ITS PERFECT timing. A 640-page volume devoted solely to Australian cricket would normally be daunting, but this is an Ashes summer, and the appetite for new intelligence about the oldest adversary grows eedy at the thought of six Test matches.

The first reference to Test matches, accidentally, was made in the Victorian Cricketers' Guide for 1862, when it referred to a match between an English XI and an 18-man local squad. Having entered the language in the mid-1880s, ` Test match' was first more commonly used in Australia than England.

That item – detail, not trivia – comes in the entry for England, in a book which is described as a companion but is encyclopaedic in intention, and in avoirdupois. The entry for England is one of the longest, and so it should be, because the Ashes are unique. They provide the only case I can think of in which the relationship between two nations is defined by a sporting event.

The first England tour of Australia took place 136 years ago; W. G. Grace sailed there in 1873, and when Australia beat James Lillywhite's team three years later, in the first proper Test series, it was a defining moment: `proof of the vitality of colonial youth and even proof that the Anglo-Saxon race could flourish in the Antipodes'.

The Bodyline tour in 1932–33 was no less important than Gallipoli in nurturing a deep sense of injustice among Australians about English ruthlessness, or that of the English establishment. Douglas Jardine is described as icy and laconic, `the personification of the patrician'. But various contributors provide conflicting opinions, which suggests that Bodyline, like Gallipoli, was not as straightforward as it is painted by partisans.

While David Frith, in his entry on England-Australian relations, describes Bodyline as `malodorous', two of the editors, Richard Cashman and Warwick Franks, point out that Jardine`employed tactics whose markedly functional aim was victory, an attitude which has been more usually assigned to the pragmatic Australians'.

Telegrams were exchanged between Whitehall and Australia and the myth arose that Jardine almost drove Australia from the Commonwealth, but the fact that the official papers have disappeared suggests that the civil servants never took the issue seriously. Don Bradman, the target of Bodyline bowling, averaged 56.57; and Harold Larwood and Bill Voce were never as fierce as Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. But facts rarely influence strong emotions.

The relevant thing is that cricket is a more potent ingredient in Australia's identity than in England's. This creates a will to win which explains why John Arlott said: `Never feel sorry for an Australian cricket team.' But the nationalistic passion is tinged also by a touching romanticism about England as the home of cricket, which, for instance, invests Lord's with a mystery that is mostly lost on English players. The editors say that winning at Lord's means more, in cultural terms, to Australian players. They haven't let themselves down either – winning 12 and losing only five of 30 Lord's Tests. (Compare this with winning five and losing 14 to England at The Oval)

But the pleasure to be had from this Companion comes from the browse as well as the argument. We learn – from an essay by Geoff Lawson – that The Demon Fred Spofforth was probably not much faster than Steve Waugh, and that when he had ground out footmarks at one end he would switch himself to the other and bowl into them.

When Don Bradman announced his retirement, the effect on English cricket was so profound that RC Robertson-Glasgow compared it to Rome's hearing of the death of Hannibal. Victor Trumper hit yorkers pitched on middle stump under an upraised left leg, and when he died in Sydney in 1915 huge, mournful crowds lined Macquarie Street to watch his funeral procession, as though he were Australia's Verdi.

This Companion, though earnest and entertaining, is in one respect plain daft. It carries political correctness to an extreme by devoting an entry to every woman who has played for Australia. I looked up Avril Fahey and learned that at the age of nine she was chosen for Vasse Primary School Second XI before making the 1st XI, and that, after playing one Test, she graduated in occupational therapy from Curtin University in 1995. The entry belongs in a high-school yearbook, not an Oxford Companion.

  The Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket, edited by Richard Cashman, Warwick Franks, Jim Maxwell, Brian Stoddart, Amanda Weaver and Ray Webster: Oxford, hardbak, 640pp, £30. Stephen Fay is deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday

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