Cirrus@Austlit

'Biography of Australian Artist Donald Friend, concentrating on the first 20 years of the artist's life. The book explores the experiences and influences that shaped a significant and controversial figure in Australian Art.

'Ian Britain’s biography brings together rich and revealing detail of Friend’s life and career. There are fresh investigations of the myths, and less glamorous realities, of his ancestral and family background. We are then taken on a journey from his privileged childhood and education in Sydney and rural New South Wales, through his earliest professional training in the city’s art schools, to his first sexual encounters and love affairs. We follow him to Northern Australia, where he engaged with the communities and culture of the Torres Strait Islands, and to the wider world of his student years in the UK and Europe and his spell in West Africa, where he practised as an ethnographer as well as an artist. His years abroad were marked by early career success but also by emotional trauma. On his return to Australia after the outbreak of the Second World War, Friend began to gain wide recognition for his art in his homeland, before enlisting in the army and embarking on his diary. 

'These various narrative strands are deftly set within the framework of turbulent international events and developments: two world wars, a major economic depression, the waning of empire and the burgeoning of modernism in the arts worldwide.' (Publication summary)

'Angus Trumble, who died suddenly last October, was a towering figure with a slight sideways tilt to his head. In his famously dandyish attire he might have stepped out of a Max Beerbohm cartoon, and appropriately so given his expertise in Victorian and Edwardian art. Trumble’s latest, and last, subject also chimes with one of Beerbohm’s earliest literary ventures, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, published in 1894.' (Introduction)

'At age fourteen, Donald Friend declared: "Have done quite a lot of painting lately, and have made up my mind that I shall be an artist. And I shall be famous!"

Friend achieved his aim. He also left behind more than two million words of brilliant, intimate diary entries—one of the greatest acts of autobiography in Australian history.

This is the first single-volume selection of these writings and includes material from the two 'lost' wartime diaries recently unearthed in America by Ian Britain, along with handsome sketches by Friend.

Everyone is here: Russell Drysdale, Margaret Olley, Jeffrey Smart, Robert Helpmann, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes, Mick Jagger and Gore Vidal. Friend's frank and often acerbic reflections trace his career, acquaintances and love affairs—in Australia, England, Italy, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Bali—as well as many of the notable characters and events of the twentieth century.

Most of all, the diaries attest to his ceaseless desire to understand and master his art. Neither love, food, writing, money or music, nor flattery nor sincere admiration nor the company of friends (all the things I am most partial to),' Friend wrote, 'could seduce me from my painting.' Reworked into a chronological narrative, and supplemented by material from correspondence and interviews, The Donald Friend Diaries reveal an extraordinary Australian life.' (From the publisher's website.)