Dr Britain’s redacted version does a service to Friend and his readers alike. The abridgment is severe. The important Merioola period when Friend lived with the likes of Loudon Sainthill and Justin O’Brien in a rambling colonial mansion, reduced in 1946 to a boarding house,  is shortened from eighty pages to six. A compelling narrative is the result which the cumbersome NLA volumes lacked. Indeed, Dr Britain’s ‘essential Donald Friend’ functions as a useful primer to the full diary.

The book is timely because Friend has become a fugitive presence in most Australian public collections. His drawings and other works on paper are generally his best and reflect vividly his neo-Romantic temperament. His more ambitious oil paintings with their mix of decoration and narrative appear to be irredeemably unfashionable. On a visit to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1983, Friend admired the Mark Rothko, hated a contemporary Australian show, and lamented ‘that of my own art there was not a trace’.

The Diaries are Friend’s masterpiece, a Gesamtkunstwerk in miniature. The drawings which ripple through them are among his very best, and the marriage of word and text quite magical. There is nothing else quite like them in the literature of Australian art – the frank revelations of an artist central to his times, an ardent homosexual, a wanderer and a penitent with a gift for self-scrutiny and self-dramatisation:

Few books, no music and no money. And long, long hours waiting for it to be a reasonable time to call on someone, just sitting with a ghastly feeling of loss and loneliness in the heart. The tiring flagstones of the street, walked in weariness that makes near seem so far and far seem an ultimate of pain and aching legs merging into an infinity of boredom and indifference.

So the young Friend mopes at twenty-three, down and out in London.

The parabola of Friend’s career is unlike any of his contemporaries. Only Ian Fairweather had a more peripatetic one. Most know of Friend’s Bali period (1968–79), where he became a Conradian figure, known as Tuan Friend like Lord Jim.But from his mid-twenties on he had extended stays in exotic places, in West Africa (1938–39) and in Sri Lanka (1957–61), as well as visits to London and Italy.

What drove him on so restlessly was a longing for Arcadia, a place of beauty, strangeness, stimulus, and sexual gratification. His unsatisfactory affairs in Australia stand in sharp contrast to easygoing relations in exotic places. At Merioola he fell in love with a seventeen-year-old art student, Colin Brown. But within months Friend acknowledges ‘a certain amount of misery to balance my happiness with Colin. He is not at all in love, nor pretends to be.’ Three months later, Friend lectures himself:

You’ve got to get out in the world and run about the face of the earth and find somebody new. A nice simple black boy … Donald, don’t go oozing your saccharine soul sentimentally all over the blameless breasts of the native heathen – just go to bed with them … They like you. They think you’re terrific. They’d enjoy a spot of ‘tumble-in-the-hibiscus-bush’.

Dr Britain is unsparing in detailing Friend’s shameless attraction to black- and brown-skinned boys, just as he neither underscores nor glosses over their youthfulness. It would be anachronistic to describe Friend’s proclivities as ‘sexual tourism’, but there is an unnerving sense of exploitation in these encounters. At seventy-three, holed up in Sydney, Friend mused on further travel to Tonga: ‘a short explorative trip where I might rent a bungalow and have a few natives to tend me …’

Bali was the final, climactic Arcadia, ‘the people all smiling, singing at their work … the garden green and growing, looks superbly like a Douanier Rousseau’. The local population honoured him, and international café society lionised him. With more than a hint of name-dropping, he faithfully records visits from the Gortons, Robert Helpmann (whom he gently mocks, calling him ‘Sir Robert’ every half hour and ‘Bobbie’ in between), Mick Jagger, and the duke and duchess of Bedford. The latter three are described as ‘brilliant guests’ and must have assuaged Friend’s unconcealed snobbery.

Donald Friend, Page of diary, with self-portrait, 1943, National Library of Australia

Donald Friend had a gift for friendship. The most important of these was with Russell Drysdale. They met in 1940, when they were both in their twenties. They had similar backgrounds, being sons of landed fathers, and both were familiar with Paris and London in the 1930s. Early on, Friend singles out Drysdale’s art: ‘His paintings are the most Australian, in the most beautiful sense, that have ever been painted here.’ Sidney Nolan would use almost identical terms to describe Drysdale, with an ironic edge. Friend interestingly reveals a rivalry between the two, detecting ‘a sort of resentment (a jealousy) in him [Drysdale] towards Sid Nolan. So in a way he does not admit to himself he is competing with Nolan, whom he does not regard very highly as an artist.’

The pair visited Hill End together in 1947. Out of that visit came Drysdale’s magical Sofala, done ‘in a frenzy of painting quite unusual with him’. Friend pays the work generous tribute and forlornly notes that ‘it makes me feel so strangely the inadequacy of my own, which lacks grandeur and discipline and … looks silly and slovenly’. He records, compassionately, the twin blows that struck Drysdale in his fifties: the suicide of his son, Tim, in 1962, and that of his wife Bon the following year. After Drysdale’s second marriage to Maisie Purves Smith, the two friends drifted apart. Friend went to Drysdale’s funeral in 1981 and feels ‘the bony finger beckoning me’.

The following month Friend reflects extensively on Drysdale, the man and his art. It is one of the shrewdest estimates of his gifts and of their limitations. He notes the strangely dilatory quality of Drysdale’s practice. Friend characterises Drysdale’s work sympathetically, but his shrewdest insights are of the man:

When the cruel blows of life at last infiltrated his guard and smote him with terrible realities … the deaths of Tim and Bon – he was quite destroyed. After that he was a mere shell containing a personality. A personality still of kindness and generosity and loyalty to all his friendships, but one which exhibited to us mostly mere tricks of appearance and manners of speaking … he painted nothing at all for years at a time, so that every time he unwillingly returned to paint a canvas, he had to relearn the mystery. Naturally, that meant going back over old ground. There was no going forward.

By contrast, his friendship with Jeffrey Smart is breezily bitchy. In 1950 the relationship survived Friend’s taking away Attilio Guarracino, a young, impoverished, Ischian fisherman, from Smart, who was much enamoured of the boy. Friend acknowledges the accomplishment of Smart’s work and his knowledge of art when they go on the Piero trail together. Later ‘a plump and prosperous’ Smart, ‘indulging in the profoundly cultured pomposity which is his “high society manner”’, irks Friend. When Smart turns up unexpectedly at a Margaret Olley opening, dispensing ‘positively ducal greetings’, Friend finds that ‘his Proustian attitudinizing has become a genuine part of his character, a perfect defence against insecurity’.

Friend must have possessed great charm when he needed or wanted it, for his circle extended across the spectrum from the kindly James Fairfax to Robert Hughes – ‘a spiky, nervous, irritable young fellow … impatient, bad-tempered, brilliant’; from the actor Peter Finch, briefly a lover and fellow hobo, to Margaret Olley, whom Friend seriously considered marrying at one stage. Curiously, little of that charm finds its way into the diaries, as it does in, say, Delacroix’s Journal.

What plagued Friend internally was an uncertainty about his place in the firmament of Australian art. In early 1944 he caught by chance a commentator on the ABC calling ‘the Holy Trinity of Australian art, Dobell, Drysdale and Donald Friend … We all felt very famous and happy.’ A decade later he sensed that the tide was turning against his form of Romanticism. The emergence of John Olsen was initially greeted with dismay and hostility, although he ended up liking the man and his art. During his lifetime, Friend was never without admirers. At his final exhibition at Australian Galleries in 1987, he sold two-thirds of the paintings on opening night: ‘The greatest success I’ve ever had to date.’ Obscurity, fortunately, was his posthumous fate.

Looking at the drawings from the diaries, I am struck by how similar they are in quality and timbre to the work of his contemporary British neo-Romantics such as John Minton, John Craxton and the early Michael Ayrton. After years of neglect, they now have their secure place in the story of modern British painting. And so it must surely be for Donald Friend. Already he seems to be outlasting William Dobell, whom he revered. It says a lot for Friend that one has to go to the highest reaches of Australian art to find a draughtsman to equal him.

One odd and off-note is struck in this otherwise absorbing and valuable book: extreme banality in the footnotes. How can an editor as experienced as Ian Britain or a publisher as sophisticated as Text believe that a reader of Donald Friend’s Diaries needs to have identified van Gogh (‘Vincent van Gogh (1851–1890) Dutch painter.’), Michelangelo, Gauguin, Modigliani, Monet, Streeton etc.?

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010