1810–1830 was a crucial period in the development of New South Wales, when the legal foundations of a free-settler and emancipist society were laid. This book explores the relationship of a colonial people with English law and looks at the practice of law among the ordinary population. Paula Jane Byrne traces the boundaries between property, sexuality and violence, drawing from court records, dispositions and proceedings. She asks: what did ordinary people understand by guilt, suspicion, evidence and the term 'offence'? The book reconstructs the legal process with great detail and richness and evokes the everyday lives of people in the colony. It focuses on the different valuing of males and females and analyses the complex gender relations of the early colony. This book innovatively ties recent ideas on convict society and Australian colonial women's history to the legal, economic and social history of early New South Wales.

No area of social welfare in Australia has seen as much conflict as health policy. Clashes have involved the medical profession, bureaucrats, friendly societies and political parties, often to the detriment of the patient. This 1991 book provides background to the current debate by studying the political conflict over health policy in Australia from 1910–60. It looks at both state and national levels for the origins of the system of publicly subsidized private practice epitomized in the fee-for-service scheme. The different currents within state policy are analysed along with the various obstructions to the development of the national health insurance policy. The role of the British Medical Association, which in its indigenous form continues to have a hostile relationship with the government because of its determination to maintain its independence and fee-for-service practices, is closely examined. The Price of Health will be of particular interest to health policy makers.

State and private employers in New South Wales recognised the convicts' previous occupations, and employed a large proportion of them in the same occupations they had held at home. The women convicts - often classified as prostitutes - in fact brought a range of occupational skills equally as important for the economic development of Australia as those of the male convicts. Once settled in Australia, the convicts consumed a diet, and experienced housing, superior to that received by free men and women at home. The organisation of their work was not very different from that in Britain and Ireland and, while cruel treatment did exist, the likelihood of numerous floggings during their term of sentence is shown to be a myth. Convict workers is a study in comparative history, noting the resemblances and the contrasts with indentured labour, slavery and punitive communities elsewhere. By illuminating the contribution of the convict workers to Australia's economic and social development.