Non Fiction

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.

This is a work immediately topical to a large number of teachers and students concerned (with much justification) about the lack of a proper link between school and employment after schooling. The tragedy is that unemployment often hits those in the fifteen to nineteen year old age group, who are unskilled and semi-skilled, ill prepared for the transition to a workplace increasingly demanding higher qualifications. The Technical Teachers’ Association of Victoria (TTAV) released a document in 1977 called Submission to the Committee of Enquiry into Education and Training, which acknowledges problems of this kind and calls for remedies in the form of Work Experience, greater TAFE funding, the greater co-ordination of government, business and teacher groups, formation of ‘clusters’ of educational institutions, and an end to discrimination against girls and women in the TAFE area of occupations.