Shrub or tree, 0.5–8 m high: branchlets terete, glabrous or with appressed, minute hairs, sometimes minutely woolly, typically with many red, resinous hairlets. Phyllodes spreading to erect, terete to compressed, linear, elliptic, or oblong-elliptic, 2.5–10.5 cm long, 3–15 mm wide, straight to curved, rigid, glabrous, occasionally somewhat glaucous, acute to acuminate, or obtuse and mucronate, coarsely to sharply pungent or sometimes innocuous; main veins 3–6, distant, raised, with nearly as prominent secondary veins occasionally anastamosing. Peduncles 0.5–0.8 mm long, paired, with appressed, minute hairs; heads depressed globular, 4.5–5 mm diam., 8–15-flowered, pale golden. Flowers 5-merous; sepals one-quarter to two-thirds united. Pod linear, to 31 cm long, 6–10 mm wide, coriaceous, in one to several open coils, covered with minute appressed hairs and (when young) with many clumps of red tiny hairs; seeds longitudinal, oblong-elliptic, 6–8 mm long, glossy dark-brown, aril orange, subapical. Flowers Nov.–Jan.
LoM, MuM, Wim, VRiv, MSB, RobP, MuF, Gold, NIS. Also WA, NT, SA, Qld, NSW. Widespread but rather uncommon through northwestern Victoria, mainly in calcareous sands or loam. A collection labelled Port Fairy is presumably in error or from a cultivated plant .
A transcontinental species with many variations but none of sufficient importance and discontinuity to recognize infraspecific categories. The phyllodes are especially variable in form from flat to compressed and elliptic to linear or oblong with the apex often pungent but sometimes only acute or obtuse and innocuous.
