Sandall was finishing a
librarianship course and taking photographs of the
protests at
Berkeley when
MOMA's
Willard Van Dyke recommended him to the
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) as a "one-man film unit." He replaced
Peter Coleman as the editor of
Quadrant from March 1988 to January 1989, after which he quit due to a public political clash and difficulty in drumming up interest among writers. He retired from teaching in 1993. In 2001, he published
The Culture Cult with an American firm after comments he had made at a conference years prior were "grossly distorted in a[n Australian] newspaper report." In 2003, the book won him a
Centenary Medal. He named Margaret Mead,
Ruth Benedict,
Robert Owen, and
John Humphrey Noyes as part of the "culture cult" that kept designer tribalism alive. A quote from
The Culture Cult reads: "If your traditional way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is 'rich', 'complex', and 'sophisticated', how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a 'Gone Fishing' sign and head for the beach?" He also felt that "repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints" were inherent within primitive Indigenous cultures. ==Personal life==