AustLit

'This is a splendidly readable and meticulously transcribed book of extracts from the colonial Australian diaries kept by Caroline Thomas from 1851, at age 19, to 1895, at age 63. She died seven years later in 1903 aged 70. It is a fascinating, authentic and valuable addition to our intimate knowledge of a courageous pioneering woman. Social and colonial historians will devour it for its details of daily life, and local and family historians, particularly Armidale ones, will be glad of her first hand responses to the early settlers during her sixteen years here. This review concentrates on Caroline Thomas's seventeen years at Saumarez, just west of Armidale airport, from 1857 to 1874'  (Introduction)

J. M. Bennett has been praised by The Hon Justice Michael Kirby as 'Australia's foremost legal historian'. He has written the life of Sir Alfred Stephen, third Chief Justice of NSW, 1844-1873, the thirteenth volume in his series Lives of the Australian Chief Justices and it is surely his masterpiece. Bennett uses 'Legge's Reports' and the recently published Dowling's Select Cases 1828-1844, as well as newspapers and a mass of archival letters and papers and thanks his son Michael for help with the thirteen illustrations. He lists 92 'Dramatis Personae', 'principal actors' which is most helpful. One feels that Bennett knows them all well enough to tell us their virtues, achievements and flaws, but they are briefly introduced. He is well acquainted with the 'drudgery of diligence', a phrase from his valuable and unique regional legal history In Witness Whereof: Lawyers, the Law and Society in New England and the Liverpool Plains in the Nineteenth Century. (Introduction)