Roger Sandall's essays have appeared in a number of international journals, and have also featured on Arts and Letters Daily. In October 2005 Michael Crichton chose his 2001 book The Culture Cult as one of the "five best books" in the past twenty years about the social effects of romantic primitivism (see the Wall Street Journal for 10.29.05).

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He was born in 1933 in Christchurch, New Zealand—an orderly corner of a small and orderly country. But it didn't seem to help. After a stormy and unprofitable time at secondary school in the 1950s he was asked to leave, and spent the next two years working in a sugar refinery, at the meatworks, and on the docks.

A BA in anthropology took him to Columbia University in 1956, but the prospect of further work in this alarming subject made him turn aside and take up film-making. This eventually led to his appointment as Film Director at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1965. He still finds photography an agreeable pastime.

In 1973 he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His writing has appeared in Encounter, Commentary, Sight and Sound, Art International, The New Lugano Review, The Salisbury Review, Merkur, Mankind, Quadrant, Visual Anthropology, Agenda, The New Criterion, The American Interest, and Society.

His guiding philosophy is suggested by the saying that life is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel. Except in the company of politicians he is usually good-natured. He retired from university life in 1993. Happily married, with two grown children, he lives in Sydney at Bondi Beach.

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