This hefty volume begins with an article on a cappella singing (ensembles with names like Café of the Gate of Salvation and Voices from the Vacant Lot) and ends with the zither, which instrument, the editors assure us, ‘can be seen as a metaphor for the present-day cultural diversity of music in Australia’. We have no lack of companions today: indeed, over the last decade they have been coming thick and fast. However the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia seems to have had a particularly troubled genesis, though the editors, John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, make no reference to it.

Like most companions, this one comes with the briefest of prefaces. At the Melbourne launch, Whiteoak told some ‘horror stories’ about the editors’ experience in taking over and producing the long-awaited volume, but the impersonal face of the encyclopedia seems to discourage any such disclosure in print. What the editors are keen to stress is that this companion is about music and dance in Australia, and not Australian music and dance, allowing them, as they put it, ‘to bypass muddy issues of “Australianness”’. This is thoroughly sensible, but it should be noted that it also distinguishes their product from The Oxford Companion to Australian Music (1997), which they also fail to mention. Clearly, some companions are not mates.