It contains an alphabetically arranged set of articles on Australian subjects: notable persons, historic events and topics of general interest, ranging in length from 100 to 2,000 words.
It has around 720 pages and is bound uniformly with The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature and, no doubt, others in the series.
Its preface acknowledges a considerable debt to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but is not exhaustive or detailed; for example it discusses only eight governors-general: Fitzroy, Hasluck, Hayden, Hopetoun, Isaacs, Kerr, McKell and Munro Ferguson; and only Hasluck in any depth.
Its list of contributors contains around 320 names of researchers and specialists, mostly academics, with their respective institutions.
remarkably free from the biases of political correctness or economic innocence .