This is a generous and powerful treatment of the authority-defiant figure across many cultures and centuries. While Graham Seal's major work to date has been largely concerned with medieval England and colonial Australia, this is a fine and world-ranging survey, and a study presented with a compassionate identification and with a pleasing wit. It is, quite simply, Australia's finest national and comparative volume in the global scholarship of the folkloric discipline. What more is there to say about outlaw heroes? A great deal, it turns out. While many might have considered the tradition of the outlawed hero to have died out, it has not only endured, but has evolved into viable new forms; the cultural processes that produce and contain the outlaw hero as a viable model of resistance are not only ancient, extensive and deep, but are also socially perilous.

Since the early 1970s, there has been functioning in the United Kingdom/ British Isles a quietly effective Social History Curators Group - one with a remarkably lively journal and an Annual Conference - each, alike, changing the profession quite dramatically. The now vital role of women in this field is notable, as is their different form of emphasis on collecting materials and on imaginative research projects.

The initial knowledge of the materials contained in this book came to the writer from a broken run of Household Words which he first read as a child. It consisted of unbound weekly parts of the journal for the year 1853, a period during which the attention of England had been focused on Australia because of the gold strikes and consequent commercial boom. This story is told as evidence of the widespread currency of these journals and of the way in which a pioneering family in Victoria prized these pages which so often discussed their life in a harsh but fresh new world. Indeed, so fondly were these much thumbed pages regarded that, despite early removal to New Zealand and the wear and tear from several generations, they were preserved for the writer to read almost a century later.