The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History
book about Australian military history

The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (ISBN 9780195517842) is a book in the series of Oxford Companions published by Oxford University Press, its first edition dated 1995.
The second edition, published 2008, was written/edited by Peter Dennis, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, Robin Prior, and Jean Bou.
Reviews
A reviewer for Army magazine praised the book for its readability and scope, but found its coverage patchy — giving good coverage to some topics while ignoring others, equally worthy. He thought a companion volume on Australian military hardware was needed.
“The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History” enters the record as book about Australian military history. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Oxford, Companion and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Oxford, Companion and Australian provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56481537. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995 and 2008.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.