Review of Brett J. Stubbs, 'The Gold Digger's Arms: Pubs of the Upper Clarence River District, New South Wales'. East Lismore, NSW: Tankard Books, PO Box 5098, 2009). Soft covers, A4 format. Pp. viii, 120. 53 Figures, mainly original photographs. $30.00, postage free within Australia

How to review a work amazingly 'sui generis'? The title of this neat A4 sized volume - like its cover - focuses the reader on a series of variously spaced hamlets, long-time micro-communities once socially significant, but historically valuable in the Upper Clarence District of northern New South Wales. Unlike so many local histories with a funding source and so a focus in local government and its obvious tourist beckoning interests, this work is a curiosity driven labour of love, illustrated by photographs from varied minor collections in parts of Eastern Australia. And, as the several hundred footnotes make clear, this has been an enormously difficult assemblage of the relevant facts - numbers, dates, details in official reports - from a bewildering array of forgotten documents, reports and newspaper references. In short, it has gone to the vestigial sources with tenacity and particularity.