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konfrontasi home to the reader,who is confronted with the fact that the meaning of ‘meaning’
is about as solid as the Cheshire Cat.
Just as the Cat reckons that he is mad since the dog is not, Billy Kwan weighs evidence
of all he is not, and arrives at the conclusion, ‘So I must be Australian, mustn’t I?’ (YLD, 10).
Kwan’s ideological and spiritual tendencies are just as fluid as physical identity. He professes
to usually subscribe to a Christian moral point of view, meaning ‘the view that you don’t think
about the so-called big issues, or changing the system, but you deal with whatever misery is in
front of you—and the little bit of good that you do adds its light to the sum of light’ (YLD, 22).
Kwan is Roman Catholic, but says that he is considering converting to Islam. He tells Cookie,
‘Lately I have a feeling the Church has spent its passion’; and, ‘the Methos in Sydney used to
invite me to little suburban gatherings to show how broadminded they were with their tame
Chinese—but they’d get uncomfortable. They only like multi-racialism in theory, poor
darlings.’ He cites several reasons for his possible move to Islam, ‘No priest cast. Equality
for all believers under God.’ He gets to the point then, however, when he mentions, ‘And they
have force. That’s what the communists in this country underestimate—the fury of the
Muslims at being told there’s no God.’ (YLD, 95-96)
Kwan would be as difficult a Muslim as Catholic, however, as he is really an animist.
Cookie asks him if he believes in the supernatural, and Kwan answers that there is a spirit near
his bungalow who moves about in the garden and even ‘came in one night, and knocked some
bottles of developer off the shelf.’ He explains their existence, with the circular thinking
typically found in Alice, by the presence of a belief in them. ‘Where animistic religion is still
strong, you’re obviously going to have a lot of them hanging about. Demons can’t come
without invitation, can they?’ (YLD, 96)
Billy Kwan’s flexible spiritual bent parallels his fluid identity. His extensive files,
which Cookie terms his ‘indexomania’, is an attempt by Kwan to understand everything and
everyone around him, and the point is to arrive at a knowledge of himself. In his files on
dwarfs, he tries to justify his physical condition by putting on the trappings of mythology and
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