With the publication of the sumptuously produced third volume of The Diaries of Donald Friend, the grandly conceived concept of the National Library of Australia is three-quarters of the way to completion. This is not just the portrait of the artist in his own words, but through his drawings as well. Together they are proof that Friend was not only one of the most eloquent and acrid of commentators on the social and artistic worlds in which he uneasily lived, but also among Australia’s leading 20th-century artists.
Astutely edited by Paul Hetherington, the diaries cover 17 years of Friend’s life (1949-66) on three continents. There are two trips to Italy, a five-and-a-half-year sojourn in Ceylon, intermittent visits to the artists’ retreat at Hill End that he did so much to popularise, and an attempt to settle in Paddington in the 1960s. In this period there were diverse friendships, for example, and to stay with alliteration awhile, with James Fairfax, Ian Fairweather and Peter Finch. As Friend moved from his mid-30s to beyond his 50th birthday, one aspect of his life remained lamentably constant. Hetherington comments that ‘almost inevitably, it seemed, his love became too claustrophobic an experience for his lovers’. Friend’s problem—which Hetherington might have identified as also the dramatic and emotional core of Shakespeare’s sonnets, was that of ‘the ageing man who is attracted to but cannot control, or finally possess, the youthful boy’.
Volume Three presents a succession of such boys. Some are anonymous, such as ‘a strange dangerous tough little sailor from Aberdeen’. Others, such as Attilio (sketched ‘Sulking’), he of the ‘Neapolitan guttersnipe soul’, would become long-term fixtures in Friend’s life. The warnings of well-wishers were never heeded. One by one the youths treated Friend as the ‘rich fool’ that he despised in himself. Usually they began as his models. Drawings converted them into cash which Friend returned with interest. He was clear-eyed about his entrancement and entrapment, depicting himself as ‘a middle-aged pederast who’s going to seed’, but unable to change. The last lover to whom we are introduced, the loathsome thief Stewart Holman, is memorably described by Friend as being like winning ‘some appallingly demanding and infuriatingly inconvenient thing in a raffle, such as a desert, or an angry crocodile’.
While periodically he lacerates himself as the creature of ‘long, unintelligent and unhappy obsession’, so Friend is unsparing of others. Hetherington remarks that even the diaries’ gossip is