It contains over 3,000 articles on Australian subjects: authors, titles, and literary topics, ranging in length from 100 to 5,000 words, arranged alphabetically.
It has around 830 pages and is bound uniformly with The Oxford Companion to Australian History and, no doubt, others in the series.
The essay-length articles are mostly credited to their authors, otherwise entries are published anonymously.
The preface acknowledges a debt to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
All three were academics at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra.