The methodology developed to verify the existence of a low frequency precursor to the great 1960 Chilean earthquake is applied to International Deployment of Accelerometers (IDA) station data in the 1--6 mHz band to determine the seismic moment and temporal centroid of 22 recent large and great earthquakes, including the 1989 Macquarie Ridge earthquake which has been reported to have a low-frequency precursor (Imhl¿ et al., 1993). No clear evidence of precursors to any of these events is observed in the 1--6 mHz band. The seismic moment of large unilateral earthquakes of a given type of faulting is shown to be approximately proportional to the square of the duration. These data are observed to be well fit by this relation. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995.