436 pages
240 x 240 cm
ISBN: 9780646877990
The Making of Donald Friend
Life & Art
IAN BRITAIN
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 relationships 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 rich and revealing detail about this seminal 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 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.
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.