Animal law in Australasia: A new dialogue
P Sankoff and S White (Eds)

Animal law has only recently emerged as a recognised field of legal study in Australia, with a growing number of legal practitioners working in the area and a significant number of Australian law faculties now offering elective courses in the ... read more »

Reviewed by Celeste M Black

The house on the hill: The transformation of Australia's farming communities
Neil Barr

In this book, Neil Barr, Senior Social Researcher, Department of Primary Industries, Bendigo, critically examines Australian farming, with particular focus on the family farm. Having grown up in a family who tried to make a living in horticultural ... read more »

Reviewed by Ingrid Muenstermann

Rotary in Maleny: 50 Years of Service
Jack Wilcox AM

Jack Wilcox AM has written an engaging, generously illustrated, and handsomely produced history of the first fifty years of Rotary in Maleny. In the absence of significant quantities of written records, he has been thrown back on the shifting sands ... read more »

Reviewed by Don Boadle

The water dreamers: The remarkable history of our dry continent
Michael Cathcart

The Water Dreamers is about water and the ideologies that drove its exploration, its use, and its misuse from the time of British settlement until the present. The story begins with the early colonists who are faced with a lack of water on the arid ... read more »

Reviewed by Ian Coldwell

Agriculture and the WTO: Towards a new theory of international trade regulation
Fiona Smith, LLM

International agricultural trade has long been described by agricultural economists as an 'intractable problem'. From a narrow economic perspective, there exist relatively straightforward ways to solve this problem but to a large extent these have ... read more »

Reviewed by Donald MacLaren

Rural ageing: A good place to grow old?
N Keating (ed)

A welcome addition to the somewhat sparse ranks of scholarly writing about ageing in a rural context, Rural Ageing brings together a remarkably coherent set of chapters by Canadian and British research scholars from diverse disciplines - chapters ... read more »

Reviewed by Robin Harvey

Women of the outback: Inspiring true stories of tragedy and triumph
Sue Williams

Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife, an instant success when published in 1892, presents a story often told when Australians give an account of themselves - the plain but compelling narrative of the stoic Australian woman, who contends with rural ... read more »

Reviewed by Thérèse Taylor

Resolving Indigenous disputes: Land conflict and beyond
Larissa Behrendt and Loretta Kelly

This book is an important and helpful contribution to both the literature on Aboriginal law and policy, and that on alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Aimed at the intersection of these diverse areas of social regulation, and proposing a strategy ... read more »

Reviewed by Guy Cumes

Making sense of place: Exploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and lenses
F Vanclay, M Higgins and A Blackshaw (Eds)

This book seems to be more about sentiment and place than about the senses and place. Anthropological studies record the way that an Indigenous sense of place is informed by a truly multi-sensory or kinaesthetic knowing. These studies may privilege ... read more »

Reviewed by Catherine Laudine

Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization
Jennifer Summer

Can we successfully challenge corporate globalisation and move toward a sustainable world society? In Sustainability and the Civil Commons Jennifer Sumner argues that we can do so - and do so now, because there is a world-wide ‘crisis of ... read more »

Reviewed by Elizabeth Beaton

Water Politics in the Murray-Darling Basin
Daniel Connell

This book is developed from a PhD undertaken during Connell’s ‘four good years’ at the Australian National University Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, and draws on his experience during eight years with the ... read more »

Reviewed by Kathleen Bowmer

Environmental Policy: Australian Practice in the Context of Theory
Ian Thomas

A stated aim of this book is to provide a starting point for gaining a background in environmental policy or for developing and/or implementing such policy (p.v). Although the book does provide a comprehensive coverage of this policy field - a ... read more »

Reviewed by Ingrid van Putten