The introduction sets out in detail the aims, scope and processes of BAL’s compilation. The ambitious nature of the project is underlined by the compilers’ determination to examine physically every listed publication, an examination which ‘required hours upon hours of concentrated work’ in numerous libraries. The work builds, of course, as the editors acknowledge, on previous bibliographies, which are helpfully listed, with their abbreviations, at the end of the Introduction. In addition, BAL has obviously gained from the establishment of such databases as AUSTLIT and Austlit Gateway. Meanwhile, bibliography as an endeavour has been made vastly easier with the advent of computers, both in gaining access to catalogues and the like, and in physical manipulation of data. The editors maintain, for instance, that BAL has ‘utilized the online catalogues of major research libraries worldwide and second-hand booksellers’ listing on Internet search engines such as Bookfinder.com and AddALL.com.’

The introduction gives an excellent historical summary of Australian bibliography as it developed from George Barton’s Literature in New South Wales (1866). The major figure in the historical sequence is, of course, Morris Miller, whose two-volume Australian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1935 appeared in 1940. The editors refer mainly to Frederick Macartney’s recompilation and extension of Miller’s work (‘Miller and Macartney’), published in 1950, although most Australian bibliographers have serious difficulty with Macartney’s reworking of Miller. Given the ambitious nature of BAL, a comparison with Morris Miller is inevitable.

Not surprisingly, the volume of publication since 1950 has increased markedly. Miller and Macartney list some 8,320 titles by 3,491 individual authors while this volume of BAL lists some 10,000 titles by 3,500 authors. The editors estimate that the complete BAL will contain more than 33,000 titles by more than 10,500 authors. The figures are misleading, however. BAL, bowing to current fashionable critical approaches, maintains that it has no canon and regards ‘self-published books of verse, the thousands of westerns produced en masse … in the fifties, sixties and seventies, and the hundreds of Mills and Boon romances as relevant as the novels of Jessica Anderson, Peter Carey and Patrick White’. Morris Miller, which comprises ‘literature in the fields of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, criticism, anthology and miscellany’, has a broadly canonical definition of ‘literature’. BAL does not provide full bibliographical details on works of criticism, essays, autobiography, biography, history, social commentary, description or travel. Where an author has also published in these areas, then his/her works are listed, but only selectively under ‘Other Works’. It is likely that some users of BAL will find these exclusions and inclusions limiting.

Individual entries in BAL provide a wealth of detail, as the sample entry demonstrates. Author entries provide birth and death dates, places of same, pseudonyms or other names, if any, gender, book titles, alternative titles, illustrators’ names, details of the first edition and, where applicable, first publication in Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand, location of the copy examined, other imprints, abridgments, serial versions, translations, other works in the noncore genres (selectively), familial relationships where known and relationships with other authors, references to other relevant bibliographies and listings, and location of literary manuscripts and personal papers. Information under ‘Further Information’ or ‘Comment/s’ provides a miscellany of useful material, such as alternative birth dates, other writing and relevant activities. ‘Comment/s’ under Rolf Boldrewood, for instance, notes that he also wrote Heralds of Australian Literature (1892) and that he was the father of Rose Boldrewood. ‘Further Information’ provides references to Boldrewood in major bibliographies, in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and to biographical and critical studies. Names of compiler/s responsible for each entry are inserted at the end in abbreviated form. All this information will be of enormous value to researchers, as will the extensive index of pseudonyms and variant names included towards the end of the volume. When the subsequent volumes of BAL are published, Australian scholars and librarians will have more information at their fingertips than ever before.

To return to Morris Miller is to be struck by the cultural gulf between the two bibliographies. Morris Miller may precede BAL by more than fifty years, but it is still not ‘out of date’, as claimed by the editors, except in the most literal sense. Miller prefaces his bibliographies with large sections of historical/biographical/critical commentary, which includes much valuable information. Differing most markedly from BAL, Morris Miller has both a narrower and a wider view of ‘literature’. Implicit in his introduction and commentaries is a conviction that there is such an animal as literary merit, while he spends much space defending his decision to exclude writing on religion, philosophy, history, art and science. Miller’s second volume includes an extensive section under criticism, i.e., an historical introduction and a bibliography. The latter is divided into essays and reviews, English literature, Australian literature, Classical literature including philology and translations, modern literatures including philology and translations, and anthology and miscellany. His indexes, meanwhile, contain much valuable information, especially his ambitious subject index to fiction.

 Morris Miller’s two volumes represent an integrated, semi-critical perspective on Australian literary culture up to the 1940s. Comprehensive as it undoubtedly is within its self-imposed limitations, BAL does not aspire to such Olympian status. For these reasons, it is not likely that BAL, even when completed, will dislodge Morris Miller from the library shelves. His achievement, along with that of H.M. Green in the field of literary history, remains not just outstanding but permanent, even in the face of computers, online databases, teams of compilers, and large research grants.