Volume One of reference work listing all children's books by Australians together with children's books about Australia from 1774 to 1972. Entries provide physical descriptions, dates, publishers, illustrations, awards received and, in some cases, remarks on the content. Entries are arranged by author. Title and illustrator indexes are included.

Like cities everywhere, Melbourne is two cities. There is the city of space and place, of the streets and parks and buildings where we live. Then there is the city of words, the imagined city that has inspired or directed the building of the material city, and that holds the memories of the lives its people have led. Before the invasion of the settlers, the Aborigines who lived in what would become Melbourne patterned their lives in song and dance, word and ritual, that joined them in a seamless reality of place and space: past, present and future. The settlers displaced this with the chartered streets where solid buildings aspired to the ostentatious wealth of London or Paris, and narrow lanes and alleyways crawled with the misery of poverty. As new forms of transport arrived, new suburbs spread. Successive waves of immigration brought people from around the world as the city passed through cycles of prosperity and depression and changed from British to Antipodean to cosmopolitan. Each wave brought its own dreams. Each appropriated what they liked in the new land as they tried to build their separate pasts into a common future. In this study of Melbourne as a city imagined through words, John McLaren examines the words of writers who, in memoir and autobiography, diaries and journalism, fiction and poetry, have shared their perceptions of the city, its conflicts and its celebrations. He shows how this past lives on beneath today's city, taking us back to the boats that filled its harbour, the rivers that run beneath its streets and the ghosts who dance in its market. His book offers its readers new prospects of reading, and new ways of seeing the city within the city.

Report on State of the Colony of New South Wales is a nonfiction and fundamental record of some convicts being transported to New South Wales. Excerpt: "Condition and Treatment of Convicts during the passage to New South Wales. CLOTHING.] FOOD.] PREVENTION OF PLUNDER.] VENTILATION.] Parliamentary Evidence, p. 100.] MEDICINE.] PRISON ROOM.] 21st Article of Instructions; A. No. 1.] II. Debarkation and Muster of the Convicts, Male, and Female. Vide Government and Public Notice, Sydney Gazette, 19 April 1817.]"