Didgeridoo master Mark Atkins talks jamming and playing with the stars

H My mother was Aboriginal and my father was of Irish Catholic descent. Once my mother got married and moved away from her Yamatji people, she was expected to shun her culture. I went to a Catholic school in Albany, Western Australia, at a time when life was pretty brutal if you were half-white, half-Aboriginal. People would say things like, "You're a half-caste so you've only got half a chance." My aunty and grandfather used to try to teach me some of the traditions of their people. When I was about 20, I went to a funeral and my uncle gave me the didgeridoo to play. I had played it here and there since I was four, but I realised then that I wanted to really know how to play it and to fully understand my Aboriginal roots.

By 1989, I was in my early 30s, had four kids and my life was pretty much on a collision course. I decided I wanted to pursue a career as a musician. I loaded up the car with the family and the dog and drove across the Nullarbor Plain to Tamworth, a town in New South Wales. It took us over a week to drive there. Tamworth is known for its music festival and I felt instantly at ease. I joined a band. I was a drummer but they wanted to incorporate the didg sound. As with a lot of bands, there was a fair bit of politics, so I looked at different avenues. In Sydney, I met jazz supremo James Morrison and he helped put me on a different path, playing with a wider variety of musicians. A lot of the soundtracks in Australian movies and commercials that feature the didg are the result of my performances.

I first took my didgeridoos to Japan in 1992. There were only a handful of people playing them there then. Now there are over 50,000 players. I enjoy big concerts, but I also enjoy just jamming. I took my didgeridoo into a Hong Kong music store the other day. The guy there had never heard one played before and asked me if he could try. He really liked it. Even when you are performing with something like the London Philharmonic Orchestra, what is great is the way you bounce off each other. You look at each other afterwards and grin from ear to ear. I've also performed with Sinead O'Connor, Philip Glass, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. There's always total mutual respect when you perform with people like this.

Playing didgeridoo is like doing yoga or meditation. It's all about breathing. You get in the zone and it takes you to a different place. I practise a technique called circular breathing. It's kind of like breathing out under water. It's not easy to learn, but is useful for a number of instruments (breathing in through the nose while pushing air out of the mouth allows wind instrument players to give a continuous tone). Louis Armstrong came to Australia to learn this technique in 1958. Jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Herbie Hancock also learnt it. I hold the record for doing it the longest (51 minutes).

If I ever get homesick, I don't notice it when I am playing. Most of the didgeridoos I've been travelling around Asia with recently are a couple of hundred years old, but many in Australia are thousands of years old. Aboriginal people are nomadic, so these didgeridoos have just been left in their place for centuries.

There are many parallels in Aboriginal and Chinese culture, such as respecting elders. When I visit Asia, people really enjoy the stories. Hong Kong people especially ask a lot of questions. They get it. Our stories go back to the beginning of time, the Dreamtime. They are passed down (orally) from ancestors and not written down. When I am in India, I see many people who look as though they are Aboriginal. We believe that the land mass that is Australia was once part of India. If you look on a map, the top of Australia and (the east coast) of India fit together like a jigsaw.