The general editor introduces the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia with a number of challenging statements. He does not want it to be ‘just another encyclopaedia’. He has made it his policy, he writes, to have no ‘academic-style text references, linguists and other students of Aboriginal studies rarely appear, and there are no “studies suggest that” ... This encyclopaedia also aims to tum the usual convention on its head by presenting an Australia with no white people except as they impinge on Aboriginal society.’

There are the faults of the type any encyclopedia suffers. There are the factual errors. The period in which Thomas Mitchell was Surveyor-General, for instance, was 1828–55 (not 1831–46), and the reference to him omits the important and relatively recent (1985) biography by William Foster.