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The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History

book about Australian military history

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ56481537 ↗
Source-derived summary

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.

Editorial summary

“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.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1995, 2008—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2008-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Oxford, Companion and Australian.
Editorial analysis

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.

Evidence profile

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.

Critical limits

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.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History primary sources, The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History archive and Oxford research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

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.