This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Australian Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence, held in Canberra, ACT, Australia, in November 1995. The 16 full papers included in the book are revised versions of the contributions accepted for presentation at the workshop; they cover a wide range of current issues in the field of DAI, such as formal frameworks, methodology, theory, and architecture; various aspects of agents and multi-agent systems are addressed.