[8][7] 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.
[6][5][12] 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.
[citation needed] 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.
He coined the term designer tribalism to criticise Western anthropologists' perpetuation of the noble savage archetype and the "Disneyfication" of Indigenous people's relationship with nature by "forcing" them to continue practicing their ancestral traditions.
[3][2][16][17] He specifically criticises the Māori people for hunting practices that caused the extinction of the moa bird, which he felt was proof that these rituals were being maintained for Western tourism.