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Donald Friend was one of twentieth-century Australia’s most celebrated artists. In more recent years, his artistic achievements have been overshadowed by the revelations in his diaries of his sexual relations with minors. Those diaries, written systematically from the time he was 27 until close to the end of his life, provide the most comprehensive and candid record of his later career, and they have been published in various editions. Records of his early years, on the other hand, are fragmentary and widely scattered, and yet it is here that we can discover and best understand what went into his making – as man and artist.
Ian Britain’s biography brings together all kinds of rich and revealing detail about this formative period 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 Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands, where he engaged with the communities and culture of the local indigenous inhabitants, and then on his first trip abroad. In London he attended the Westminster Art School, had a solo exhibition in Cork Street and moved in the circles of Nina Hamnett, the Bloomsbury Group and Aleister Crowley, but he also suffered from an emotional trauma that prompted his escape to West Africa, where he spent almost a year and a half, practising as an ethnographer and political adviser in addition to his artistic pursuits. 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.
Author: Ian Britain
Large format paperback with flaps Published 15 August 2023 436 pages
Ian Britain is a cultural historian, biographer, and former editor of Australia’s leading literary magazine, Meanjin. His previous books include Once An Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James. Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes and (co-edited with Brenda Niall) The Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays. He has contributed articles and reviews on painting, film, theatre, opera, fiction and history to a range of periodicals, including Australian Book Review, Studio International and The Times Literary Supplement. He edited The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles and Confessions of an Australian Artist for Text Publishing in 2010.