KERRY 0' Brien of the ABC's 7.30 Report had kept her waiting 20 minutes and I was determined to show her that some of us had better manners.

So there I was, five minutes ahead of our scheduled meeting time, sitting in the foyer of the Park Hyatt, waiting for Yoko Ono.

At 11.3Oam, dead on time, she materialises, a slight figure looking even slighter beside her grey-suited bodyguard, a nice young bloke roughly the size of a Portaloo.

She knows just which buttons to press in an interview. Starting with unqualified praise for this city. "I am so lucky to be here. I never expected it to be so beautiful. I love the water, I love the light."

Her palpable enthusiasm is understandable. Outside the sun is glittering on the waters of Campbells Cove, bouncing off the tiles on the shells of the Opera House, the sky is clear, the air is sharp and salty.

Ono surveys the scene through her lilac-tinted glasses. "If I lived in a place like this, I'd sit around all day enjoying the view. It's very conducive to meditation. I wouldn't want to be going out to clubs."

Not that she goes clubbing in New York City where she lives in the apartment in the famous Dakota building on the upper west side, the one she shared with John Lennon, the one outside which he was shot. Some people can't continue to live in places associated with personal tragedy. Not Ono. "It's my home. You don't leave because someone died there. I would never move out."

There she rises at 7am, works in her office dealing with Lennon's legacy, pursuing her own art projects. Sometimes she walks across Central Park for lunch in a Japanese or Italian restaurant. She is most definitely not on the Manhattan social merry-go-round.

"I am not very sociable. I don't get excited about cocktail parties. I don't like dressing up in haute couture. I like jackets, jeans and T-shirts."

She is wearing just that, a black T-shirt, black jeans, a buff linen jacket, black designer runners. The mauve sunnies enliven this neutral ensemble, draw one's attention to the intensity of her gaze. Her eyes and enthusiasm seem more appropriate to a delighted child, not a 66-year-old woman.

She's not too worried about everyone knowing her age and tells me how her secret leaked out.

Back in the late sixties, just after she made her famous Film Number Four showing a series of bare male and female backsides, she was interviewed by a toffy British journalist who said that if she wanted people to be honest and bare all, she in turn should be honest about her age.

"I was. I told her I was 34 and the press has been counting ever since." As an afterthought she adds "I should have said I was 24."

She shouldn't worry.

SHE exudes youthful-ness, an insouciant charm that make easy to see why John Lennon fell for her.

I raise the subject of Lennon gingerly but she is happy to talk about him.

"I don’t mind being still associated with him," she says in that quiet but authoritative voice.

"Something tells me he's still with me."

When they married, she was demonized as the weirdo who caused the break-up of the Beatles.

"The public thought they owned him", says Yoko. "They felt I had taken him away from them. It had something to do with me being an Asian woman as well. It wasn't so long after the war and in Britain lots of people wrote to him saying he ought to watch out or she'll slit your throat while you're asleep."

JOHN and Yoko's first years together involved a battle of wills. She was more combative. He had his celebrity and she wanted hers. She tried hard to keep her independence. Eventually she gave up fighting. "Now I just miss him. I cherish his memory and I do my work." Is she happy that Imagine is not only back in the charts but has become what a British writer describes as "a non-denominational anthem for world humanism."? Behind those mauve glasses her eyes sparkle and she clutches her throat with joy. Of course she is. "Isn't that GREAT!" she cries.

Yoko likes that word "great". She thinks the 2000 Biennale that has lured her to Sydney for the first time is great too. "The organisers have been very courageous. You don't just get the names'. They have chosen lots of young people and that's great."

Her contribution to the proceedings, Ex It, an installation of one hundred plain wooden coffins from each of which sprouts a tree, has, as she puts it, "been around".

Created in 1998, it has been seen in Mexico and other countries throughout South America, in Jerusalem, in Valencia in Spain and in New York City. In each city in which it is shown, she selects a local variety of tree. In Valencia, the coffins spouted orange trees. Here in Sydney she’s chosen paperbarks, the native melaleucas. She has never seen a mature one so I tell her about them, about the palimpsest of bark, the writhing shapes of the trunks. That leads us inevitably to Aboriginal art.

"I've seen a lot of it in New York and even bought a few but the works at the MCA are totally different," she says. "The paintings on bark are more delicate than those on canvas. So are the Mimi figures. They're great."

IT SEEMS that in Yoko's case, enthusiasm begets action.

In between appearing at innumerable Biennale bashes, delivering a keynote address to a capacity crowd at the Opera House, awaiting Kerry's pleasure and dining at the nearby Imperial Peking Harbourside Restaurant ("The food there is GREAT!") she's managed to get to a gallery or two and acquire a few examples to ship back home to the Dakota.

I mention the cultural cringe. "In Japan it was just like that right up to the end of the 50s. We needed someone from outside to tell us if anything produced locally was good or not. People had to have some critic peering over their shoulder to tell them what to feel."

We should get over our cringe, she advises. She is becoming more intense. There is more than a hint of Peace and Love and Flower rower in her voice:

"Instead of having negative feelings you should count our blessings. Don't worry about the politicians. They'll change. Everything changes and it's fine."

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH Saturday, May 27, 2000

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