You can skip from Tex Morton to Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ and on to Paul Kelly and Icehouse; you can wonder at the ‘cupid’ ballet version of The Sentimental Bloke, then go back to films of Dad and Dave or Alfred Hitchcock’s version of colonial Australia (Under Capricornia, starring Ingrid Bergman); or you can trace shifts in Australian poetry enthusiasms from the influence of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ to Judith Wright’s conservation writing and on to Michael Leunig’s prayers; you can explore moments from Australia’s film and television industry such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Getting of Wisdom, or Puberty Blues. The book is organised year by year, with often surprising subjects in focus (wars are marginal in this history). The editors offer a list of paths, from Abroad to Yarning, that show their awareness of connections. But you are much more likely to follow serendipity to find your way around.

Some of the most rewarding pieces seem to be leftovers from scholarly research – additional details that didn’t fit the authors’ books. Frank Bongiorno’s comparison of Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch (1970) and Dennis Altman’s Homosexual (1972) expands his history of Australian sex lives. Jill Roe’s account of the publication of a Miles Franklin serial in a Newcastle newspaper (1947) serves as an endnote to her Franklin biography. Manning Clark’s biographer, Mark McKenna, tells us about the immediate reception and memory of Clark’s first volume of his monumental history in 1962. Nicole Moore delineates the censorship of The Catcher in the Rye, found on the federal parliament’s library shelves in 1957.

The book is full of new perspectives on material that may be familiar to Australians with memories of the recent cultural past. Nicholas Jose’s recollection of his experiences during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, including sheltering the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, is riveting. Sylvia Martin tells us about Aileen Palmer’s arrest for throwing red paint on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street in 1939. Rick de Vos and Simon Forrest explore the relationship between Mary Forrest and Nene Gare in Geraldton that informed Gare’s The Fringe Dwellers (1961). Kim Scott explains the importance of Ethel Hassell’s My Dusky Friends (1975) for identifying family histories of contemporary Aboriginal people.

Broad-ranging as it is, this book makes no claim to be exhaustive or even balanced, and certain emphases of current research are obvious. On the whole, the pieces seek out international connections, so we learn about Patrick White’s and Thomas Keneally’s publishing careers in America, about Hitchcock and Helen Simpson, P.L. Travers and Walt Disney, and Nam Le’s success in creating fiction with globalised appeal. Did I hear someone mention the ‘cultural cringe’ (Bongiorno and Ian Henderson, 1958)? Globalism might be its latest form. There are two pieces (1998 and 2003) on Shirley Hazzard, but only a passing mention of Helen Garner, and none at all of Helen Darville. In fact, 1995 (the year of the Helens) has disappeared completely.

With an awareness of the world market for Australian exoticism, the authors engage with a string of popular books about Central Australia, from the American H.P. Lovecraft’s inventions about the Great Sandy Desert to Ernestine Hill, E.V. Timms, and Mills & Boon romances of the Outback. This makes obvious the absence of any mention of Marlo Morgan’s massively successful concoctions about Australian Aboriginality and theirimpact on international readers.

The strongest strand in the book is the rise of Aboriginal consciousness in our culture, from the Jindyworobaks to the Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara in the 1940s, through Gare’s novel and the Bringing Them Home report to the Apology of 2008, with publications by Aboriginal people and sympathisers along the way. This also makes Paul Keating the most significant politician, with his Redfern speech (1992) cited several times and his career culminating in Keating! (2007) – the musical ‘we had to have’.

For all its entertainment and enlightenment, this book also strikes me as something of an anachronism in the age of the Internet. These are the kinds of diverting essays that pop up on social media, where your friends tempt you away from work to read some oddity they have discovered. But there you can ‘like’ or comment on what you read – and I wanted to comment on many of these articles. Just for starters: if Nan McDonald only has a brief moment of attention, she should be remembered for one of the great Australian war poems, ‘The Mountain Road: Crete 1941’, as well as for her editorial work at Angus & Robertson. I have a distinct memory of Reg Livermore singing Kate Kelly’s song ‘Die Like a Kelly, Ned’ on television, though Lee-Von Kim doesn’t mention this song in her discussion of his ‘forgotten’ Ned Kelly: Rock Opera (nor does Livermore on his own website). It is a pity that David Foster’s Man of Letters was published too late for Tanya Dalziell’s riff on the postal service and the Legends stamps. Having once attended an ADFA Officers Mess dinner where all those in uniform stood and sang every word of ‘Khe Sanh’, I would like to know what Don Walker thinks about the emergence of his song as a masculinist (misogynist?) nationalist anthem.

There are moments when the limits of book learning are apparent here; there are living people who could have provided more information on some of the topics under review. My interviews with screenwriters for the Australian Writers’ Foundation Oral History project have yielded glosses on The Sullivans (from Ian Jones), the film of The Getting of Wisdom (Eleanor Witcombe), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Cliff Green), and Puberty Blues (Margaret Kelly) that could add to these stories. Brian Wright, who wrote the Australian radio serials based on the Biggles novels, told me that when he ran out of W.E. Johns material he began inventing his own; Johns was annoyed at first, but began to use Wright’s plots for his next novels – perhaps those discussed by Adam Nicol (1955). But that’s another story (and I was asked to contribute to the book). This is not an encyclopedia, nor a reference book; it’s more an incitement to discussion.

Monash University Publishing, could you set this up as a blog, and invite readers to add their insights? With year-by-year headings, some brave soul might even fill out the missing 1995.