If I sometimes thought big-picture Paul had stepped from a Petty cartoon yanking his lever, keen to put three limo windscreens, four diagram-loving Treasury boffins, and eight bodyguards between himself and the grass-roots, these people, my friends, are creatures (and here I return to my theme) whose imaginations are so overdeveloped they've imagined the real Australia out of existence. (Remind me please, if there's time, to sing the praises of Jeff Kennett - at least he and Boorbidge operate with some grasp of where Victoria and Queensland's true interests lie).

They just don't get it do they? As my friend Stephen Sewell once so eloquently put it. To which I add a simple imperative: get real or get out of the life-raft, some of us are trying to build a half-decent country here.

I'll conclude by tidying up this thing about the role of the imagination. My remarks will focus on Japan which I realise is a closed book to many of you, and perhaps frighteningly foreign for that reason. Just open the book. That's all I've done, and, on and off, for two of the last four years, I've lived as a transplant, thrust from the world's most livable city, Melbourne, into the world's most expensive, Tokyo. What this profound experience has done is re-orient and rebuild my theatre-making, almost from the bottom up.

In Japan, what I became is something I haven't been since I was 2: functionally illiterate. There - and it's why the current racism debate so angers me - there I was a migrant who spoke little of the local lingo and had to use my eyes to get the drift of what was occurring around me. Relying, a) on the kindness and civility of the Japanese, and b) on extra-linguistic clues, on body language and so on. To sense what the score was wherever I went, amounted to a formative experience I'd recommend to all playwrights; indeed to anyone connected with the theatre. When every play you see, every film, every bit of television, can only be absorbed visually and with some mysterious sixth sense, you ponder your craft afresh, I tell you. There I was, a name, a talent, someone who at home based his sense of self on the fact that he was a writer. Suddenly this dab hand with words was wordless. The upshot of this freely chosen bout of illiteracy, has been a painful but quite wondrous rolfing of my soul and skills. In effect I've had a visuality transplant, and write these days as much for the eye as the ear, with a richer than ever love of sub-text over text.

But that's me and I'm talking 'us', so I'll give what I want to say a local spin first.

Is there any faintly decent human being in this room who hasn't felt enlarged by the emergence of a strong Aboriginal theatre in this country? If reconciliation is on the move, the theatre has been a part of the vanguard. The Page boys and Bangarra in Sydney, Jack Davis and Richard Walley and an astonishing bunch of talents in Perth, Wesley Enoch and co. in Brisbane, Jimmy Chi in Broome. The story holds in other areas of the arts, in painting, sculpture, in novel and story writing, in fashion, in music. Across the whole cultural spectrum in the course of a mere two, going on three, decades what can only be termed a 'cultural explosion' has occurred. And it's this, my white friends, that much of the rest of the world wants to know about; this, to the outside world - at least culturally - is Australia. Not us on this platform, not most of you out there, but Tom E. Lewis droning down a hardwood stove-pipe.

It is a first-order folly I suggest to think this incredible flowering couldn't have happened sooner. A look at William Barak's paintings, or Tommy McRae's nineteenth century drawings, confirms it. This invisible force, suddenly made visible, has been under our Euro-centric noses since settlement. That's the crime. That's the boat the generations before ours, with a string of notable but all too few exceptions, failed to catch. Well I'm on that boat, being transported wherever it leads, and the ticket's for life.

It's here that I'll praise J. Kennett. He's not a ladder, and he's not a donkey. When he saw Lawler's Doll, that wonderful milestone of a play, turned by the VSO into an opera, he shouted: we should be doing more of this, what's next, Dimboola? Having that reported to me I experienced a surge of hope, because the question after that is surely why didn't the Doll happen as an opera twenty or more years ago? And after that question comes the core issue and it's this: how well has the traditional cultural elite of this country served the real social and cultural interests of Australia? Quake you compradors, quake.

Let's imagine another. What if, not that it happened, but imagine if instead of displaying a fairly rare stroke of genius, a figure like John Sumner had let the MTC pass on the Doll back in John Howard's beloved '50s. Imagine what our profession would be like, how unadvanced we'd be. What if we had to wait for Jean Pierre Mignon's 1988 production to even sight this play? If so, I doubt I'd be a playwright on this platform addressing you today. I tell you straight, only because of Ray's example did I fearlessly go where he rather diffidently minced around about treading. Again I ask the fundamental question, with all the spleen of a Patrick White fuelling my duodenal ulcer, how well have our cultural power brokers served the real interests of this land? It's a question I'd like Jeff, as Victoria's arts minister to ask himself, if and when he has faintly dark nights of the soul viz a viz whither Victoria? Could lead to a few changes of adviser.

What Ray Lawler did was set in train the Australianisation of our theatre - Jack Hibberd, myself, and sundry others joined the long march, and now we've built the fort and nobody's getting us out of it. What the upsurge in indigenous theatre has done is a new and equally potent development, we've begun to aboriginalise our collective imagination. I put to you the same question with regard to Asia.

The truth my friends is this: in the long backyard, in what is the most populous region, and fast becoming the richest part of the globe, there are still extant an extraordinary array of theatrical forms which a few of us (me amongst them) have begun to sample, but which few of the general public, as yet, even dream exist. With the again-honourable exception of some of Truscott's MEFA programming, with Belvoir Street's gestures in this direction, and with some of the work accomplished by Playbox, it remains very early days with regard to the Asianisation of the Australian imagination, but an eager curious embrace of the cultural big-diversity off-shore will, I promise you, make you ask what - or who - kept us in the dark ages for so long.

In 1995 I was in Tokyo listening to a lecture delivered by my friend, the Singaporean playwright Pao Kun. In the '60s, aged 19, he was the first person to read the news on Singapore television. It was the era of the Colombo Plan - and let's never forget how far-sighted some Liberals, probably Casey, were in those days, and how many friends Australia has in the region because of it, Mahathir excepted. PK came to Australia and did the production course at NIDA, probably the first Asian production student to bother the place. For a year and a bit he toured shows throughout New South Wales for the Arts Council, then returned to Singapore.

Having become an elder on the Singapore theatre PK remains a friend to Australia and a sage commentator when it comes to understanding the drama unfolding in our region. In Tokyo that day he described Singaporean multi-culturalism for a Japanese audience, arguing (as we do here) that such societies manage to weave great depth and resilience, plus the wisdom and languages of many lands and many ages, into their social fabric.

He supposed mono-culturalism to be a thing of the past and painted a cautiously optimistic view of the future in which societies made a virtue, and a unity, of diversity.

He also made another major point, which the lumpen know-nothings who govern this country would be well advised to take on board. And they heard it here if (I hope it's the case) there's a spy or two in the audience.

He claimed this to be the age of the full emergence of the Asian individual. Not this crap cliché about the coming Asian century as a merely economic event (true though that is). This is a social and cultural phenomenon, and probably the greatest mass event in the history of the world, and it's happening, folks, on the doorstep, so get real about it or get yourself a permanent seat at the Crown Casino, yank the handle and watch the little lemons devour your dole.

This is street-smart Michael Jackson with bells on, man (he's still popular in Sri Lanka, can you believe it?). This is post-village, post-extended family, post-Confucian humanity. Because no police state could even hope to inspire fear and submission in this many people, only considerable consensus will make for legitimacy. Thus democracy will the rule not the exception.

This is everything the west has ever known about having an industrial base, and then some. This is mega-cities that start where New York, London, Paris and Rome left off. This is probably a new physics, a new chemistry, a new biology, a post-modern science and technology (and a theatre) inflected with a myriad of Asian flavours, taken where that much living, breathing, ultra-educated humanity wants them to go.

Again I say it, get smart, get sorted out on this one 'cos that's where the drama is being played.

Think about it my friends, check your own soul for how much Western arrogance and ignorance you're carrying, because it is utterly surplus to survival requirements. When Pauline Hanson's ancestors, supposing they had an artistic bone in their bodies, were drawing fish (is that with lemon and chips or just vinegar?) on the walls of the caves of Europe (they sure didn't didn't doodle a barramundi on the walls of a cave in Kakadu I know that), old Peking had already become a city of a million souls.

Between 1653 and 1725, when the Shakespeare of Japan lived and worked, principally in Osaka, his town was a port city of one hundred thousand souls, as big as the just-dead Shakespeare's London, and every bit as up to date. Post-village, post-peasant, Japanese groovers were strutting the block. Whereas Shakespeare left us approximately forty plays, Chikamatsu Monzaemon left us one hundred and twenty of them. A goodly sprinkle were city plays, the rest traditional intrigue and feudal style warrior dramas. He is the first notable city playwright of our region and I consider him of greater interest to me than (much as I love them too) Shakespeare or Jonson.

His characters ran soy sauce shops, or traded cooking oil futures, or ran rice depots, or did a bit of smuggling on the inland sea. He invented a genre of play new to this part of the world, in fact new to the world, full stop: the double suicide play, and I've already done a cover version of one of his works, an exercise in artistic bonding I wouldn't even contemplate with an Elizabethan writer. That seems to me my karma, and I'm glad to be enacting it.

There are those in this country who fancy modernisation, city life, factories, giant ports - all the trappings of a civilised existence - were colonialism's gift to Asia; that but for the (somewhat brutal but times were different then) incursions of the West, the East would still be a most benighted place.

Well I know what I know, and it is absolutely otherwise. I know for example that the complex problem of the role of the imagination in the theatre that has so exercised Jim Sharman and myself in these lectures, was a subject addressed by Chikamatsu Monzaemon in the course of his playwrighting life. A record of his aesthetic musings exists, and in an oft-quoted formulation what he insisted was this: that the theatre is neither a fully real nor yet a wholly imaginary domain, but rather the drama, being neither one nor the other, emerges in the gap between the two. This highly sophisticated, felicitously phrased grasp of one of the theatre's time-honoured paradoxes, amounts to saying a play ought to aspire to be a feat that harnesses the laws of gravity, whilst seeming to defy them. His genius, like that of Shakespeare, was to be on the one hand an accurate social historian, on the other the king of artifice. The play is the spark that bridges these points, leaping one way towards naturalism (and prose), the other towards formalism (and poetry). The theatre is at its most luminous when it's a light bulb hung between both these poles, at its feeblest when it clings to only one.

Since he wrote for both the kabuki and the bunraku and contributed greatly to their historic development, small wonder that you get in these two forms a quite paradoxical, inherently dramatic tension. The puppets, mere wood and fabric, came to specialise in feats of the most exquisite naturalism, seeming to pour sake or use a fan or experience the deepest emotions with a fidelity to human gesture and feeling that is mesmerising - mesmerising because there's a mystery there - damn it, why so lifelike when the bloody things are just wood and fabric? In the kabuki, the reverse occurs. There the actors, who you know to be flesh and blood, living breathing entities, practice such an extreme form of physical stylisation that you think their gestures wooden, their stance, their features, so still, so tightly controlled, you often mistake them for dolls.

Ah yes, the drama and dialectics, protagonist/antagonist, text/sub-text, him/her, yin/yang, good/evil - but I've covered evil. I hope it's been good. I called this excursion Ringing Heaven. Can you excuse me? I've gotta go ring Rex and tell him how his lecture went.

John Romeril