This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2008. The 42 revised full papers and 21 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, constraints, planning, grammar and language processing, statistical learning, machine learning, data mining, knowledge discovery, soft computing, vision and image processing, and AI applications.