  We present a counts-in-cells analysis of clustering in the optically selected
Durham/UKST and Stromlo-APM Galaxy Redshift Surveys. Minimum variance estimates
of the second moment, skewness (S_3) and kurtosis (S_4) of the count
probability distribution are extracted from a series of volume limited samples
of varying radial depth. The corresponding theoretical error calculation takes
into account all sources of statistical error on the measurement of the
moments, and is in good agreement with the dispersion over mock redshift
catalogues. The errors that we find on S_3 and S_4 are larger than those quoted
in previous studies, in spite of the fact that the surveys we consider cover
larger volumes. S_3 varies little with cell size, with values in the range
1.8-2.2 and errors ~20%, for cubical cells of side 3-20 h^{-1}Mpc. Direct
measurements of S_3 are possible out to ~35 h^{-1}Mpc, though with larger
errors. A significant determination of S_4 is only possible for one scale, l=6
h^{-1}Mpc, with S_4~5. We compare our results with theoretical predictions from
N-body simulations of cold dark matter universes. Qualitatively, the skewness
of the dark matter has the same form as that of the galaxies. However, the
amplitude of the galaxy S_3 is lower than that predicted for the dark matter.
Our measurements of S_3 are consistent with the predictions of a simple model
in which initially Gaussian fluctuations in the dark matter evolve
gravitationally, if a second order bias term is specified, in addition to the
traditional linear bias, in order to describe the relation between the
distribution of galaxies and dark matter.
