however, also united in their depiction of largely self-taught, highly motivated and dedicated Australians who leave valuable legacies to the nation.

Among the many publications of 2018 were three books that focused on aspects of South Australian history. Carolyn Collins and Paul Sendziuk's edited collection of papers, titled Foundational Fictions in South Australian History; Robert Kearney and Sharon Cleary's lavishly illustrated popular history, titled Valour & Violets: South Australia in the Great War, and Don Longo's edited collection of First World War letters, titled Pens and Bayonets: Letters from the Front by soldiers of Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, during the Great War. These books come at a time when local and state-oriented histories are of growing scholarly and public interest. National histories can be problematic in their generalisations, their weighting of metropolitan sources over regional sources, and in their focus on east coast experiences over those of the rest of the country. Australia has a diverse history, and the proliferation of state and locally-focused studies can help highlight that diversity and shed light on the nuances in this history. However, as the following discussion will demonstrate, while the three books reviewed here take a local/state focus as a defining element of their construct, only one of the three, Foundational Fictions, manages to sufficiently justify the value of that focus.

D. Bainbridge 'How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives' Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003 (224 pp). ISBN 0-67401-028-0 (hard cover) RRP $46.74. S. Baron-Cohen 'The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain' London, Allen Lane, 2003 (288 pp). ISBN 0-71399-671-4 (hard cover) RRP $39.95. R.W. Connell 'Gender' Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002 (184 pp). ISBN 0-74562-716-1 (paperback) RRP $32.95. Genetic explanations for complex human behaviour are growing in popularity, aided by recent advances in molecular genetics and the Human Genome Project. However, their popularity far exceeds their scientific validity. Books written for a general audience to promote genetic causes for differences in behaviour between men and women are not merely over-simplistic and inaccurate; they also promote particularly conservative opinions about society.

This survey essay comprises something of a focused musing over two standard and very carefully revised introductory but overview studies of sociology, works produced in large laminated format with copious illustration: Macionis, J. J., 'Sociology', 5th edn, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1995, xxviii, 708pp., with numerous (coloured) maps, diagrams and photographs, £29.95; Henslin, J. M., 'Sociology: A Down-To-Earth Approach', 2nd edn, Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 1995, xviii, 716 pp., with numerous coloured illustrations, £23.95; referred to below as Macionis and Henslin respectively. For the student of more traditional culture, a comparison between these books will be seen to strongly reinforce the general lines of the contemporary organisation of their field. Both in organisation and style, and in length and general judicious proportions, they would appear to be aimed at very similar readerships, a matter made even clearer by their equally similar large divisions (five and five), and chapter numbers (24 and 22). This general common shape to their approach to society may be seen to first involve some eight chapters of introduction concerned with nature and nurture, including: the sociological perspective, culture, socialisation, interaction, groups, organisations, and deviance and social control. While these areas of study were once deemed "postgraduate", they are now assumed to be accessible to the "undergraduate".

'Introductory Econometrics: A Practical Approach' is most aptly named. It explains step by step the applications of econometric methods in practice. The text also discusses the key econometric issues in a non-mathematical way and provides a summary of key issues in econometrics. The book covers all econometric topics for typical undergraduate courses: the classical regression model, simultaneous equations, qualitative variables and panel data, time series econometrics and the like. One of the attractive features of this book is that its 16 topics are grouped into five teaching units. This gives both lecturers and students guidance in teaching as well as in studying the subject.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of repeated sessions of imitation on the social initiations and responsiveness of children with autism. Twenty non-verbal preschool children were randomly assigned to an imitation or contingently responsive playgroup. The procedure consisted of four phases, each of 3 minutes duration. In the first phase, the child entered the room alone. An unfamiliar adult sat still like a statue with an expressionless face. In the second phase, the adult either imitated all of the child's behaviours or was contingently responsive to the child's behaviours. During the third phase, the adult sat still again. In the fourth phase there was spontaneous play interaction between the adult and the child.

A current trend in the education of children with autistic spectrum disorders is the use of computers as an instructional tool. The following papers report findings on the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction for teaching emotional understanding and social problem-solving in persons with autism as well as the positive influences on teacher-student interaction during computer training on language skills. Despite the methodological drawbacks of these studies, they offer valuable insights into this new and promising teaching approach.

The present study set out to explore the manifestation of symptoms in a large community sample of adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). There is considerable need for such an empirical investigation, given that there is a dearth of knowledge about this age group, presenting a real challenge for parents and services. This paper examined the following specific issues: i) the stability of the diagnosis of ASDs; ii) the extent to which the symptoms of autism differ in severity between the lifetime score and the current score on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) and iii) which symptoms of autism change the most and which are the most stable.

This study focused on teaching pretend play to five young children with autism and learning difficulties. The classroom-based intervention lasted for 4 months, and was divided into three phases, each lasting 5 weeks (with three 40 minute teaching periods each week).

The aim of this study was to carry out a direct and comprehensive comparison of video modelling and in vivo modelling for the acquisition and generalisation of target behaviours across different tasks in a group of five children with low and high levels of functioning (their mental age ranging from 4 yrs 4 months to 6 yrs 9 months). A multiple baseline design across all children and for each child, across the two modelling conditions and the different tasks, was used. Each child was presented with two tasks of similar difficulty; one task was assigned to the video condition and the other was used for the in vivo condition. Target behaviours were nonverbal (independent play, self-help skills), verbal (expressive labeling of emotions, spontaneous greetings, conversational speech, oral comprehension) and social (cooperative play, social play). In both modelling conditions the models were familiar adults who demonstrated the target behaviours at a slow pace. Overall, the findings suggest that video modelling is an effective procedure for teaching children with autism a number of different skills.

The primary aim of this study was to explore the usefulness of sensory-motor behaviours as potential predictors of autism during the infancy period (9-12 months). Although there are extensive reports on the presence of sensory-motor difficulties in older children with autism, as well in retrospective accounts of the infancy period based on medical or parental reviews, the qualitative aspects of sensory-motor skills that may be disrupted in the early (under the age of 2 years) development of children with autism have not been studied in detail.

An underlying concern of this book is the impact of land use change on soil properties, largely focussing on the biological characteristics of soil microbial communities, soil organic matter and contamination in tropical and savannah ecosystems from Africa, Asia, and South America. One matter that is more implied, than explicitly addressed, is what can be done to make land managers more aware of the impacts of changing land use and the benefits of soil-building practices? The editors, from the out-set, draw attention to the fact that poor management can quickly degrade the soil that has taken many thousands of years to develop. The book itself does finally address this concern, in the closing chapter, with research areas that require further investment and enquiry, while the central chapters provide good evidence for the impact of land use change on areas that previously have lacked intensive study. Each chapter concludes with the significance of the work and an assertion that without such work the management of these environments will not be sustainable.

Review of: Linderman, F. B., 'Indian Why Stories: Sparks from War Eagle's Lodge-Fire', illustrated by Charles M. Russell, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, xx, 236pp., £9.50; Linderman, F. B., 'Indian Old-Man Stories: More Sparks from War Eagle's Lodge-Fire', illustrated by Charles M. Russell, Lincoln and London,University of Nebraska Press, 1996, xxvii, 169pp., £8.50; Linderman, F. B., 'Old Man Coyote (Crow)', illustrated by Herbert Morton Stoops, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, v, 255pp., £10.95. These three volumes, originally issued in 1915, 1920 and 1931 - the first two by Charles Scribner's Sons, the third by John Day Company - are now reprinted in an authorised paperback edition. They each have a new Introduction, the first two by Sidner Larson, the last by Fred W. Voget. Other works by Linderman recently in the same reissue series include 'Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows'; and 'Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows'. Together they constitute a remarkable account - an important picture of the American Indian country and of its life "before it was gone".

A mother of three grown daughters learns that her cancer has returned, so she gathers everyone together for one last Christmas at the family home in Perth; a woman is suddenly widowed when her husband suffers a heart attack, leaving her with four children to support on a rural property in south-east Queensland; a young mother, living a comfortable existence in inner-city Melbourne, is doubly devastated when she learns of her husband's infidelity shortly after her nine-year-old son is diagnosed with leukaemia. These plot synopses for, respectively, Little Sparrows (Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2010), The Tree (Julie Bertuccelli, 2010) and Matching Jack (Nadia Tass, 2010) suggest all three films are maternal melodramas. Each film is distinctive, however, in its approach to subject matter that might otherwise be dismissed as sentimental or mawkish. With diverse production and funding bases ranging from micro-budget independent (Little Sparrows) and art-house co-production (The Tree) to mainstream studio distribution

Education in the United States was in a state of "crisis" at the time of the 1983 release of 'A Nation at Risk', the landmark report on the US education reform. This was the time when the rising Japanese economy started threatening the post-war US economic dominance and conservative figures such as Ronald Reagan gained popular support. Subsequent US debates over education reform put Japanese education in the spotlight, driving many American education researchers to travel to Japan to learn the "secret" of its educational and by implication its economic success. A large number of books and journal articles about Japanese schooling - or what I have called elsewhere the "foundational studies" (Takayama, 2010) - were published in the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Cummings, 1980; Finkelstein, Imamura, & Tobin, 1991; Hess & Azuma, 1991; Lewis, 1995; Peak, 1991; Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989; Shields, 1993; White, 1987). As one observer rightly reflects, "cross-national attraction anywhere in the world has rarely been as strong as was US attraction to Japanese education" (Rappleye, 2007, p. 38) at that time.

Review of Mitchell, B. 'An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England', Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, xx, 424 pp., £12.99. and Davidson, H.E. 'The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe', London, Routledge, 1993, vii, 181 pp., £45.00 cloth, £12.99 paper. These two volumes are part of the current wave of books attempting to keep available in sensible format the Germanic and Old English background, for, as the first scholar stresses, "Old English should have a part in every university English syllabus and in the library of every reader of English literature." (p. viii) ... This survey is even more comprehensive than Mitchell's earlier efforts to give in the one book both overview perspectives and such sensible bibliographic references as will enable the curious and determined to get fairly quickly to authoritative scholarship.

The last quarter of a century has seen waves of reform in higher education (HE) around the globe. No less striking are the similarities in terms of language, aims and instruments across these reforms. A relatively independent - institutionally 'pillarized' - and simple organization with a short list of tasks (teaching and research) and occasionally a good wine cellar was to be turned into a multi-tasking engine of economic growth within the 'knowledge economy': relevant, engaged, internationally competitive, excellent, entrepreneurial. In a mood that occasionally approached what Albert Hirschman (1991) has dubbed 'fracasomania' (failure complex) - the belief that the existing system has so irredeemably failed that only its wholesale restructuring can bring about improvement - the old structures, designed to reproduce scholarly traditions and train elites, were no longer thought fit for purpose; no longer up to the new challenges and opportunities. Nor were they providing value for taxpayers' money. The reform impulse of policy makers and politicians was given an intellectual frame and programme by ideas emerging from the universities themselves, and specifically from the social sciences, notably new public management (NPM). Like other public service providers, universities were to be simultaneously exposed to market discipline and subject to stricter and more transparent systems of accountability and audit (Strathern 2000). These new instruments of control were, paradoxically, introduced in the name of 'autonomy' (Olsen 2009). Universities were to be freed from the direct control of the state in return for which they were to increase efficiency and demonstrate improvement in audits of teaching quality and research output and impact. To further facilitate this, the office of the VC/Rector/President was to be remodelled in the image of the CEO, competition between universities was to be encouraged and league tables were to become powerful instruments for concentrating the minds of academics and university managers alike (see Sauder and Espeland 2009). Within the universities themselves, these developments were frequently accompanied by a Greek chorus in which any change was denounced as a threat both to genuine autonomy (coded as 'academic freedom') and the traditional practices necessary for maintaining, again genuine, standards.

Sharing some closely related themes and a common theoretical orientation based on the governmentality analytic, these are nevertheless two very different contributions to criminological knowledge and theory. The first, 'The Currency of Justice: Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies' (COJ), is a sustained and highly original analysis of that most pervasive yet overlooked feature of modern legal orders; their reliance on monetary sanctions. 'Crime and Risk' (CAR), on the other hand, is a short synoptic overview of the many dimensions and trajectories of risk in contemporary debate and practice, both the practices of crime and the governance of crime. It is one of the first in a new series by Sage, 'Compact Criminology', in which authors survey in little more than a hundred pages some current field of debate. With this small gem, Pat O'Malley has set the bar very high for those who follow. For all its brevity, CAR traverses a massive expanse of research, debates and issues, while also opening up new and challenging questions around the politics of risk and the relationship between criminal risk-taking and the governance of risk and crime. The two books draw together various threads of O'Malley's rich body of work on these issues, and once again demonstrate that he is one of the foremost international scholars of risk inside and outside criminology. I will focus first on the longer book, for this is ground which might be said to be less familiar to criminologists, or perhaps so apparently familiar that it is lost in plain sight.

Review of Paul Barber. 'Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality'. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Pb ix + 236pp. ISBN 0-300-04859-9, Carol A. Senf. 'The Vampire in 19th Century Literature'. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Pb vii + 204pp. ISBN 0-87972-425-0, and Brian J. Frost. 'The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature'. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Pb viii + 152. ISBN 087972 460 9. Although this is a review rather than a survey of three related but not overlapping volumes and of their place in the evolving lore of the vampire, they can, in a suitable sense, be treated in the general order in which they are listed above, not least since Paul Barber's engrossing 1990 text, 'Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality' serves as a fine introduction to a socio-cultural field which is treated very thoroughly in its major printed disquisition by Carol Senfs 'The Vampire' in 19th Century English Literature (1988), and finally in the multimedia, multi-disciplinary survey by Brian J. Frost, 'The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature' (1989). Significantly all three volumes come from North American university presses, as is more than appropriate since that continent, perhaps more than any other, has accepted and developed this age-old (European) heritage and helped it to evolve in ways that are consonant both with its folklore of migrant genesis and with the post-modern popular culture and legends of the later twentieth century.

This one-volume literary history is monumental, being the major effort of a large group of scholars to provide a comprehensive reference work on Canadian literature in English. Although the main attention is given to poetry, fiction, and belles-lettres, opportunity is also taken to discuss sub-literature and applied writing, folk-tale, Canadian English, Canadian publishing, the work of historians and naturalists, philosophers and theologians. This breadth of subject is a wise choice, since it shows how Canada's best writing has reflected many local, national, and universal matters. The conclusion, which comments upon and draws together the forty chapters, is by Northrop Frye who shows his competence in a field not normally associated with his name, at least in international English letters. Unlike such historians as W. L. Morton, Professor Frye is less concerned with the Turnerian theory of frontier in the functioning of the imagination. He sees the British connexion as midwife to Canadian nationhood and intellectual maturity. The lack of a Canadian writer of universal acclaim is perhaps due to the unique northern quality of the life, a (mental) climate governed by a strong seasonal rhythm, a hinterland explored from the metropolis, for every Canadian psyche.

Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) was a development economist and political theorist whose work is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how economic life figures in the political worlds we inhabit and the ways in which we give meaning to our lives in market-based societies. Perhaps best known for the distinction between 'exit' and 'voice', Hirschman was a prolific theorist who wrote about the role individual moral virtue and individual self-interest should play in economic activity, how economic growth in the developing world might best be achieved, and the reactionary rhetoric of neo-conservative politicians in the late 1980s, to list but some of the areas he covered. Hirschman's writing was elegant; further, he understood the importance of the well-chosen word. He was, as this new biography by Jeremy Adelman shows, an economist for whom the essays of Montaigne were as important as the writings of Ricardo and Smith.

• Ian Ridgway, 'Red Cedar-Red Gold', Ian Ridgway, Port Macquarie, 2006, pbk, ISBN 9780980388800, 407 pp, $35.00. • Ian Ridgway, 'Red Cedar-Red Gold 2: Burying the Ghosts of the Past', Ian Ridgway, Port Macquarie, 2006, pbk, ISBN 9780980388817, 357 pp, $35.00. • Ian Ridgway, 'Red Cedar-Red Gold 3: All Things Return to the Beginning', Ian Ridgway, Port Macquarie, 2008, pbk, ISBN 9780980388824, 351 pp, $35.00 or $90.00 for the set of three. ... These three large and closely printed soft-covered volumes have been described as 'The Red Cedar-Red Gold Trilogy'. The actual wrapper for the set refers to them - and justly - as 'true stories and bushmen's tales about the last days of cedar-getting on the North Coast of New South Wales'. The three works constitute a wide-ranging and extraordinarily rich saga of the last and most difficult phases of the North Coast's traditional industry, that of 'getting' the harder/more hidden and dangerous cedar, even as they also comment variously on the task of felling and bringing out many other timbers from (smaller) stands still amazingly difficult of access. The steadily evolving plot - for we are dealing with 'faction', or the use of facts to create time, place and socio-cultural circumstances - is one that radiates out from a central location, a river town with many small sawmills feeding it. It is given the fictitious name of 'Brown's Landing', on 'the Spencer River', somewhere on the lower Mid-North Coast, and it sounds much like Wingham or Taree, as it/they might have been earlier in the twentieth century. For they are mouldering, long-memoried, and strangely evocative of a ruthless age that succeeded the convict one, but retained many of its predatory and ruthless characteristics.

Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance. They are a credit to Terri-ann White and her team at UWAP in Perth. The miserably small print runs for volumes of poetry often lead to scrimping and saving on design and production, but here at least design costs have been defrayed over the entire series and it pays off in the look of the finished product.

'Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson' Edited by NJB Plomley Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 1180pp, $99.00, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9775572-2-6. 'Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission' Edited by Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls Quintus Publishing, 238pp, $34.95, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9775572-5-7. Until 1966, the image of Indigenous Tasmanians given to British and European understandings of Australian colonial history was largely that provided by British armchair anthropologist Henry Ling Roth's 'The Aborigines of Tasmania', published in 1890 - or more accurately, the revised edition of 1899. This was a key moment in the translation of the Tasmanians for European and, by extension, Australian settler consumption. With his ambition towards a totalising comprehension, synthesising all that could be objectively known about Tasmanians from a multitude of previous accounts, and with his subsequent efforts to confirm his own scholarship by disproving Fanny Cochrane Smith's claims to be the Last Indigenous Tasmanian, Ling Roth set the seal on the discourse of Tasmanian extinction for generations. His text remained the standard reference on Tasmanian Aboriginals for almost seventy years - until Brian Plomley's monumental edition of the Tasmanian journals and papers of the island's Chief Protector of Aborigines in the early 1800s, George Augustus Robinson, swept it into oblivion and reopened the whole question of Tasmanian history. 'Friendly Mission' provided a belated first-hand account of Robinson's attempts at conciliation, and of the subsequent relocation of a remnant population of Tasmanian Aborigines to Flinders Island. The importance of the book is hard to over-estimate. But the cost of reproducing it must have been extremely disadvantageous, for the first edition published by the Tasmanian Historical Research Association ran to 1074 pages; and for some thirty years now it has been out of print. It is not often a reviewer has the opportunity to celebrate such a milestone event in Australian publishing.

The 1990s were labeled 'the decade of the brain', at least in the USA. While the focus of much of the brain research was medical, driven by the hoped-for but unachieved goal of an effective intervention against dementia, a few educationists and neuroscientists proposed that some of this research on perception, learning and memory might be informative for education. These three books on how educational practice might be informed by cognitive neuroscience are all published in the USA. No publications on this theme have yet to come out of the UK. The common 2002 publication date is indicative of a recent avalanche of books, websites, courses, conferences, email lists and dedicated research centres on education and cognitive neuroscience, again nearly all American in origin, and aimed at classroom teachers rather than academic educationists. Undoubtedly this is another example of trans-Atlantic enthusiasm for new intellectual explorations running years ahead of English reserve.

The ubiquity of animals across all Victorian literary genres is traceable in part to the visibility of a wide range of animal species - especially domestic animals - in everyday lives of the Vicrorians: as raw material, sources of labor and transport, food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, and sciencific knowledge, produced through animal observation and experimentation.

Australians have an insatiable appetite for true crime. In terms of books alone, the true crime genre accounts for approximately half a million book sales annually in a continent inhabited by 22 million people. Monitors of Australian book sales also indicate that sales for this genre have increased in recent years. In 2006, true crime sales increased by 65 percent. Interest in true crime has not been restricted to book sales, the genre ubiquitous on free-to-air and pay television broadcasting. A notable production was the Underbelly (2008) television miniseries, focusing on Melbourne's gangland wars in the years 1995-2004. This series was a significant critical and commercial success, giving rise to imitators, sequels and prequels. The recent film Snowtown, based on eleven murders which occurred in South Australia between 1992 and 1999, has also achieved critical and commercial success. Interest in true crime can also be gauged through increased visitor numbers to various historical attractions in Australia. In 2010 eleven convict sites were added to the World Heritage List. Attractions with a more contemporary focus, specifically targeting the true crime market, have also attracted significant local and international interest. For example, since it first opened in 1991, the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney has increased visitor numbers annually, with visits in 2010 totaling over 75,000 people. The above noted, as interest in true crime grows, Australian crime rates appear to be subsiding. Australian Institute of Criminology data indicates that Australia, not unlike many other developed Western nations, has experienced significant declines in most categories of crime over the last decade. However, historians, such as Flanders and Wittenburg, have documented how the true crime genre has thrived in periods during which the incidence of serious crimes have declined. So what drives the popularity of true crime? These three recent books, all focusing on a specifically Australian experience of crime, offer some clues. Drawing from these works, this review will examine the enduring popularity of true crime in Australia by highlighting key contemporary and historical themes specific to the Australian experience. Among other things, the true crime genre in Australia highlights how the space of national mythmaking has shifted from the colonial space of the outback to the post-colonial spaces of beach and suburbia. In these spaces Indigenous experience is marginalized or distorted. True crime also highlights thematic concerns central to Australian post-colonial texts which express a sense of discomfort - isolation and disorientation - with being in the Australian landscape.

Review of Hogg, Richard M., 'The Cambridge History of the English Language', vol. I, 'The Beginnings to 1066', Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, xxiii, 609pp., £60.00. and Baugh, A.C., and T. Cable, 'A History of the English Language', London, Routledge, 4th edn., 1993, xvi, 444 pp., £12.99 paper. The initial volume here is the first in what is "the first multi-volume work to provide a full account of the history of English". Like the other five it aims to give an authoritative coverage of areas of central linguistic interest and concern and adequate treatment to more specialised topics relating to English. Thus there are here, after Richard Ho 's introductory chapter, the following comprehensive surveys: "The Place of English in Germanic and Indo-European", by Alfred Bammesberger; "Phonology and Morphology", by the named editor; "Syntax", by Elizabeth Closs Traugott; "Semantics and Vocabulary", by Dieter Kastovsky; "Old English Dialects", by Thomas E. Toon; "Onomastics" (with as generous a section on anthroponymy as that on the more obvious toponymy), by Cecily Clark; and "Literary Language", by Malcolm R. Godden - the whole followed by a generous glossary of linguistic terms, and a bibliography which is particularly rich as to secondary sources.