Brook has a quite a funny relationship with Ganesh, the Hindu god, the elephant being, and he quite likes the Hindu pantheon and mythology. He had the idea of using some ideas from Hindu mythology and expressing them in an artistic way to depict aspects of the life of an Aboriginal person, as, you know, a dynamic flowing series of events rather than, you know, the boring old static idea of the Aborigine in Australian mythology. So that idea of the cycle of life and death and the dynamism of you know, being human, he wanted to inject into a work of art. And he wanted me as the subject and so we started talking about what’s important in my life. And, of course, he knew that I’d written a lot about traditional Aboriginal use of fire. He knew that I had worked at the Argyle diamond mine. And, of course, in Buddhism you have the Diamond Sutra and the diamond represents the multifaceted effect of, well, let’s say, purity, of peace.
So, he’s captured, you know, me juggling all sorts of things, but it’s not just me, you see, it’s a big idea in there. It’s a very big idea. And I like it that he’s taken me as a person and he knows me rather well and so what he’s done is put the two together, my private person, my public persona, then added Kali, and I think undone the conventional mythology about the Aboriginal portrait, the portrait of an Aborigine. And I’m absolutely thrilled with the outcome. It’s so big and bold and colourful and lively. And I think in man y ways he captured more about me that a conventional portrait would.
