Donald Friend

Donald Stuart Leslie Friend (6 February 1914 – 17 August 1989) was an Australian artist and diarist. He traveled widely, living for a time in Britain, Italy, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Bali. Over the course of his life he produced 47 diaries, most of which were illustrated. These were published by the National Library of Australia as The Diaries of Donald Friend in four volumes between 2001 and 2006. Friend had kept a diary since the age of 14, and the fact that he described himself as a "pederast" and speaks of his love for "boys," has led to much discussion and debate after his death.

Whilst many English-language sources state that Friend was open about his pederasty and pedophilia, one historian who examined the diaries has stated that the only ages given for his male sexual partners were between 17 and 20.

As the historian Edmund Marlowe explained:

If Friend’s sexuality is to be understood, it is unfortunately not enough to leave him speaking for himself through the diaries here drawn on. Although all the people in whom he expressed sexual interest were “boys” in his view, their ages were not usually given. The only exceptions were youths aged 17 to 20.

The confusion has been severely compounded in the media due to a documentary about Friend, caustically called A Loving Friend (Negara Film and Television, 2013), and made with the express hostile purpose of shaming the Australian artistic community into posthumous abandonment of Friend as a “paedophile”. Two things are alleged in support of this. First, Friend is quoted as calling himself “a sentimental pederast”, as he had indeed in a 1950 diary. It is conveniently omitted that he said this with reference to his affair with a youth of 18 and left to popular ignorance to conflate “pederast” with “paedophile”. Secondly, it is claimed that the boy Dolog was 10 when he began a liaison with Friend. No sources of information are cited for this much-repeated claim. The only evidence for Dolog's age in the public domain is Friend’s own drawings of him shown on this webpage. The reader seeking to guess from these whether he was 10 or around 13 should bear in mind the considerable relative physical immaturity of poor South-East Asian boys in 1967. If we add to this that he described a boy of 12 as “of incredible dreamy beauty” and “I’d guess, very, very sexy” (16 January 1967), then 12-20 seems the fairest statement of the age range that attracted him, and his self-description as a pederast was just.

Some of his former lovers became lifelong friends. One former lover - Attilio Guarracino - was 19 when he met Donald Friend, and remembered him positively and publicly after Friend's death by speaking to National Radio broadcast in Australia. As of January 2026, the radio audio is still available to the public.

Early Life

Born in Sydney, Friend grew up in the artistic circle of his bohemian mother and showed early talent both as an artist and as a writer. He studied with Sydney Long (1931) and Antonio Dattilo Rubbo (1934–1935), and later in London (1936–1937) at the Westminster School of Art with Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky. During World War II he served as a gunner with the AIF. While stationed at Albury, began a friendship with Russell Drysdale, leading to their joint discovery of Hill End: a quasi-abandoned gold mining village near Bathurst, New South Wales, which in the 1950s became an artists' colony.

Career

Much of Friend's life and career was spent outside Australia, in places as diverse as Nigeria (late 1930s, where he served as financial advisor to the Ogoga of Ikerre), Italy (several visits in the 1950s), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka; late 1950s – early 1960s), and Bali (from 1968 until his final return to Sydney in 1980).

Despite winning the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1955, Friend made "no attempt to disguise the homoeroticism which underlay much of his work". He was well known for studies of the young male nude, as well as his wit.

Diaries

Friend's diaries chronicled in half a million words, a life peopled with such artists as Drysdale, Margaret Olley, Jeffrey Smart and Brett Whiteley.

Volume Four dealt in part with Friend's time in Bali in the 1960s and 1970s. Publicity for the book claimed: "[T]his volume confirms Friend's quicksilver creative brilliance and extraordinary insight. He is perhaps Australia's most important twentieth-century diarist".

The volume also contained Friend's depiction of himself as "a middle-aged pederast who's going to seed". As indicated above, however, factoids which fail to clearly cite primary source information from the texts themselves, been disputed by at least one historian who shows extracts from the relevant volume itself. We highly recommend readers to examine the article by Edmund Marlowe linked in our footnotes, or read Friend's diaries themselves.