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Ronald Anderson’s latest book explores the potential for deer farming in Australia, and gives at least the initial information to someone wishing to establish a deer farm. By page eight of the book the profit potential of deer is already apparent. Their costs of production are relatively low, while product prices are extraordinary. For example, at the time of writing, New Zealand farmers were receiving $4.75 per kilogram for venison, some six or seven times the price of beef. As if this were not enough, there is the annual crop of velvet or immature antler, harvested without slaughter from the stags. Used as a component in Asian medicines, this returns no less than $110 to $150 per kilogram to the farmer or at least $300 per stag per year. Not satisfied? Then try the ‘by-products’ also obtained when the deer are slaughtered for venison. These range from mature antler (for jewellery) to frozen deer tails at $6 each (for culinary use) and from deer foetuses ($3 to $45 depending on stage of pregnancy) to deer penises! The last, which must be ‘...complete with testes and a tassel of hair…’, are graded (by length!) and frozen and return about $9 each to the farmer. In exploring the reasons for farming deer, Anderson raises one important issue early in the book and returns to it in several places. This is the hunter’s ‘...ambivalent attitude to deer…’ and to deer farming. To the hunting fraternity, says Anderson, deer are to be shot, not farmed. Unless, of course, they are farmed to provide stocks for shooting. The problem is that strong lobbying, based on such an attitude, would make it even more difficult than at present to obtain enough deer to stock a farm. The same attitude, prevalent in West Germany, led to a virtual embargo on the import of farm venison from New Zealand, in favor of ‘real venison’ shot in the wild, with obvious consequences for New Zealand’s deer farmers.

Karobran (Togetherness) by the late Monica Clare is not a great (or even a good) novel, but it is an important work and, as such, deserves to be widely read.

If you’re a kid, finding a tap at school that doesn’t spurt can be what life is all about. Perhaps Glen Tomasetti’s story ‘Ella makes a Friend’, highlights the tone of The Kids’ Own Book – gentle stories to help children lean evenly into life.

Kenneth Cook’s latest book is a parable for adults. At the end of the second millennium A.D., God remembers the duty he has overlooked at the end of the first, destroys life on earth. However, no doubt due to his advanced age, he is a little careless, and in a valley in the in the middle of the United States, two mice survive. They and their rapidly multiplying descendants inherit man’s civilization, including thought and speech, but otherwise not memory. They have to develop theory and institutions from scratch, guided by reason and reading.

Anyone who has attempted to write the history of a municipality will have felt the need to consult a history of local government to see how his particular area fits into the general scene. Now there is such a reference work, but only for New South Wales.

This book is subtitled A History of Local Government in New South Wales Volume 3. The other two volumes are The Origins of Local Government in New South Wales

1831-58 and The Stabilization of Local Government in New South Wales 1858-1906. This reviewer has not read these earlier volumes, let alone seen them in the bookshops, but, if they are of the same standard as the third, then they form a very important contribution to our knowledge of the third level of government in this country.

Divorce Dilemma is a book for those contemplating divorce, but it should be compulsory reading for those contemplating marriage! Warwick Hartin brings a wealth of research and practical experience to this clear and searching analysis of divorce and marriage in our society. He courageously examines the sacrosanct institution of marriage, our reasons for marrying, the divorce rate and the effect of divorce on children.

This is a small minor mini-pocket lexicon of how, where and when to travel abroad from Australia, starting with A (Add-on Holidays) and ending with Z (Zoos).

A nice idea, but only moderately successful. ‘Zoos’ tells· why – because in fact it tells so little. It appears to be there merely to complete the register and to allow Weg to contribute a final cartoon.

Bibliomania is a disease that has afflicted men, and occasionally women, in many walks of life. Some of the most famous cases have been extremely wealthy bachelors, like Richard Heber in England and David Scott Mitchell in Australia, whose only interest in life was collecting books and manuscripts. At the other end of the spectrum have been men who were leaders in business, the professions or politics, yet who still had the time, energy and money to amass huge collections. Sir John Ferguson in Australia, John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington in America, William Gladstone in England and Sir George Grey in New Zealand fall into the latter category.