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dossiers. While it is not correct to say, as Haltof does, that Billy is destroyed by his
disillusionment with his puppets (Haltof, 49), Kwan does ignore (consciously or not) that fact
that by abusing his puppets he is abusing his own perception of self. Indeed, the act of
destroying the wayang puppets will mark Billy Kwan’s triumph of spirit over desire; he
relinquishes his masterly control over them, and recognises that they are but the illusion and
their symbolic shadows the reality. Billy Kwan’s error is not that he becomes disillusioned by
his creation, but that he seeks to remove himself from his prejudiced world and gain a sense of
absolute freedom through his power-oriented ego. When he becomes aware of his power game
and chooses to end it, then he has achieved the essential wisdom of Krishna’s Supreme
Utterance, which can today be reformulated as follows:
The modern individual, paradoxically speaking, only achieves a degree of
freedom when he or she renounces the illusion of complete independence, and
accepts, along with ancient and premodern humanity, that he or she exists in
relationship with an Other who must be propitiated, served, and recognised.
(Tacey, 186)
Kwan’s dilemma is that he is one of the ‘puppets’ in his own dossiers, and he is consequently
unable to free himself from his largely self-imposed bondages.
Cookie believes that, ‘since his race was double and his status ambiguous’, Billy choose
to multiply his masks indefinitely. Billy agrees with this assessment, telling Hamilton ‘I am
Gemini—the same sign as Sukarno. He and I have two faces—the hard and the sentimental’
(YLD, 82). Koch’s ubiquitous theme of doubleness is grounded in his belief ‘that we contain
within us the seed of other, alternative natures’, but which might be exaggerated as ‘a product
of the cultural schizophrenia’ which is part of Australia’s inheritance (Thieme, 1987, 456), and
never more evident than in the character of Billy Kwan. He is on the surface ‘a comic type
with unusually malicious flaws in his nature’. As ‘a dwarf Buddha in a Hawaiian shirt’ (YLD,
71), he is ‘the personification of a ridiculous contradiction’. But as the writer of his dossiers,
the dalang of his secret shadow world, he is ‘a many-faceted, deep-souled, sensitive, highly
complex though highly eccentric man’, who gets caught up in the gathering intensity of the
world he tries to observe and control (Cowie, 89-90). Sukarno, like Kwan, is ‘a small man
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