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QMNQMNQMNeasy because you don't belong to any castes. But you are most likely to haveyour own caste so there is no effect, and it's very easy to live in India becauseof this, but your behaviour is more or less how your caste behaves.What about when you came back to Australia, did you find it difficult afterseven years to settle into Australian society?I remember getting off at the airport at Melbourne, because that is whereI was living at the time, and settling back into one of these modern cars andthinking it's so luxurious man, and then that it was a different world thenbecause since I was away from Australia for seven years things had reallychanged, and in India they had an old Ambassador car which was a MorrisMajor or something, which is a sort of rattle trap type car. So this was ataste of lUXUry and then it was hot water and things like that. But what reallyhit me was the overwhelming materialism of Australia. Like you go into asupermarket and if you have been out of the environment for a while it issort of a physical shock - you have six brands of baked beans. How doyou choose which brand of baked beans you want because in India you eitherhad one brand of baked beans and usually you could not afford western foodanyway, and so I used to run out of supermarkets, I couldn't go in, only Ihad a wife then, my first wife, and she was sort of an angry lady and sheforced me into these situations, otherwise I wouldn't have ventured in thesefor the rest of my life, so it was a definite culture shock.In hindsight what was the most striking image you retain in your mind aboutyour travels and religious instruction in India?I think it was my contact with my Tibetan teacher and I will never forgethim, also the Tibetan people who I consider had one of the best culturesin the world and one of their major exports, for example, were books, andthen again the materialism wasn't very much there at all. Also, society wasnot so open to oppression and power hungry people as other societies are,and Tibetan people were reasonably very happy and this was the case in mostBuddhist countries. So I think Buddhism sort of has a beneficial influenceon societies such as Burma, Thailand and so on, and this is seen in that onceupon a time people were happy, but the Western influence came in and theyusually destroyed very quickly.As an Aboriginal writer in a largely white literary world, did you feel thatyou were ever placed on a patronising show piece pedestal by critics andacademics?Well there is a problem, if you are an Aboriginal writer, that you never knowhow good you are because either you are being patronised by someone oryou are being put down by other ones, so you are caught in between, andthis gives a certain kind of stress in, say, your writing, especially if you arecritical, that you have to sort of judge how good your work is. There wasa problem with the Song Circle of Jacky when it had a readers report fromthe Aboriginal Arts Board, and there was quite a few criticism there, andI think they were invalid, in fact. Certain adjectives were going to be deleted,like to the idealistic spinning wheel which refers to the congress party in Indiaand also Gandhian philosophy, so that work idealistic had to remain,otherwise it didn't make sense and these are comments I didn't accept at all.But then again Dr Wooreddie, my third novel, which has been praised bylots of people, I dislike, but people tell me they like it best.And again, academically, they always want the token Aborigine around,anyway, and so I think you more or less have to accept that position if youare going to do any good, and use the tokenism aspect of it seeing theAborigines are sort of hunters to survive, and get ahead and make other people86 WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989