Simpson Returns is a novella by award-winning Australian author, Wayne Macauley. Simpson and his donkey: those lauded heroes of the Great War. Part of the ANZAC legend. Died there in Schrapnel Gully in 1915. Or did he? Because, almost ninety years later, here is Jack Simpson, with his donkey Murphy, travelling around country Victoria, on his twenty-ninth attempt to find the Inland Sea. He’s doing this on behalf of (the now long-dead) Lasseter.

Yet again, he leaves Mrs Fowler’s garage in Richmond with his ailing donkey. But Simpson keeps getting distracted. Still wearing his threadbare Red Cross armband, he says he’s plagued by Inveterate Samaritanism: he’s unable to turn away when someone needs help. First, it’s Shelley Jaecks with her three sons in the back of the hatchback, failing to commit suicide. As with all those he helps, the story is shared and a cure is dispensed.

Soon enough, he comes upon a heart-broken Denis Wrycroft, standing on the back of his newly-shorn angora goat, a noose around his neck. Crisis averted, comfort given. Javed the joyless refugee is next, and Simpson does what he can. For Laura, silent and broken, her story related by a concerned brother, Simpson can do little but, in seeking shelter and aid for both the girl and the donkey, he comes upon an ex-teacher whose school was closed down, resident in the non-functional hospital that was his last refuge and protest site.

Unsurprisingly after ninety years, Simpson’s quite the cynic, although many would simply classify him as a realist. Macauley uses the various predicaments of those Simpson helps to highlight defects in our various social systems. And despite all their tragic (but, unfortunately, wholly believable) tales, there’s quite a bit of humour.

Macauley has a talent for character description: “Did I mention that Denis Wrycroft, by contrast, was as ugly as a hatful of arseholes? Of course this shouldn’t matter, but naturally it did. He’d fallen out of a tree at the age of three and a half and had his nose flattened back level with his cheekbones. He had very bad skin, few teeth and enormous muttonchop sideburns.”

Macauley’s novella is clever and funny and thought-provoking and a very entertaining read, but it loses half a star of the potential high rating for indulging in the arrogant and annoying editorial affliction/affectation of omitting quote marks for speech.