Donald Friend

Donald Stuart Leslie Friend (6 February 1915 – 16 August 1989) was an Australian artist and diarist who lived much of his life overseas. He has been the subject of much controversy throughout his life. Friend kept a diary since the age of 14, and was open about his pederasty and pedophilia. His diaries contain various accounts of friendships and sexual relationships involving children and young people. Some of these young people became lifelong friends, such as Attilio Guarracino who was 19 when he met Donald Friend, and remembered him positively and publicly after Friend's death by speaking to ABC Radio National in Australia. Friend's diaries were published posthumously in four volumes from 2001 to 2006, by the National Library of Australia.

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, including nude male children, as well as his wit.

Diaries

Friend's diaries were published posthumously in four volumes from 2001 to 2006 by the National Library of Australia.[8] He had kept a diary since the age of 14. It 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 open writings about his pederasty and pedophilia, depicting himself in his journal as "a middle-aged pederast who's going to seed". While his relationships were mostly with adolescent boys, in the 1960s Friend wrote in his diary of a 10-year-old boy: "[He] spent the night with me. I hope life will continue forever to offer me delicious surprises ... and that I will always be delighted and surprised. He goes about the act of love with a charmingly self-possessed grace: gaily, affectionately, and enthusiastically. And in these matters he's very inventive and not at all sentimental for all the caresses." A few boys became his lifelong friends, particularly Attilio Guarracino, whom he met on the Italian island of Ischia where Guarracino was born - located in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Naples - when Guarracino was 19 years old.