The usher of the book’s title is T. Nelson Downs, long-time resident of Burleigh Heads. (The T. Doesn’t stand for anything; it was a parental whim.) He’s one of those wonderful, original, exasperating people full of impossible ideas (such as marketing gigantic ice sculptures for public occasions using skilled tradesmen brought out especially from Florence).

Amateur magician, collector of antiquities, botanist, visionary, T. Nelson is owner and head usher of a cinema he calls the Universe-Cine-by-the Sea. He has installed a galaxy of lightbulbs in the roof, and, to better understand the world, is showing progressively earlier films, even if this means screening Cutting Out Diseased Potatoes from the Warrnambool Herd on Christmas Eve.

Another book on George Augustus Robinson, the nineteenth-century oddity who toured Tasmania gathering Aboriginals whom he eventually incarcerated on Flinders Island? Historians from John West to Brian Plomley have written about his Tasmanian adventures; Robert Drewe and Mudrooroo Narogin have added interpretations of his singular career. Do we need another?

I was doubtful until I read this lovely book. Cassandra Pybus, who holds a history PhD, states that hers is not a work of history as much as a personal meditation. Though the powerful narrative and reflective pauses entitle Community of Thieves to the appellation ‘history’, the meditations of the author on these dismal events form the book’s greatest strength.

If the stories brought together in this book had been arranged according to a chronological narrative, it would go something like this:

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal people in what would later be called the Victoria River country (Northern Territory) were affected by a new disease, smallpox, which came from the north; many succumbed to its hideous embrace. Possibly, the decimation of some families intensified endemic skirmishing among neighbouring peoples, and deaths created opportunities for territorial expansion and problems of orderly succession to country.

You can’t write a review of millenarian ‘time-pieces’ without showing your hand. I hereby declare that the first thing I do on looking into such a collection is a simple calculation, to which the answer in this case is 16:25.

Not bad, certainly, if you compare it to a similar notional collection prepared just before 1000 CE. Not great, either. In the spirit of these times, rather than those long gone, how about proportional representation? In a straight statistical sense, that would of course mean weighting the ratio in favour of women. I contend it would also be legitimate to give women more space according to the talents of the writers working in Australia. To name some who don’t appear in this line-up, and who would certainly not have let the side down if they’d been used to bring the numbers up to 50/50: Gabrielle Lord, our best futuristic fabulist; Jean Bedford; Janet Shaw; Barbara Hanrahan; Helen Hodgman; Rosie Scott; Judy Duffy; any of a number of younger writers such as Stephanie Johnson; some of the better crime writers such as Marele Day.

In their introduction to this collection of essays, the editors state that Australia’s war experiences in Vietnam left some lasting legacies, but ones that were either unexpected or unintended: a loss of moral authority on the part of Australian conservative governments, a breakdown in the defence and foreign policy consensus about the ‘threat’ to Australia, the revival of populist politics and resistance to conscription, and increasing resistance to orthodox political views on other issues.

The authors also see the war experience as having done lasting damage to the United States’ image in Australia and, instead of reinforcing and sustaining the political will of Washington to maintain a strong military presence to our near north, as having resulted in the partial disengagement formalised in President Nixon’s Guam Doctrine. Nor, despite the later efforts by Labor governments and elements of the Australian press, did the war really reinforce Anzac mythology in the minds of many Australians.

Come on in. Do you like mango chutney? I myself have never had mango chutney, not liking mangos, but Phil’s an expert on making the stuff. It never lasts, but make sure you use green mangos because the old ones are too stringy.

That nothing lasts forever is a theme that runs through Thomas Shapcott’s book of short stories. What you have when you are young is not necessarily something you will have when you get older and what you consume is only borrowed, for you cannot take it with you.

This collection is divided into three sections: What You Have, What You Leave, and What You Own. As with his earlier novel, The Search for Galina, Shapcott is here obsessed with the past.

Award-winning Western Australian poet Philip Salom is both surprised and delighted by the response to his first novel, Playback. Simon Patton spoke to him recently during a brief visit to Melbourne.

After having read Playback, the story of Jack Biner, a folklorist who visits a small country town to collect oral histories, I could not help feeling that I was re-enacting an episode from the book. Sitting down with Salom with the cassette recorder going, I realised that, like Biner, I was involved in the process of collecting someone else’s words, and that I would inevitably understand them in my own way in order to weave them into a coherent ‘story’. But the irony of the situation provided plenty of stimulus to the conversation

Publishers are like invisible ink. Their imprint is in the mysterious appearance of books on shelves. This explains their obsession with crime novels.

To some authors they appear as good fairies, to others the Brothers Grimm. Publishers can be blamed for pages that fall out (Look ma, a self-exploding paperback!), for a book’s non-appearance at a country town called Ulmere. For appearing too early or too late for review. For a book being reviewed badly, and thus its non-appearance – in shops, newspapers and prized shortlistings.

As an author, it’s good therapy to blame someone and there’s nothing more cleansing than to blame a publisher. I know, because I’ve done it myself. A literary absolution feels good the whole day through.