In 2006, Beverley Kingston, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales, offered the early twenty-first century her very human and wise perspectives on the white peoples' experience of their daily life in New South Wales, from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present. Later in the year she would do the same in a very personal discussion - at unusual length - with Quentin Dempster on television in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's perspectives programme, 'State Line'. Her book, published earlier, 'A History of New South Wales', is the first history of the premier state to have been issued in over a century. It is also both political and social, cultural and insightful, as to many of the events which we tend to list in somewhat perfunctory fashion. The treatment is, perhaps, much of what might have been expected from a reflective historian who has also written well about the experiences of women in work in Australia, we well as the witty and perceptive Basket, 'Bag and Trolley: A Short History of Shopping in Australia' (1994).

I am sure that most academics approaching retirement look forward to the opportunity of working in a leisurely way on some projects that appeal strongly to them, but for which they have never had time. I was no exception, and as 1985 approached and with it my departure from the German Department of the University of Queensland I had several projects that I hoped would give me something to do without the horror of deadlines.

This volume has been put together in some haste as a working text for a Residential School at the University of New England in September concerned with 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' and Keneally's later novels. It follows on the similar weekend study course on Keneally's first five novels held here early this decade. For several of these seminars on the Modern Novel - in an ongoing series now numbering almost a score from the first one in January 1968 - folders of notes have been prepared, or books of select proceedings have been issued, notably with 'Tolkien: Cult or Culture?' (1969) and 'Gleanings from Greeneland' (1972). The present compilation falls somewhere between these two approaches. Many persons are interested in Keneally's novel on the aborigine's defiance for differing reasons - because of the local aspect of the historical events, the modern fictional recension, or the film's largely New England locations. For these persons, there has been a bias in the items selected, towards the process whereby the novel and the film have, in the last year or so, created their own legend, as well as a remarkable momentum both within Australia and overseas. Some attempt has thus been made to indicate, through various documents, the stages whereby this has occurred.

VII. Oceanic Languages Bibliography describes a listing of resources, arranged by subject, and includes sources on Etymology, Lists of Names, Sources - a) Toponymy, b) Anthroponymy, and c) Ethnonymy, Names of Languages.

The wreck of the 'Stirling Castle' and its outcome is a sorry tale, a Story of a woman's amazing fortitude and the miserable death of a gallant band of British seamen. (Bill Beatty. 'The Tales of Old Australia', 1966, p. 173). Objective fact in the 'Stirling Castle' story is an elusive spirit and just as it is about to be grasped has the habit of changing its form. (Michael Alexander, 'Mrs. Frazer on the Fatal Shore', 1971. From 1976 edition, p. 97). Let us consider the woman Eliza Fraser ... whose shipwreck among the aborigines ... and ultimate rescue by a convict ... (have) been the subject of much biographical reconstruction. (Jill Ward 'Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves' 1978. p. 402). This topic should be one of particular interest to the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, not merely because the putative events associated with it occurred in the immediate Brisbane area, but from the fact that the 'events' themselves very soon became folk-history, with various conflicting interpretations, each concerned to embroider or interpret the happenings to suit seemingly dominant issues in the case.