Males have a very short comb of hairs on the front of their long jaws.
In the described male and female, the abdomen is mottled greyish brown and beige and has three pairs of humps on its back.
Austrarchaea raveni has a markedly elevated front body. In the male holotype, the carapace was 1.08 millimetres long and 2.59 millimetres high. Both described sexes have two pairs of small horns on the head.
The 2011 paper records a female and a juvenile collected together at the base of a fallen log. They were hand-collected at night at Mount Glorious on 3 March 2001, from what the authors described as a maternal web. The record documents not just the forest locality but the much smaller setting in which the spiders were found.
Other specimens carry similarly detailed collection information. The male holotype was collected inside a hollow log in August 1990, while material collected in May 2010 came from sifting elevated leaf litter. Log bases, hollow wood and accumulated leaves form a set of precisely recorded places that can guide further searches for this tiny spider.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
In 2011, the authors reported that this restricted-range species was relatively abundant in several national parks and forest reserves, and did not consider it of conservation concern. Maintaining forest, fallen wood and leaf-litter settings at documented localities, together with renewed surveys, would support future checks of occurrence.