Hi peter, the manual is called "Building Design parameters in Residential and Low Rise Commercial Structures" Volumes 1 - 3 Published by Queensland University press. It is a 900 page compilation by Engineers and architects and Australian standards Association.
I believe the tome costs nearly $1K. I sort of inheritted it from a professional library and the book must be a few years old now. It has an analysis of the Threbo disaster and structural failures - so when was that?
Half of volume 3 is devoted to critical failure states where despite professional certification something horrible went wrong - a very funny section IMO.