National Library of Australia

When he died in 1989, the artist Donald Friend left a double legacy. The first was his artistic output, as various, dazzling and charming as it was vigorously contested in terms of its ultimate quality. The second was an accumulation of forty-nine diaries commenced precociously at the age of fourteen, kept briefly for a year or two and then, from the war years on, written lovingly and obsessively for much of the rest of his life. Friend’s art as draughtsman and painter is widely held in public and private collections; the bulk of the surviving diaries were eventually acquired by the National Library of Australia. Profusely illustrated, these intimate personal records document a remarkable life while providing a detailed insight into one man’s struggle with the processes of making art. In their span, the diaries constitute an extraordinary individual record of twentieth-century Australian experience in war and peace.

'It is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.’ Oscar Wilde’s Cecily, in The Importance of Being Earnest, expresses the contradictions of many diarists. Whether by chance, or by the diarist’s own wish, this most private form of writing often comes before the public. It may be that in the diary’s purest form the self communes with the solitary self. Yet many of the great diarists have a strong sense of audience. Writing a diary is a means of exploring the self, but it is also a way of testing voices, trying on masks. This element of theatre is very strong in the diaries of Donald Friend.