because, apart from any other consideration, it has been the subject not only of one good book but of two?K. D. Buckley's The Amalgamated Engineers in Australia, 1852-1920, published in 1970, and now Tom Sheridan's Mindful Militants: The Amalgamated Engineering Union in Australia 1920-1972. Sheridan's volume has been designed to carry on from Buckley's researches and, also designedly, comes to an end at the time of the amalgamation of the A.E.U. with other unions to form the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Union. It thus ends on a note of deserved satisfaction for the union, which then became the largest union in Aus tralia, replacing the Australian Workers' Union which had previously held that position throughout this century. It may or may not prove to be the case that this will prove to be a short-lived record, though no one doubts that the A.M.W.U.?which has already had 'and Shipwrights' inserted in its title because of a further amalgamation, will continue to be one of the most important and significant unions in the country. Already other unions are rivalling it in membership. Its future competitors in size may be not the A.W.U., which has continued to decline though still embracing a formidable proportion of unionists by any standards, but the like of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees', which now has 80 per cent of the membership of the A.M.W.U. whereas at the time Sheridan's history ends it was around 60 per cent; or the Federated Clerks' Union, for which the corresponding figures are 62 per cent and 50 per cent. The end of Sheridan's period may, then, mark the termination of an era in which Australian industry, and to an even greater extent Australian trade unionism, was dominated by the metal trades, which in turn were dominated by the A.M.W.U. and the unions which came together to form it.