‘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.

Friend, who was born in 1915, gave his diaries to the National Library of Australia a few years before his death in 1989. Well aware of their value as cultural history as well as personal record, he hoped that the NLA might one day publish them. But the sheer bulk of forty-four years of diary entries, and the complex task of editing them for publication, seemed insuperable obstacles until the Morris West Trust Fund came to the rescue. The first volume, which includes Friend’s important wartime diaries, has now been published. Handsomely designed, and edited with impressive scholarly attention by art historian Anne Gray, they deserve to find a wide readership.