John Baxter’s Australian Cinema was the first of a number of works on the history of film production in Australia – all, in varying degrees, superficial, selective and inaccurate, in such a new field, where to arouse interest in the subject was perhaps as important as to supply information, these early books could be forgiven for such inadequacies. But Pike and Cooper have at last taken the next step. Using material gathered over a ten- year period from many sources (archives, contemporary journals, personal reminiscences, and the films themselves), they have compiled a comprehensive encyclopaedia-style coverage of the feature films produced in Australia from 1900 to 1977.