Author: Lou Klepac
Date: 2016-10-29T23:00:00+00:00
Description: A beautifully printed publication that, for the first time, brings to the public a representative selection of the extraordinary drawings from the Donald Friend diaries held in the National Library of Australia. Witty, moving and evocative, these drawings chronicle the brilliance of one of Australia's finest draughtsmen over four decades. The volume is an essential purchase for all lovers of Australian art and culture.

The Genius of Donald Friend

Drawings from the Diaries 1942-1989

Selected and Introduced by Lou Klepac

National Library of Australia Canberra 2001

TVM Edition

2016

Published with the Assistance of the Morris West Trust Fund

Published by the National Library of Australia Canberra ACT 2600 Australia

© National Library of Australia and Lou Klepac 2000

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

The genius of Donald Friend: drawings from the diaries 1942-1989

ISBN 0642 107254.

1.    Friend, Donald, 1915-1989-Illustrations.

2.    Friend, Donald, 1915-1989-Diaries.

I. Klepac, Lou, 1936-. II. National Library of Australia. III. Tide.

741.994

Produced for the National Library of Australia by The Beagle Press

Designer: Catherine Martin

Publisher's editor: Kathryn Favelle

Printed by Lamb Printers Pty Ltd

The National Library acknowledges the support of the Trustees

of the Trusts of the Will of the late Donald Friend.

Unless otherwise indicated, all of the images and items

reproduced in this publication are held in the collections

of the National Library of Australia.

Page 1

Diary 1987 to 19—, Title Page
pen and ink and watercolour; 33.5 x 24.1 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

Front Endpaper

Work Table with Donald Friend drawing with the Right Hand,

1989 Photograph by Michel Laurence

Back Endpaper

[Donald’s Farewell] 19 December 1988 (see page 26)

pen and ink; 40.3 x 26.5 cm

(MS5959, item48)

Contents

7      Foreword

Jan Fullerton

9      Introduction

Lou Klepac

30    Biographical Notes

33    Drawings from the Diaries 1942-1989

142   List of Plates

144   Select Bibliography

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jan Fullerton

Introduction by Lou Klepac

Notes

Biographical Notes

Drawings from the Diaries 1942 ― 1989

List of Plates

Select Bibliography

National Library of Australia, Canberra Pictorial collection

Foreword     by  Jan Fullerton

Director-General, National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia is responsible, along with other Australian libraries, for collecting, preserving and making accessible the documentary heritage of Australia. Since 1901, the acquisition of major formed collections, numerous smaller purchases and gifts from private benefactors have contributed to the creation of an extensive and unique collection of diverse material relating to the history and stories of Australia.

Among the Library’s most treasured possessions are the diaries of renowned Australian artist Donald Friend. These came into our collection through the generous donation of the artist — on the advice and encouragement of Lou Klepac. Lou first discovered these diaries while researching his monograph on Russell Drysdale and quickly realised their immense value as works of art and as cultural records. It is most fitting, therefore, that Lou provides us with an introduction to this publication that outlines his response to the drawings and his personal connection to the diaries.

Spanning more than 40 years, the diaries document in fascinating detail the life of an extraordinary draughtsman and artist, and the world he inhabited. Through drawings, anecdotes, letters from friends, and recollections of passing moments, Donald Friend’s diaries are both an intensely personal record and a history of Australia’s cultural life during the latter half of the twentieth century. They also provide an account of one of Australia’s most interesting artistic friendships — that of Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale.

The Genius of Donald. Friend: Drawings from the Diaries 1942—1989 publishes for the first time many of the witty, entertaining and extraordinary drawings Friend created in the diaries’ pages. This shall be followed next year by the publication of the edited diaries revealing Friend’s honest, and often self-mocking, written account of his life. The diaries show that Friend was both a remarkable artist and a writer of great ability. I am delighted that the Library is able to make this material accessible to the community through this and future publications — so realising Friend’s wish that his diaries be edited and published.

Donald Friend in Russell Drysdales barn-studio, Albury 1942

Photograph by Russell Drysdale (1912—1981) Private collection

Introduction     by  Lou Klepac

Donald Friend’s diaries are a remarkable achievement. Not only do they span a long and important period, 1942—1989, and chronicle his colourful life through episodes, recollections, reflections and letters, but they also contain wonderful drawings and watercolours.

Donald Friend’s long and close connection with Russell Drysdale, intimately revealed in Friend’s diaries, offers perhaps the best way to delve into an understanding of both of these remarkable personalities.

I am at Hill End for a weekend visit with Jeff Smart and Tim [Drysdale], It is more of a pilgrimage than a visit.

So wrote Russell Drysdale to Donald Friend on 16 August 1959. Drysdale got the keys and opened up Donald’s cottage.

The cottage is beginning to show the ravages of time ... rats have been at work ... I’m removing your private: diaries to Sydney. I think they are too valuable and personal to leave under the roof.

Donald Friend was still in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where he had gone in January 1957 with Tim Drysdale. Friend had hoped that he might be able to ‘instil a few principles and some worldly experience’ into Tim, who had shown signs of disturbing behaviour. But things did not work out and, in June 1957, Drysdale came to collect Tim on the way to London, where he spent his only long sojourn overseas painting the works for his 1958 Leicester Galleries exhibition.

Drysdale’s pilgrimage to Hill End pinpoints the moment of separation of their individual careers. Until then, theirs had been one of the most profound and creatively rich friendships that two artists could have experienced. Donald’s diaries up to that time are essentially a dialogue of this friendship, a chronicle of the life of the time, the people who came and went, and the events which influenced their lives at a significant and exciting moment in the history of twentieth-century Australian painting.

Although the precocious young Donald Friend did write a diary in 1929, 1930 and 1931[1], the mature diaries begin in 1942, at almost the very moment when this friendship is established. It provides a structure and a recurring theme to the entries. Their association was important to both, but especially to Friend, young, rather arrogant, spoiled and totally out of place in an army environment. To him, Russell Drysdale and his family became the security and the welcome escape which he needed.

This morning I got back to camp at 4.30 from a hectic beer and swing party with Tas and Bon Drysdale. 6.30 reveille: a roll call, a visit to the Regimental Aid Post for aspirin: no breakfast, instead, eight Benzedrine tablets to keep me awake.

So runs the entry on 28 October 1942.

Their friendship evolved from each artist’s need for someone with whom to share thoughts, discuss ideas, talk about books and painting.

Russell Drysdale (1912-1981)

Donald
pen and ink drawing in Volume I of

Friend’s diary, ‘Desastres de la Guerra’,

inscribed by Friend ‘1st September 1942’ (MS5959, item 8)

ALBURY

In 1942 Donald Friend enlisted in the army, was assigned to an artillery training regiment in Sydney as a gunner, and was posted to Hume Camp near Albury. The Drysdales, who had come to live in Sydney at the end of 1940, had moved back to Albury after the Japanese attack in Sydney Harbour in mid — 1942. In Albury, Drysdale had set up a studio in an old barn and had begun to paint a remarkable series of works inspired by the life around him, such as Home Leave, Albury Platform, Country Brownout, Albury Station and Local VDC Parade.

The two artists found themselves like outcasts on a desert island, and discovered that they had much in common. Both came from privileged backgrounds; both were fine draughtsmen with exceptional talent; and both were committed to the contemporary cause in a country where traditional art ruled supreme.

On 1 September 1942 Drysdale made a sketch of Donald in his tight style of drawing, a style which after their meeting evolved into a freer, more natural manner. In the diary entry written the day before the ‘beer and swing party’ at Drysdale’s, which must have been a farewell party, Donald bemoans the imminent loss of his new friends:

Tas and Bonny are going to Sydney soon. No more painting, no more talking, no more amusing Bon, no more boogie woogie.

27 October 1942

The Japanese invasion scare over, the Drysdales had decided to move back to Sydney. But the friendship continued by way of correspondence and weekend visits. All through the remainder of the war, the Drysdales’ home in Sydney was a home from home for Donald Friend. He got on well with Bon and the two noisy children who adopted him into their immediate family.

Drysdale was a keen photographer and with a time exposure recorded Friend and himself in the barn studio. On the same day he also took a memorable photograph of Donald, which captures this individual and unique artist, free for the moment, but due back in camp and the unbearable army life.

Donald Friend (left) and Russell Drysdale in the barn-studio,

Albury 1942 Photograph by Russell Drysdale

Private collection

‘Desastres De La Guerra’

It is through the diaries that much information about Drysdale is now known. Not only does Drysdale confide his thoughts about art and his activities in the studio, but he also tells what is going on in the art world in Sydney and further afield. Thus, Drysdale’s letters have been preserved, though Friend’s have been lost.

The diaries, written in ordinary exercise books, which Donald titled ‘Desastres de la Guerra’, were sent to the Drysdales for safekeeping as they were finished, Drysdale being free to read them as he pleased. A curious result occurred from this:

By the way this will probably amuse you. After you left I read the volume of Les Desastres which you left with me, and coming to the passage in which you described the Albury Railway Station, and likened it to my painting of it, I was given pause to think as they say. I felt that by destroying it I had somehow let you down in that descriptive passage. I felt quite a cad. So I decided to repaint it — do it bigger and better. I’ve finished it — 30x24 [inches, about 75 x 60 cm] and showed it as it is at night. The colour scheme is black with sombre blues and orange-reds in the sky, with the campanile dirty pink and the facade a peculiar colour I got by scraping the colour right down and drawing in the indications of the doorway shadows and the architectural abutments. The light standard outside throws a sour yellow glow across part of the building and illuminates the yard and a G.S. lorn’ across to the right. Directly under the light and looking rather curious and ghostly in a slicker is a figure walking out of the gaping black doorway across the yard to the wagon where another figure waits beside it.

Donald comments:

I like that writing. It gives one the entire picture, without all that curious sombre waiting melancholy that abounds in his work.

April—May 1943

Drysdale also provided Donald with valuable criticism.

First, he said the drawings had arrived safely, and praised them in such terms that even my unblushing self-confidence finds it too much to quote him to my own face, as it were. But having said how much he likes the work I had sent, and what he liked in it:

‘One word of advice for what it’s worth. In your newfound strength and the joy of it —be careful and sparing in the brilliance of the textural qualities you re getting: there’s a danger that you may be captivated into stressing lovely textures to the detriment of the main structural unities, with a corresponding emphasis on pictorial attributes which become, as single entities, unimportant.

‘Eliminate and be as rigid as hell with yourself — it takes a lot of courage to make a good painting, courage to resist an impulse which you may not have considered sufficiently in relation to the whole — and courage too to overcome that persistent will o’ the wisp which is always trying against our better judgement to convince us that we can find satisfaction in work which we feel in our souls need more attention.

‘You’ve now got to a point in your work where you need to watch and discipline yourself like blazes. I have no doubt you will because you are an artist — not just a painter of ability.

‘I’ve never subscribed to the time-honoured theory that an artist must subject himself to a ruthless discipline as a student or as a young man discovering the joy and power of self-expression — it is when he becomes an artist, when slowly through the experiences of his living and his training that he becomes confident of himself and what he wants to say, and his power to say it, that he must subject himself to discipline.

‘And then one doesn’t like that word: rather it is the beginning of a sensitive and very determined power of selection — the selection that places on the table the real gems from the intriguing heap that surrounds them.

For an artist is not merely so because he is able to state one thing or another — he is essentially an artist firstly in that he shows an unusual selection and perception in what and how he states it...’

Dear old Tass! — if it hadn’t been for his help and belief, I would have long since lost everything, identity included, and drowned myself in the horrors of the war.

28 June 1944

On 1 December 1945 Friend began his new diary — much larger than its predecessors and upright in format — obviously enjoying the pleasure of writing in this new volume:

This morning I went to town and collected this and another similar notebook. I’d left the paper with an old Estonian bookbinder to make up for me. The city was terribly crowded and I came home as soon as I’d got the books. Tass was working at the big crucifixion panel, which is progressing well. The studio is in rather a mess — things everywhere. One works in a Rowlandsonian [atmosphere] of debris, yelling children, cups of tea and much mad singing and talking.

It has often struck me, when watching with what consciously-reverent facial expressions many people ‘drink in the ineffable beauty’ of a painting — say, for instance, one of Rembrandt’s masterpieces — that they would imagine, if it occurred to them to think about it at all, the painter creating it in an exalted, spiritual mood, soothed by soft sound of viols, interrupted only by awestruck earnest and beautiful young men and women who come bearing foods to sustain the great maestro, tiptoeing softly, afraid lest a sound should break the divine thread of inspiration ... when what actually occurred, as I imagine, would be a scene more familiar — Rembrandt, greasy and rather smelly, yelling madly for more beer as he dabs at a burgomeister’s face, swearing jovially, singing, cracking active lice, and breaking off every now and then for a merry romp on the carpet with Hendrijk Stoffels, whilst a rabble of mangy dogs gobble the remnants of a still life and the infants cut up drawings and etchings to make paper toys, the kitchen wench has hysterics and is raped by the baker’s boy and downstairs the bailiffs gorge themselves on the joint for Sunday’s roast —

The net result is a painting like the Night Watch.

Of course, it may not have happened like that at all, but I doubt it.

In any case, I put it on record so that, should Tass’s ‘Crucifixion’ end up as a world-masterpiece, any who read may know that it was painted to an accompaniment of ear-splitting yells and screams from the two children drawn here, that their noise was rivalled by the gramophone playing Fats Waller’s ‘Forty Nine Robbers’, by Tass and I singing, by much talk, cups of tea, glasses of wine, meals, telephone-calls, sundry visitors — was interrupted when we went out to cocktail parties and shopping expeditions. In this manner we painted all the afternoon, during which Tass made the first drastic alterations to his picture. Most of his paintings during the slow process of their growth get wildly altered, painted out completely, turned upside down, recommenced, scrapped — emerging triumphant in the end without scars to show for the appalling assaults they’ve been subjected to. In the present case, the fleeing figures were scrapped, the actual crucifixes moved several miles back into an immense perspective of receding desert, and a great gaunt brooding figure was introduced into the foreground, then wiped out completely and brought back again.

Merioola 1946

Back Loudon Sainthill, Jocelyn Rickards, Alison Lee,

Centre: Roland Strasser, Harry Tatlock Miller, Donald Friend, Arthur Fleischman, Edgar Ritchard, Chica Lowe

Front: Alec Murray, Justin O’Brien, Peter Kaiser

Photograph by Alec Murray

Private collection

Visit to Sofala and Hill End

Another passage relates to their historic first trip to Sofala and Hill End in August 1947. Tired of living in Merioola, the boarding house-art colony run by Chica Lowe in Rosemont Avenue, Woollahra, Donald Friend and his friend Donald Murray had decided to go and live in Tasmania. But after reading an article (by George Farwell) in the Sydney Morning Herald everything changed.

I read a newspaper article on the deserted ghost-towns left empty after the gold-rush of the 60s. Then I began to think there must be lovely old stone houses in that district — the hills behind Bathurst — and in no time I was mad to go there and let Tasmania go hang. Tass was equally enthusiastic. We straightaway planned an excursion there in the car.

Drysdale had just taken possession of a new car and two days later they were off.

After driving 160 miles we got to Sofala — a lovely crazy old village — perfect. We stayed that night at Hill End, 30 miles further on. A town character showed us round — an old ruined village living in the memory of its former 30,000 inhabitants and fabulous tales of gold-strikes. Now there are only a handful of rather sordid, jovial male peasants who live by fossicking and rabbiting.

The above entry was written on 22 August after their return. The following day Donald wrote:

Tass has started work on a canvas of identical subject to the one I have been working on ever since our return from the country — Sofala main street, from sketches we both made there. It is interesting to see how utterly different both pictures of the same subject are.

Then on 31 August:

Tass, in a frenzy of painting quite unusual with him, worked on the final stages of his picture of the Sofala main street, which he has been painting on every day since last weekend. It is very good, and makes my own picture of the same subject look pretty foolish, shallow and flimsy.

Donald Friend could work in any circumstances, but he didn’t like being watched while he worked. Obsessed with drawing, which he could do equally well lying on the floor in the middle of a noisy party or in the Solitary comfort of a studio. Friend often wondered why Drysdale put off painting and drawing as long as possible. He was forever trying to cajole him into getting down to work, sometimes being told by an annoyed Drysdale that he, Friend, did not know the difference between work and industry. A distinction hard to understand for an artist as addicted to painting and drawing as Friend was.

Edgar Kaufmann

In 1943 Sydney Ure Smith produced an edited version of the diaries, entided Gunner’s Diary, later to be followed by the more substantial Painter’s Journal ( 1946).

At the end of September 1943 Drysdale informed Donald that Captain Edgar Kaufmann, who owned the famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house Fallingwater at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, was intesested in buying Donald’s diaries.[2] The heir to a large retail business, Kaufmann was involved with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Sydney he took an interest in the contemporary art scene, purchasing works by Drysdale and Friend and writing articles on their work. Donald made a pen-and-ink drawing of this interesting man, who carried a Duchamp drawing in his army rucksack during the war.

‘Edgar has a terrific stimulation on me,’ Drysdale wrote to Donald on 22 February 1945, ‘and he bucks me up no end, but there’s something rather special about just yarning with another painter whom you respect and are damn fond of — used to be the same in Albury — I think it always will be.’

The war had restrained Donald’s need for change and his interest in exotic places, but it had sustained their friendship.

When travel was possible again, Friend began to plan his escape. During the war years, Donald had established his reputation as an artist. Largely due to the efforts of Sydney Ure Smith, Drysdale, William Dobell and Friend were considered the top three contemporary artists in Sydney, if not in Australia.

In 1949 Donald sailed for Italy, a trip that influenced the rest of his life.[3] After visiting Florence and London, he went to Ischia to see Jeffrey Smart and there he met an 18-year-old fisherman’s son — Attilio Guarrancino — with whom he became passionately involved and who would become an important figure in his future life.

[Hill End]  The Cottage from the Back Lawn ... c. 29 Novembcr 1948

pen and ink and watercolour 31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

Bali

In 1968 Friend settled permanently in Bali where he built himself a magnificent house, put together an important collection of Indonesian sculpture and artefacts and established a reputation as a great host. This was all financed by his prodigious industry and decorative skills, supplying a constant flow of work to eager collectors in Australia. The 13 years he spent in Bali and the many versions of good and sometimes indifferent works on paper he produced there have tended to identify him with this exotic tourist destination, to the detriment of other more important works buried in private collections.

By the late 1960s, Friend was seen as an artist poles apart from Drysdale and the early, important connection between the two was all but forgotten by a new generation of art critics. The 1960s and 1970s, dominated by abstraction, depreciated draughtsmanship as old-fashioned and of little importance. Friend watched the art World with satirical disdain. Having noticed that during the 1980s even Drysdale was being relegated to the cellars of art museums, Friend commented that, after the ‘Bomb’ fell, only his and Drysdale’s Works would survive, because they were stored in the safety of the cellars.

Six years after Drysdale had removed the diaries from the cottage at Hill End they were being read by the young Robert Hughes, who was writing a monognaph on Friend.[4]

By this time Donald had produced two of his most  remarkable diaries. In Italy in 1950 he had two handsome books bound in Carta di Varese, one with a blue pattern and the other red. The Fabriano Ingres paper in these diaries was ideal for drawing and Donald obviously made the most of it; some of the finest drawings are in these two volumes. The text and the drawings often merge to create a kind of illuminated page; these are not sketches, but are fully realised works. They were produced during a high point of Friend’s artistic career. Some of his best drawings date from this period. They are not as large as the work he did in Bali — just a quarter of a full sheet, approximately 30 x 47 cm. There are drawings of Attilio, studies of landscape, and many drawings of Italian boys, and of two special friends Aberdeen Goodwin and Omu — done in pen and ink on coloured papers often touched with coloured chalk or watercolour. They reveal Friend’s unique talent as a draughtsman, his ability to capture in a few lines the essence of a subject with amazing verve and freshness, and his ability to place the lines on the page in such a way that the whole becomes a sophisticated work of art.

Friend’s diary,

22 September 1954-8 December 1956,

bound in Carta di Varese

(MS5959, item 37)

The second volume, from 22 September 1954 to 8 December 1956 and begun at Cairns, contains the seeds for the illustrated books to which Donald would devote his talents in the late 1970s and 1980s. Two of the 46 works reproduced by Robert Hughes in his monograph are from this diary and two others are used for the end sheets.

Gunner’s Diary and Painter’s journal, as originally published by Sydney Ure Smith, give the impression that the drawings are ‘illustrations’, that they are the intrusions of an artist on an author’s text. In fact, the diaries are a combination of drawings and text of equal importance. When first begun, the diaries were often used as a sketchbook. Later the drawings begin to merge with the text, when Donald began to ‘illuminate’ the pages, as a monk might have done in medieval times, carefully planning the use of space and making the whole a work of art. It is this that Friend was particularly good at.

One might have expected that the Bali diaries would contain some of his finest drawings, but this is not the case. By this time he had begun to make independent illustrated manuscript books to the detriment of the drawings in the diaries.

During his first visit to Bali in 1966—1967, Friend made notes and prose sketches for a book which was eventually published in 1970 as Donald Friend in Bali.[5] But the amazing and irreverent Bumbooziana (published in 1979) is the tour de force of this kind of ‘illuminated’ manuscript — a collection of magnificent drawings and vignettes. It was followed by several other books, some with an equal amount of erotic content, which extended Friend’s reputation as an original and gifted illustrator with a cynical and naughty sense of humour. While these expensively produced books greatly amused those able to see or purchase them, people forgot that he was also a serious artist and a great draughtsman.

Sydney,1981

When Friend returned to live permanently in Australia in 1979 his reputation as a serious artist was shaky. He had some admirers and some loyal friends, but his existence in a small flat in Bondi Junction, when he came to live in Sydney in 1981, was that of a lonely recluse. It was sad to see him thought of as a pornographer for the rich, his talent as a draughtsman used only in a cynical and whimsical manner. After all, wasn’t he one of the most intelligent, sophisticated, well-read, travelled and gifted artists Australia ever produced — equally able to use a pen to make a brilliant drawing or to write eloquently upon almost any subject? For quite some time he languished in his Bondi flat, writing, drawing and creating one of the finest of his manuscript books, Ayant Kesayangam III—The Prodigal Son’s Return 1980-82.[6]

It was at this time that I got to know him. I had first visited him in Melbourne the previous year when he showed me the collection of his drawings in Attilio and Ailsa’s ( Attilio’s wife) house in Hawthorne and the manuscript books he was working on. I arranged to visit him once a week so that we could talk about art, often with Barry Pearce, Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

As I was writing my book on Russell Drysdale at the time, Donald suggested that I might be interested to read his diaries. I had all the volumes in my house during 1981 and it took me some three months to read them. I can do no better than to quote from my own journal to give an idea of my original reaction to these volumes.

Sunday Aug 9  81  I have become friendly with Donald Friend who has made a series of lithographs for a book I am to publish to be called Songs of the Vagabond Scholars. Some of these images are magnificent and have even surprised Donald who seems to have come alive while doing them. Six are proofed and good, a few early ones did not come out very well, and a few more are yet to be proofed... Donald offered me the loan of his Diaries, which were kept by James Fairfax in the safe in his office at the Sydney Morning Herald... I have been deeply involved in these fascinating volumes. How could I have tackled Drysdale without being able to read the magnificent backdrop of the life and times when he and Donald made such memorable works. I have reached 1954 but there are still quite a few heavy volumes to go through. There are so many of Drysdale’s letters included — either quoted or actually pasted into the book — and they are most revealing about the friendship and their common interests... I am equally if not more fascinated by Donald Friend and his amazing life and feel that not to read these diaries would be a great loss... My outlook on Drysdale has been extended so much since I began reading these diaries. My interpretation is still the same, but I now see Drysdale in terms of the time and place much more clearly and understand the man better.

The Diaries I am reading at present... were bound in Italy for Donald... The paper seems to have weathered somewhat and perished so that it is soft to the touch and gives off the most pleasant feeling to the tips of the fingers... The ink has also sunk into the paper and become so part of it that paper and the patterns of the writing also give a warm, organic look to it and convey that they contain Donald’s life which he has poured out across them in his inimitable left-handed scribble which is at the same time legible and very decorative. From the handwriting it is so easy to see what kind of emotional state Donald is in. Angry, in ecstasy, anxious, melancholy or drunk. The flow of the lines, the placing of the words, the careful or careless writing of the words, the general spacing and placing of what he writes, provides an immediate clue to his feelings. The Diaries are a mirror held to life and they contain and capture the ephemeral moments of life as it passes or lingers, indelibly on these lovely warm pages.

Donald's preferred instrument was the pen. He mastered this as a schoolboy when he made some illuminated letters in his 1930 and 1931 diaries, in which he is dreaming of his future achievements, fame and fortune. He was 15 at the time but his character was already established with all its idiosyncrasies. His foreword (which he misspells) to his 1931 diary has that detached superiority so typical of the mature Donald Friend:

This is a setting down of my own personal thoughts. Should any unwise persons venture herein without my express permission, the references to any of them which may displease are just rewards of inquisitiveness.

Frontispiece and illustrated capital,

drawn in pen and ink by
the teenage artist in his

diaries 1930 (left), 1931

(MS5959, item 5)

1 January 1931, the entry ends:

I've got lots to do this year — to get to Europe — and inherit fortunes and a thousand other things — amongst which I shall have to go and see Sydney Long, and see about taking up drawing.

Sydney Long was a good choice for he was a good painter and a very fine etcher. It was at this time, no doubt encouraged by Long, that Friend made his first etchings, for which his talent was particularly congenial. But etching is a complicated and demanding process, and the discipline required was probably not to his liking - he preferred to see an immediate result for his efforts.

Donald Friend (left) and Lou Klepac

examining proofs of the lithographs

for Songs of the Vagabond Scholars,

in Friend s Bondi Junction flat, 1981

Private collection

London

1936 — 1938

From his student days Donald was aware of the importance of prints and illustrations. In Sydney he acquired for small sums lithographs by S.T. Gill which he studied; and later in London he purchased etchings by Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson, and facsimile prints of Guercino drawings by Bartolozzi, all of which influenced his drawing style. In London in 1936 — 1938, Friend studied with Bernard Meninsky, a very good draughtsman, especially with the pen.[7] It was from him that Donald acquired his fluid, quick, decorative sweep of line, partly descriptive, partly shorthand, but always in the service of a spirited composition. Very quickly he learnt to get to the heart of his subject. Naturally gifted, he drew constantly, quickly, incessantly, addictively. Being left-handed his drawings have an easily recognised style; the parallel shading in some of the more detailed drawings often reminds one of the drawings of that other exceptional left-handed draughtsman, Leonardo da Vinci. First and foremost a draughtsman, Friend’s oeuvre is mostly made up of works on paper. He did use oil at certain periods, but oils comprise only a fraction of his otherwise very large output.

In London Donald also befriended an unusual character, R.E.A. Wilson, who had a gallery in Cork Street. In a letter to his mother, Donald described him:

like the devil, infinitely attractive, clever, understanding and wicked... and like the devil he is benevolent.[8]

Wilson exhibited Donald’s drawings with those of Augustus John, Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer and Giambattista Tiepolo, and in 1938 gave him his first one-man exhibition of drawings. Wilson, who had an unusual lifestyle and equally unusual morals, induced Donald to have an affair with one of his mistresses. The outcome was a child, who was brought up with Wilson’s other children. It was understood from the beginning that the affair was entirely Wilson’s responsibility.

[Soldier Reading] c. 10 June 1944

pen and ink and wash 25.4x20.4 cm

(MS5959,item26)

After he had heard from Wilson of his daughter’s birth, Donald wrote to his mother:

I am not thinking of marrying. Naturally I shall see to the child later.

West Africa

At the end of 1938 Donald sailed for Africa and fell in love with the lifestyle. It was all that he had hoped for and he told his mother in a letter from Lagos dated 23 March 1939 that he was determined to stay. He was busy writing a book on the Yoruba people and his letters to his mother allowed for introspection.[9] In the following passage one recognises the voice of the Donald Friend of the later diaries:

I don’t want to go back to Australia — I am so happy here now, far away from the dangerous treacheries of Europe and the endless intrigues of the family and criticisms. You know, it is not just or true to say that I would be a success if I only bothered to try — because the argument is based on such a stupid shallow little conception of success. I have been successful and I am successful in that I have attained more of love, and of adventure, and have tasted the emotions and senses both sweet and bitter at their full strength, I have created work that has made my name already respected amongst the intellectuals wherever I have been — I have lived in my 24 years more than most people of 60 have done.‘Success’ as Madge Granger means it, is money and clothes. I could do with both, but you must admit I have done well without them. When I say I don't want to go broke — I rather fear that my illusions would be broken there too. Now I think of it — the harbour and the country, and King’s X and Pakies and the California, and all the heavenly people I know, I sometimes long to be there. But here where I am is after all the ultimate land of illusion and mystery and romance, and I love it — it has all the glamour of a film and all the humanity of real life, with an odd section set aside for living gods and magic and a mad music that sets your soul free from the body to lounge unharnessed through the long crooked roads of eternity.

Undated letter, 1939

Donald Friend on the verandah,

The Palace, Ikerrc,

Nigeria 1938-1939

Private collection

He spent a period in Ikerre, Nigeria where he acted as adviser to the Ogoga (Ruler) of Ikerre, with house and servants provided. He loved the Yoruba people, but the outbreak of war forced him to leave Africa and return to Australia. Before he embarked on his voyage home, he sent a sealed letter to his mother containing his will in case something happened to him. He wrote that he had dated it forward as he was not due to inherit the estate which had been settled on him until he was 25.

Back home, he first made his way to Thursday Island to visit the Sailor family, where he was received as one of them. When he returned to Sydney he found a flat at the top of Elizabeth Bay House, Potts Point, which was at that time a boarding house. In his schooldays he and his sister Gwen had explored this magnificent building, then empty and derelict. Donald seemed to know its history and the legend that behind a secret panel was hidden a vast treasure.[10]

Donald Friend enlisted in the Australian Army on 29 June 1942; this is the date which begins the diaries of his maturity. Some of the first drawings are studies of the magnificent staircase in Elizabeth Bay House, which he drew three times, with obvious reference to one of Rowlandson’s most famous drawings, The Exhibition Stare-Case, which had once belonged to Henry Tonks, who bequeathed it to University College, London in 1936. Donald obviously knew it, because he recaptures, with his own brilliant speed of execution, the characteristic elements of Rowlandson’s style.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)

The Exhibition Stare-case, c. 1800

pen and grey and black ink and grey wash

40 x 27 cm

College Art Collections,

University College, London

Many of the drawings in the 1942 and 1943 diaries owe much to Donald’s familiarity with Rowlandson’s works. He quotes from them, even as late as the 1980s and the two artists are often very close in spirit.

The diaries chronicle not only Donald’s life, but also the evolution of his drawing style. In the earliest volumes, the drawings have a cartoon-like quality to which Drysdale makes reference in the previously quoted letter. There is a magnificent, seemingly careless speed of execution, which is really the sure hand of a fine draughtsman. Throughout, there are quick sketches, illustrations, portraits, self-portraits, figure studies, genre subjects, humorous and ribald drawings, caricatures, satires, flights of fancy, still lifes and landscapes. There are also the first thoughts for works which Donald made as independent drawings.

In 1944 Donald made a series of watercolours which he executed in a mixture of Indian ink, coloured inks and watercolour. These works were despatched to Sydney for his exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries, which was opened by Drysdale. Today these works are completely devoid of colour, only the Indian ink and Chinese white remain with just the barest suggestion that once there might have been some colour there. The result has not ruined them. In some ways the loss of the ephemeral decorative colour reveals the strength of the drawing, for here in these first large works on paper Donald is seen at his most brilliant as a powerful draughtsman. But for the early studies protected in the diaries, such as the one for Brisbane River now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, we would not know that these large works were once so colourful.

This series of works was made in a labour camp in Brisbane where Donald was sent as punishment for going absent without leave. They were created in a gas chamber, which was made available to him to use as a studio soon after he arrived in May 1944. His diary entry for 17 June:

We had the day free, with the promise that there’d be work from 5 till midnight. So to the Gas Chamber to work furiously finishing a landscape of a great hill in Brisbane crowned with a large modern building that used to be a sort of dance-hall or Lunar Park combined, but is now the American venereal disease hospital. Lynn Churchland, finding me racking my brains for a title for the finished picture, suggested "The House that Jack Built" - a brilliant idea. So that’s its name now.

Pen and ink, which Donald favoured most of his life, was suddenly abandoned in the 1980s. While living in the small terrace house in Paddington to which he moved in March 1984, he began a series of large watercolour still lifes, which were painted directly with a brush without any preliminary drawing in either pen or pencil. Painted flat, on a table in the upstairs room he used as a studio, this remarkable tour de force of colour and design is a testament to his lifelong devotion to the brilliance of watercolour and gouache and the beauty of a white sheet of fine art paper.

Donald Friend The House that Jack Built 1944

pen and ink and wash 47 x 55.8 cm

Private collection

Lateworks

The move from the depressing and uncongenial flat in Bondi Junction to the little terrace house lifted his spirit and this is reflected in the work he produced. His period of neglect also seemed to be over. The National Library had shown its serious interest in his work and the donation of the diaries on the condition that they be published had been accepted. Although the long-awaited retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales was still a good way ahead, his star was rising again and the bright colourful watercolours that poured out of him seemed to reflect this.

One of the first was a view of the upstairs room, looking out beyond a red wrought-iron balcony at Paddington rooftops. Unlike the works which followed, this still had a strong pen-and-ink armature put down with a broad architectural pen that Donald used to great advantage in large works such as this. I happened to call on him when he had just finished the most beautiful painting. It was so bright and full of joy that I immediately fell in love with it and asked if I could pay for it over a period of time.

In the diaries Donald records my enthusiasm:

he was so enamoured of a large picture of the front upstairs room with a still life that he wants to buy it — very very slowly.

6 July 1984

Neglected and dismissed by the critics, Donald was at his best: loyal, considerate, even humble. But when the tide changed and the world again began to knock at his door, he became cynical, cranky, and sometimes impossible. A serious feud developed with Attilio Guarrancino when Donald refused to send a postcard to Ailsa, who had looked after him in Melbourne and who was now seriously ill. It is sad that in old- age, this great artistic personality often found comfort in a kind of bitter cynicism. He had had his own way all his life, and yet he had not found happiness. However, he was not unaware of his faults. On 1 January 1983, re-reading one of his schoolboy diaries, he observed:

It was diverting for a while to leaf through it reviving old memories until gradually the full horror dawned: I haven't developed at all! — what seems quaint and even charming in a precocious adolescent is horrifying to find undisciplined and unimproved in oneself approaching one's 68th birthday.

Self-centred, conceited, atrociously snobbish, frivolous, obsessed with aristocratic delusions, adept at self-deceit. None of that’s changed. Already I was infatuated with the spectacle of myself as a superior being, a genius destined for fame moving wittily around in a world composed of romantic subject matter, arranged for my own delectation.

Diary, 6 July 1984

(MS5959, item 46)

Forty years earlier in October 1943, confined by the discipline of the army, Donald planned his future:

Life’s not long enough to do all the things I want to. For immediate consideration after the war, I want to do a lot of painting, publish the ‘Disasters’, finish off my book on the Yorubas, spend a while in Tahiti.

Then I must return to Africa. After that Europe: Spain, Greece, France. Then places like Cambodia, and the Celebes. Then probably back here again, to remind the world I'm alive, and show them my work, since there is no joy in creating unless one can be confirmed in what one has done by the approval of people who understand.

5 October 1943

Donald Friend Pears, Avocado and Balcony View 1984
pen and ink, watercolour 73.5 x 54 cm

Private collection

All in all he had led a fantastic and charmed life and did even more than he had hoped for. But destiny deprived him of the pleasure of seeing Donald Friend, 1915-1989: Retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He lost the use of his drawing and writing left hand due to a series of strokes. With brave determination he painted with his right hand and made some remarkable works, but sadly he was no longer able to write in his diary.

One of the most moving entries was written on 19 December 1988. An almost illegible scribble, it is his farewell to the world.

And now comes possibly my final suggestion for mankind’s improvement. Were I God I’d re-arrange things so that healthy laughter and wit did not rely for mirth on the spectacle of aged genius fallen in the mire. I’d spare men such as myself the disgraces of indignity and the suffering of suspense. I’d make sure they lacked not such good and true friends as Al and James Fairfax.

My long list of former friends has shrunk to 3. Those include Barry Pearce. The others are unworthy of the bitterness they generate in my desolate days of solitude.

Soon, soon I must die ere my mind gets crooked as this handwriting. At 4 pm Chris Leonard promised to visit me. Dear Lord let his prose in the biography of me be worthy of my unstable life.

Goodbye world of lovely colours and amicable nudes.

Aloha death, long dull dreamless nights. Ah, mortality I knew you were hiding behind that grey curtain.

My soul is transparent, heliotrope pink but not nearly as invisible.

Donald Friend died in his sleep on 16 August 1989.

Donald Friend

Cavorting Figures 1973

pen and ink 32.3 x21.1 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

(203/160)

Donald Friend outside 1 Belmore Place,

Paddington c. 1984

Photograph by Stuart Purves,

courtesy of Australian Galleries

[‘A Charming, Half-dead, Half-forgotten Old Village’ ] 29 July 1982 pen and ink 36.1 x 28.9 cm (MS5959, item 46)

Notes

1.   There are three schoolboy diaries, begun with a gift of a diary for 1929 from his mother. The 1929 diary is held in the State Library of Queensland.

2.    The National Library of Australia holds all but four of Donald Friend’s extant diaries in its Manuscript Collection. Volumes IX and XIV of ‘Desastres de la Guerra’ are thought to have been purchased by Edgar Kaufmann in 1943-1944. Their current whereabouts has not been confirmed. As well as the 1929 diary held by the State Library of Queensland, the National Gallery of Australia holds a diary covering the period 8 March 1968-27 October 1969.

3.   The ship stopped at Colombo, where he met Bevis Bawa, who embarked there, and who would become a friend and his host in Sri Lanka.

4.    Robert Hughes, Donald Friend. Sydney: Edwards and Shaw, 1965.

5.    See Amanda Beresford’s essay in Barry Pearce (ed.), Donald Friend, 1915-1989: Retrospective. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1990, p. 135.

6.    When Donald had finished the manuscript Ayant Kesayangam Ill — The Prodigal Son's Return 1980-1982, he asked me to submit it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was keen for it to be in that collection. After some thought he put a price of $35,000 on it, a modest price if one added up the real value of each page. The Art Gallery declined the purchase. It occurred to me that such a marvellous book should be in the National Library in Canberra and I duly submitted it. The then Director-General wrote in reply that the book was worth much more, and they would offer $38,000. This made us realise that the National Library was the place where the diaries might find a permanent home. The condition of the gift was that they should eventually be edited and published, and at long last this is under way.

7. In London Meninsky told Donald that he had to scrap all that he had learnt in Australia ‘and start drawing like a child’. ‘No shading,’ commanded Meninsky, ‘express through the line the forces inside it.’ Quoted by John Olsen, in his introduction to Robert Hughes, Donald Friend (Sydney: Edwards and Shaw, 1965).

Another pupil of Meninsky, English artist Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979), also kept an illustrated diary during the war and was, like Friend, an official war artist. While Donald’s diary was private and personal and his drawings, even with an eye on posterity, were made for himself, Ardizzone’s were those of a more objective observer. Ardizzone too was a remarkable artist, an illustrator in the great tradition of Daumier and Charles Keene. He visited Australia in the late 1960s and became a friend of Russell Drysdale.

8.  Letters from Friend to his mother are in the possession of the author.

9.  In another letter to his mother, undated but written in 1939, he writes:

Write a book my love. It doesn’t matter if it is not published even. It's a supreme way of getting the drag off your mind.

When it is finished, one gets frantic to have it published, and if it’s not, one forgets and writes another. A very healthy procedure, and most absorbing. I’m writing two books now, one, an absurd satire, the other, an ethnological study mixed up with biography. Maybe they’ll never be scanned by the wildly intelligent eyes of this superbly cultured pack of lice — mankind; but I don’t care much. It’s something to do and absorbing, and an excellent recipe for peace of mind — it’s my personal solution, my escape, from all the horror.

10.  Friend’s sister Gwen recounts the romance of these early exploits in her recollections of her brother, My Brother Donald: A Memoir of Australian Artist Donald Friend. Pymble, New South Wales: Angus & Robertson, 1994, pp. 67-72.

Biographical  Notes

1915     Born 6 February, Donald Stuart Leslie Moses at Cremorne, New South Wales.

Family reverts to his father’s mother’s maiden name, Friend, around 1920.

1927-29 Attends Cranbrook School, Sydney; begins art classes with Sydney Long.

1930 Enrols in Sydney Grammar School.

1931 Produces first etching in Long’s studio, an ex libris bookplate for his mother.

Parents agree to divorce in July.

1932-33 Runs away from home; travels to Queensland, where he meets the Sailor family, and Torres Strait.

1934 Back in Sydney, enrols in Dattilo-Rubbo’s classes.

1936 Travels to London, where he studies under Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler at the Westminster School and designs costumes for Sadlers Wells Ballet.

Meets Lapido, a Nigerian from Ikerre.

1937 Exhibits in his first group exhibition at R.E. Wilson’s Gallery at 32 Cork Street, London.

With William Dobell and others, paints a mural for the Australian Wool Corporation at the British Empire Exhibition, Glasgow.

1938 Holds first one-man show at Wilson’s Gallery before travelling to West Africa, staying first in Lagos before going to Ikerre, in Ekiti province.

1939 Appointed adviser to the Ogoga (Ruler) of Ikerre.

Experiments with sculpture and produces small bronzes.

1940-41 Returns to Sydney, then goes to live in Cairns, Green Island and Torres Strait with the

Sailor family.

Begins exhibiting in group shows at the Macquarie and Blaxland Galleries.

1942 Holds first Australian one-man exhibition at Macquarie Galleries before enlisting as a gunner in the AIF and being posted to Hume Camp, near Albury.

Meets Russell Drysdale.

1943 Fails Intelligence Corps Training School and is posted first to Greta, near Maitland (New South Wales), and then to North Queensland.

Exhibits 12 drawings with Drysdale at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney.

Sydney Ure Smith publishes first three volumes of ‘Desastres de la Guerra’ as Gunner’s Diary.

Edgar Kaufmann purchases Volumes IX and XIV of the diaries and Volume VI is stolen and never recovered.

1944 Returns to Greta.

After going AWOL in Sydney, is banished to Labour Battalion Works Camp, Chermside, Brisbane, where he uses a converted ‘gas chamber’ as a studio.

1945 Offered a commission as an official war artist and, in June, accompanies invasion force to Labuan before moving to Borneo.

In July, contracts serious infection of his hands and sails for Australia on 28 September.

1946 Demobilised from the army in March, he moves to Merioola, then goes to live in the Torres Strait in November.

Sydney Ure Smith publishes Painter’s Journal, edited extracts of his war diaries.

1947     Returns to Merioola in April.

A planned move to Tasmania is aborted following a visit to Sofala and Hill End.

Buys a Hill End cottage in August and begins to restore it.

In October, his father dies.

1948     Lives at Hill End and completes first novel.

Paints Apocalypse of St John the Divine.

1949 27 March sails for Italy, stopping at Colombo where he meets Bevis Bawa.

Stays with Aberdeen Goodwin in Florence before going to London and, in December, travelling to Ischia with Omar Ali, a Pakistani prince.

1950 Visits Jeffrey Smart in Italy and meets Attilio Guarrancino before returning to London, where he exhibits at the Redfem Gallery.

Returns to Australia with Attilio in September.

1951 Wins Flotta Lauro Travelling Art Prize and books passage to Italy.

Queensland Art Gallery buys two of his works.

1952 Arrives in Ischia on 8 February.

Travels to Assisi, Florence, and Venice; also visits Greece, France and Spain before arriving in London in October, where he meets Omu, an African boy who becomes his model.

1953 Stays with Kenneth Rowell in London, then goes to Genoa in August.

Visits Bevis Bawa in Sri Lanka, returning to Australia and Hill End in October.

1954 Travels to Brisbane, Townsville, Magnetic Island and Cairns with Margaret Olley.

Illustrates Coast to Coast: Australian Short Stories of Today 1953-1954.

1955 Wins Blake Prize with St John the Divine and Scenes from the Apocalypse.

Researches and writes Hillendiana.

In May, visits Torres Strait people on Magnetic Island.

1956 Hillendiana published.

1957-61 In January, sails to Colombo with Tim Drysdale to stay with Bevis Bawa; Russell Drysdale arrives to take Tim to England in June 1957.

While in Sri Lanka, experiments with brass and copper fountain sculptures and paints murals for Bauer’s building in Colombo and Mackinnon McKenzie Shipping Company.

Exhibits in Whitechapel Gallery show Recent Australian Painting.

1962 Returns to Australia and buys house at 1 Hampden Street, Paddington in August.

Artist of the Year, Festival of Perth.

1963 Visits Ian Fairweather on Bribie Island and begins a correspondence that will last until Fairweather’s death in 1974.

1964 First Australian exhibition of sculpture at Clune Gallery.

Paints dining room murals at Retford Park, James Fairfax’s house at Bowral.

1965 Travels to Penang, Sri Lanka and Africa.

Robert Hughes’s monograph, Donald Friend, published.

1966 Visits Greece and Bali.

New edition of Hillendiana published.

1967 In February leaves Bali for Bombay, Isphahan, Shiraz, Istanbul, Athens and Rome, but returns to Bali in July before going to Sydney.

1968-69 Lives in Bali, working on the book Bali and Other Islands.

Contracts tuberculosis.

1970-74 Returns briefly to Sydney for treatment.

Exhibits for the first time at Galerie Drouant, Paris and presents ten manuscript notebooks to the University of Queensland Library.

Writes and publishes Donald Friend in Bali.

1975 Begins Bumbooziana in Bali.

Mother dies.

1979 Moves back to Australia; lives with Attilio and his wife in Melbourne.

Bumbooziana published in August.

National Library of Australia buys manuscript of Birds from the Magic Mountains.

1981 In June moves to a studio flat in Bondi Junction.

Begins making lithographs for Songs of the Vagabond Scholars.

1982Travels to Queensland with Attilio.

Songs of the Vagabond Scholars is published, as is Donald Friend, Australian War Artist 1945 by Gavin and Colleen Fry.

1983 Visits Lawrence Daws, Glass House Mountains, Queensland.

National Library of Australia buys Ayant Kesayangam III — The Prodigal Son’s Return 1980- and accepts donation of diaries.

1982 Moves to 1 Belmore Place, Paddington.

Brief Encounters published, with illustrations by Friend and prose by Ron Saw.

1985 The Holdsworth Galleries holds a small retrospective to mark his 70th birthday.

1987 Produces set of etchings before suffering the first of several strokes.

In December, moves to 12A Holdsorth Street, Woollahra.

1988 University of Sydney awards him the University Medal in recognition of services to art.

1989 Dies in his sleep on 16 August.

These biographical notes are based on those prepared by Amanda Beresford and published in Barry Pearce (ed.), Donald Friend, 1915—1989: Retrospective. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1990.

Drawings from the Diaries 1942 — 1989

above left

1.    The Staircase at Elizabeth Bay House, Guests Arriving c. 15 July 1942

above right

2.    Elizabeth Bay House c. 15 July 1942

3.    The Staircase at Elizabeth Bay House - Exit My More Than Somewhat Grist Guests

c. 15 July 1942

4. Negroes Dancing at the Coloured Club,William Street ... c. 4 August 1942

left above

5. [A Group of Soldiers] c. 15 July 1942

right above

6. Free French Tahitian Sailors Dancing at the Polynesian Club c. 15 July 1942

7. Gunner c. 20July 1942

above

8. [Two Officers] c. 29 August 1942

9.  [‘A Little Attic in the Rue des Noirs Blancs’] c. 1 September 1942

10. Concert 11th Sept. ’42   11 September 1942

Page 49 from the 1942 Diary

11. The Rose Bowls 11 September 1942

12. Troop Train in Albury 19 September 1942

top

13. Tas Drysdale’s Studio, Albury 28th Sept. 1942

bottom

14. The Albury School 28 September 1942

15. Albury, from Poole’s Hill 29 September 1942

16. Monsieur Valsec et Son Nouveau Prentice à Son Atelier in Albury 29 September 1942

17. Off Duty 2 May 1943

18. Donald Selbsbildnis, 28th May'43

19. Pioneers 23 June 1943

20. Dr Vandor Plas of the Contemp. Show 3 June 1943

above left and right

21.    [Study]

c. 6 September 1943

22.    [Self Portrait]

c. 6 September 1943

23. Per Ardua Ad Astra c. 27 September 1943

24. The Village Chirgeon c. 9 October 1943

25. [Preparations for a Play] 30 October 1943

26. [Group of American Soldiers] 3 February 1944

27. [Brisbane Town Hall] 4 February 1944

28. [American Soldiers at a Bar] 4 February 1944

top

29.    Lynne Drysdale c. 6 February 1944

below

30.    Tim Drysdale c. 7 February 1944

31.    Gunners Reading ‘The Pyjama Girl Mystery’ c. 8 March 1944

32.    [Self Portrait with Glasses] c. 8 March 1944

Page 47 from the 1944 Diary

33. The Bar of the National c. 11 March 1944

34. [Allegro con Moderato] 13 March 1944

35. [Soldier Resting] c. 26 March 1944

36. [In Full Battle Gear] c.27 March 1944

37. [The Brisbane River] c. 5 June 1944

38. [Study of a Female Nude] c. 5 June 1944

39. [Self Portraits] c. 6 June 1944

40. [Self Portraits] c. 6 June 1944n

The 1940s

41. Balls and All No 1 c. 9 June 1944

42. The House that Jack Built, Brisbane c. 17 June 1944

43. [American Soldier]  c. 1944

44. The Battle Dress Jacket c. 19 August 1944

45. Lt Edgar Kauffman (sic) c. 24 September 1944

46. [BattleShip] c. 22 May 1945

47. [Studies of Russell Drysdale] 6 November 1945

48. Study for ‘Bomb Crater’ c. 1 December-1945

49. Tas [Russell Drysdale] 10 December 1945

50. [Tim Drysdale] c. 14 December 1945

51. [‘They Died that Others May Live’] c. 19 December 1945

52. [Bull and Skulls] c. 11 January 1946

53. Study for the 'Apotheosis of Ned Kelly’ 12 January 1946

54. Occupation Forces c. 27 April, 1946

55. Bunny Sailor c. 28 November 1946

56. [The Island Paradise] c. 30 December 1946

57. The ‘Adiana’ Ashore c. 2 February 1947

58. Dau 11 February 1947

59. Hill End Rectory 19 September 1947

60. [The Cottage, Hill End] c. 23 October 1947

61. ‘Olly’ [Margaret Olley] 10 May 1948

62. ‘Olly’ Working 17 May 1948

63. [Church at Hill End] c. 9 August 1948

64. [Study of Blossoming Tree] 8 October 1948

65. The Studio c. 2 July 1949

66. [Satyr and Boy] 1 December 1949

67. My Room 26 January 1950

68. [Omu] c. 19 April 1950

69. Attilio Sulking 20 April 1951

The 1950s

above and below:

70. Omu c. 28 October 1952

71. [Two Figures] c. 29 March 1953

72.    [Still Life with Flowers, Magnetic Island] 23 June 1954 below and pages 110-111

73.    [Monument and Shops, Port Douglas] l September 1954

74.    [Children and Lugger] c. 29 January 1957

75.    Karunasena 23 February 1957

76. [Views-Sri Lanka (Ceylon)] c.26 February 1957

77. John Bell 7 April 1964

78. Ned Kelly Emerging from his Saturday Bath [and Other Studies] c. 28 June 1964

79. [Death and the Maidens] 10 July 1966

80. [‘A Foreign Tourist from Another Generation’] 10 July 1966

81. Sudiyah and Pudjan [Bali] 10 January 1967

82. [Boy with Goat] 3 June 1967 The 1960s

The 1970s

83. [Four Studies, Bali] 1971

84. [Four Figure Studies, Bali] 1971

85. [Figure Studies, Bali] c. 18 October 1972

86. [Young Musicians, Bali] c. 18 October 1972

87. Diary Title Page: ‘For the Years 1982-198...’ c. May 1982

88. [The Merry-go-round, Bondi Junction] 21 March 1982

89.    [‘A Mackerel Sky’, Bondi Junction] 23 May 1982

90.    [Self Portrait] 14 July 1982

91. Beerbarrum, Glass House Mountains 24 July 1982

92. Lake Farm, by the Road to Malong, Glass House Mountains 20 August 1982

93. [‘This Charming Creature is Called a Bilby’] c. 8 September 1982

94. [A Dalmatian Dog] c. 12 September 1983

95. Glass House Mountains from Lawrence Daws’s house c. 26 March 1983

96. Upstairs Front Room [Paddington] 6 July 1984

97. [Still Life with Lemons] 27 September 1986

98. Diary 1987 to 19-, Title Page

99. [High-spirited Musicians] c. 3 May 1987

100. [‘A Nude Primitive Tongan Tapu Maker’] 15 November 1987 (drawing made with right hand after the stroke)

List of Plates

1.    The Staircase at Elizabeth Bay House, Guests Arriving

c. 15 July 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959, item 7)

2.    Elizabeth Bay House

c. 15 July 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959, item7)

3.    The Staircase at Elizabeth Bay House - Exit My More Than Somewhat Grist Guests
c. 15 July 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959, item 7)

4.    Negroes Dancing at the Colored Club, William Street...

c. 4 August 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959, item 7)

5.    [A Group of Soldiers]

c. 15 July 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959, item 7)

6.    Free French Tahitian Sailors Dancing at the Polynesian Club...

c. 15 July 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959,item7)

7.    Gunner

c. 20 July 1942
pen and ink and wash; 18 x 24.9 cm

(MS5959, item 7)

8.    [Two Officers]

c.29 August 1942

pen and ink; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

9.    [‘A Little Attic in the Rue des Noirs Blancs’]

c. 1 September 1942

pen and ink; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

10.    Concert 11th Sept. ’42 11 September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

11.    The Rose Bowls 11 September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

12.    Troop Train in Albury

19 September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

13.    Tas Drysdale’s Studio, Albury 28th Sept. '42

28 September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22,8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

14.    The Albury School

28    September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

15.    Albury, from Poole's Hill

29    September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

16.    Monsieur Valsec et Son Nouveau Prentice à Son Atelier in Albury

29 September 1942
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 8)

17.    Off Duty

2 May 1943
pen and ink, wash and watercolour; 25 x 20.6 cm

(MS5959, item 14)

18.    Donald Selbsbildnis, 28th May '43

28 May 1943
pen and ink and wash; 22.5 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 15)

19.    Pioneers

23 June 1943

pen and ink; 22.5 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 15)

20.    Dr Vandor Plas of the Contemp. Show

3 June [probably 3 July but mis-dated] 1943
pen and ink; 22.5 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 15)

21.    [Study]

c. 6 September 1943
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 16)

22.    [Self Portrait]

c. 6 September 1943
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 16)

23.    Per Ardua Ad Astra

c. 27 September 1943
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 16)

24.    The Village Chirgeon

c. 9 October 1943
pen and ink; 22.6 x 17.5 cm

(MS5959, item 17)

25.    [Preparations for a Play]

30 October 1943
pen and ink and wash; 22.3 x 17.4 cm

(MS5959,item 18)

26.    Group of American Soldiers

3    February 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.8 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 20)

27.    [Brisbane Town Hall]

4    February 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.8 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 20)

28.    [American Soldiers at a Bar]

4 February 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.8 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 20)

29.    Lynne Drysdale

c. 6 February 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.8 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 20)

30.    Tim Dry sdale

c. 7 February 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.8 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 20)

31.    Gunners Reading ‘The Pyjama Girl Mystery’

c. 8 March 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.7 x 20.3 cm

(MS5959, item 22)

32.    [Self Portrait with Glasses]

c. 8 March 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.7 x 20.3 cm

(MS5959, item 22)

33.    The Bar of the National

c. 11 March 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.7 x 20.3 cm

(MS5959, item 22)

34.    [Allegro con Moderato]

13 March 1944
pen and ink and wash; 24.7 x 20.3 cm

(MS5959, item 22)

35.    [Soldier Resting]

c. 26 March 1944
pen and ink; 25 x 20.6 cm

(MS5959, item 23)

36.    [In Full Battle Gear]

c.27 March 1944
pen and ink; 25 x 20.6 cm

(MS5959, item 23)

37.    [The Brisbane River]

c. 5 June 1944
pen and ink and watercolour;

25.4 x 20.4 cm

(MS5959, item 26)

38.    [Study of a Female Nude]

c. 5 June 1944
pen and ink; 25.4 x 20.4 cm

(MS5959, item 26)

39 and40. [Self Portraits]

c. 6June 1944 pen and ink; 25.4 x 20.4 cm

(MS5959, item 26)

41.    Balls and All No 1

c. 9 June 1944
pen and ink and wash; 25.4 x 20.4 cm

(MS5959, item 26)

42.    The House that Jack Built, Brisbane

c. 17 June 1944
pen and ink and watercolour; 25.4x20.4 cm

(MS5959, item 26)

43.    [American Soldier]

c. 17 June 1944
pen and ink; 25.4 x 20.4 cm

(MS5959, item 26)

44.    The Battle Dress Jacket

c. 19 August 1944
pen and ink; 25.7 x 20.1 cm

(MS5959, item 27)

45.    Lt Edgar Kauffman (sic)

c. 24 September 1944
pen and ink; 25.7 x 20.1 cm

(MS5959, item 27)

46.    [The Battle Ship]

c. 22 May 1945
pen and ink and wash; 22.8 x 17.4 cm

(MS5959, item 30)

47.    [Studies of Russell Drysdale]

6 November 1945
pen and ink; 22.8 x 17.8 cm

(MS5959, item 31)

48.    Study for ‘Bomb Crater’

c. 1 December 1945
pen and ink and wash; 25.7 x 20.1 cm

(MS5959. item 32)

49.    Tas [Russell Drysdale]

10 December 1945
pen and ink; 30.6x23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 32)

50.    [Tim Drysdale]

c. 14 December 1945
pen and ink and wash; 30.6 x 23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 32)

51.    [‘They Died that Others May Live’]

c. 19 December 1945
pen and ink and wash; 30.6x23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 32)

52.    [Bull and Skulls]

c. 11 January 1946
pen and ink; 30.6 x 23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 32)

53.    Study for the ‘Apotheosis of Ned Kelly’

12 January 1946
pen and ink and wash; 30.6 x 23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 32)

54.    Occupation Forces

c. 21 April 1946
pen and ink and watercolour;

30.6 x 23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 32)

55.    Bunny Sailor
c. 28 November 1946 pen and ink; 30.56 x 23 cm

(MS5959, item 33)

56.    [The Island Paradise]

c. 30 December 1946
pen and ink and wash; 30.56 x 23 cm

(MS5959, item 33)

57.    The ‘Adiana’ Ashore

c. 2 February 1947
pen and ink and wash; 30.56 x 23 cm

(MS5959, item33)

58.    Dau

11 February 1947
pen and ink and wash; 30.5 x 23 cm

(MS5959, item 33)

59.    Hill End Rectory

19 September 1947
pen and ink; 30.5 x 23 cm

(MS5959, item 33)

60.    [The Cottage, Hill End]

c. 23 October 1947
pen and ink and wash; 30.5 x 23 cm

(MS5959, item 33)

61.    ‘Olly’ [Margaret Olley]

10 May 1948
pen and ink and wash; 31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

62.    ‘Olly’ Working

17 May 1948
pen and ink and watercolour;

31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

63.    [Church at Hill End]

c. 9 August 1948
pen and ink and watercolour;

31.3    x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

64.    [Study of Blossoming Tree]

8 October 1948
pen and ink; 31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

65.    The Studio

c. 2 July 1949
pen and ink and wash; 31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

66.    [Satyr and Boy]

1 December 1949
pen and ink and wash; 31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

67.    My Room

26 January 1950

pen and ink and watercolour; 31.3 x 24.3 cm

(MS5959, item 34)

68.    [Omu]

c. 19 April 1950
pen and ink and wash; 31 x 23.7 cm

(MS5959,item35)

69.    Attilio Sulking

20 April 1951

pen and ink and wash; 31 x 23.7 cm

(MS5959, item 35)

70.    Omu

c. 28 October 1952
pen and ink and wash; 31 x 23.7 cm

(MS5959,item 35)

71.    [Two Figures]

c. 29 March 1953

pen and ink and wash; 31.6 x 23.9 cm

(MS5959, item 36)

72.    [Still Life with Flowers, Magnetic Island]

23 June 1954
pen and ink, watercolour and crayon; 30 x 23.2 cm

(MS5959, item 36)

73.    [Monument and Shops, Port Douglas]

1 September 1954

pen and ink and watercolour; 30 x 23.2 cm

(MS5959, item 36)

74.    [Children and Lugger]

c. 29 January 1957
pen and ink; 30 x 23.2 cm

(MS5959, item 38)

75.    Karunasena

23 February 1957
pen and ink and watercolour; 30 x 23.2 cm

(MS5959, item 38)

76.    [Views-Sri Lanka (Ceylon]

c. 26 February 1957
pen and ink and watercolour;

30 x 23.2 cm (MS5959, item 38)

77.    John Bell

1 April 1964

pen and ink; 31 x 23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 40)

78.    Ned Kelly Emerging from his Saturday Bath, [and Other Studies]

c. 28 June 1964
pen and ink and watercolour;

31 x23.1 cm (MS5959, item 40)

79.    [Death and the Maidens]

10 July 1966
pen and ink; 31 x 23.1 cm

(MS5959, item 40)

80.    [‘A Foreign Tourist from Another Generation’]

10 July 1966

pen and ink; 31 x 22.9 cm (MS5959, item 41)

81.    Sudiyah and Pudjan [Bali]

10 January 1967
pen and ink and watercolour; 31x22.9 cm

(MS5959, item 41)

82.    [Boy with Goat]

3 June 1967

pen and ink and wash; 31 x 22.9 cm

(MS5959, item 41)

83.    [Four Studies, Bali]

1971

pen and ink; 32.3 x 21.1 cm

(NGA 1973 203/156)

84.    [Four Figure Studies, Bali]

1971

pen and ink; 32.3 x21.1 cm

(NGA 1973 203/157)

85.    [Figure Studies, Bali]

c. 18 October 1972
pen and ink; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 43)

86.    [Young Musicians, Bali]

c. 18 October 1972
pen and ink; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item43)

87.    Diary Title Page: ‘For the Years 1982—198'...’

c. May 1982
pen and ink and watercolour; 36.1 x 28.9 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

88.    [The Merry-go-round, Bondi Junction]

21 March 1982

pen and ink and watercolour; 32.3x20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

89.    [‘A Mackerel Sky’, Bondi Junction]

23 May 1982

watercolour; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

90.    [Self Portrait]

14 July 1982

pen and ink; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

91.    Beerbarrum, Glass House Mountains

24 July 1982

pen and ink; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

92.    Lake Farm by the Road to Malong, Glass House Mountains

20 August 1982
pen and ink and wash; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

93.    [‘This Charming Creature is Called a Bilby’]

c. 8 September 1982

pen and ink and watercolour; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

94.    [A Dalmatian Dog]

c. 12 September 1983
pen and ink and watercolour; 32.3 x 2 0.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

95.    Glass House Mountains from Lawrence Daws’s House
c. 26 March 1983
pen and ink and watercolour; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

96.    Upstairs Front Room, [Paddington]

6 July 1984

watercolour; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

97.    [Still Life with Lemons]

27 September 1986

watercolour; 32.3 x 20.2 cm

(MS5959, item 46)

98.    Diary 1987 to 19-, Title Page

pen and ink and watercolour;

33.5 x 24.1 cm

(MS5959, item 47)

99.    [High-spirited Musicians]

c. 3 May 1987
pen and ink; 33.5 x 24.1 cm

(MS5959, item 47)

100.    [A Nude Primitive Tongan Tapu Maker]

15 November 1987 (drawing made with right hand after the stroke)

pen and ink and watercolour;

33.5    x 24.1 cm

(MS5959, item47)

Diary Pages

p. 42 Page 49 from 1942 Diary

MS 5959, item 8
p. 63 Page 47 from 1944 Diary

MS 5959, item 22
p. 102 Page 215 from 1950-52 Diary

MS 5959, item 35

Select Bibliography

Donald Friends Diaries

Friend’s diaries cover the period 1929-1988, although no diaries are known to exist for 1932 —June 1942. All but four of the extant diaries are held in the Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Australia (MS 5959). They cover the period 1930 — December 1988.

The earliest diary (1929) is held by the State Library of Queensland, and one diary (March 1968 — October 1969) is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Between August 1942 and November 1946, Friend wrote 27 diaries entitled ‘Desastres de la Guerra’. Volumes IX and XIV are thought to have been purchased by Edgar Kaufmann in 1943 or 1944. Their whereabouts are now not known. A third volume, Volume VI, was stolen while Friend was stationed at Greta, New South Wales, in 1943 and has not been recovered.

Published Books Written and/or Illustrated by Donald Friend

Gunner’s Diary. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1943

Painter’s journal. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946

Coast to Coast: Australian Short Stories of Today 1953-1954. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1954

Hillendiana. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1956

Rosemary Wighton (ed.), Kangaroo Tales, Australian Stories for Children. Melbourne: Penguin (Puffin Books), 1963

Donald Friend in Bali. London: Collins, 1972

Save Me From the Shark. London: Collins, 1973

The Cosmic Turtle. Perth: Carroll’s in association with PT Bap, Bali, 1976

Birds from the Magic Mountain. Sanur, Bali: PT Bap, 1977

Tides of Sensuality. Melbourne: Gryphon Books, 1978

Coogan's Gully. Melbourne: Gryphon Books, 1979

The Surprising Adventures of Blue-Eyed Patty the Valiant Female Soldier. Melbourne: Craft Press, 1979

Bumbooziana. Melbourne: Gryphon Books, 1979

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Farce of Sodom. Melbourne: Gryphon Books, 1980

An Alphabet of Owls. Melbourne: Gryphon Books, 1981

Anonymous, translated by Randolph Stow, Songs of the Vagabond Scholars. Sydney: The Beagle Press, 1982

Henry Ennis, The Voyage of the Tamar. Melbourne: Richard Griffin, 1983

Ron Saw, Brief Encounters. Sydney: Richard Griffin, 1984

Art in a Classless Society and Vice Versa. Sydney: Richard Griffin, 1985

Books and Catalogues

France, Christine, Merioola and After. Sydney: S.H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, 1986

Friend, Gwen, My Brother Donald: A Memoir of Australian Artist Donald Friend. Pymble, New South Wales: Angus & Robertson, 1994

Fry, Gavin and Colleen, Donald Friend War Artist 1945. Melbourne: Curry O’Neil, 1982

Hughes, Robert, Donald Friend. Sydney: Edwards and Shaw, 1965

Klepac, Lou, Russell Drysdale.Sydney: Bay Books, 1983

Pearce, Barry Donald Friend, 1915-1989: Retrospective. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1990