Tall shrub or small tree, 3–15 m high, with distinct juvenile and adult foliage. Bark peeling in long thin flakes, reddish brown to grey. Branchlets markedly angular to flattened or triquetrous, light brown to reddish brown, often greenish, glabrous, scurfy; branchlets of juvenile growth ± terete and densely hairy. Phyllodes dimorphic: mature phyllodes narrowly elliptic to very narrowly elliptic, falcate to subfalcate, (3.7–) 6–19 cm long, 9–25 (–48) mm wide, acute with subglobose mucro, subcoriaceous to coriaceous, bright green and glossy when fresh, glabrous (new growth with dark reddish resin globules and often hairy), with 3 (–5) prominent longitudinal veins separate to base and 3–5 subprominent veins between them; minor veins mostly 4–6 per mm, very rarely anastomosing; basal gland inconspicuous; phyllodes on young plants and new growth shorter and broader, elliptic to obovate, ± straight, often hairy. Inflorescences racemose; raceme axes 5–25 mm long, often growing out. Spikes 1–3, 2–6 cm long, dense, bright yellow. Flowers 5-merous; calyx 0.5–0.8 mm long, nearly truncate or dissected to ⅕ of length, densely white-villous mainly on tube, with red-brown or black glandular hairs on apices to c. ½ way down; corolla 1.5–2 mm long, dissected to ⅓–½ of length, with petals glabrous, scurfy on apices; ovary pubescent towards apex. Pods linear, ± flat, straight or sometimes curved, 1.7–10 cm long, 2.5–4 mm wide, coriaceous, longitudinally wrinkled, glabrous, scurfy. Seeds longitudinal, 2.8–5.3 mm long, brown to almost black, with slightly darker areole.
Grows mostly in sandy soils on sandstone ridges, steep hillsides, and in gullies, in open eucalypt forest and margins of wet sclerophyll forest; often forming almost pure stands; sometimes on Narrabeen shale lenses.
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