With approximately a thousand entries, the book took more than twenty years to complete.

The book contains 1,030 biographies of Australians, or people who were closely connected with Australia, who died before the end of 1942.

According to Serle in his preface:[1] This date closed the first one hundred and fifty years of Australia's history, for although the first fleet arrived in January 1788, the first emigrant ship, the Bellona, did not come until January 1793.

Until then Australia had been merely a dumping ground for convicts, but the arrival of free emigrants foreshadowed the founding of a nation.The average length of the biographies is about 640 words.

Serle classified them roughly into the following twelve groups: Of the above profiles, the number of women included was 42 or 4 percent of the biographies.