Features

The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles & Confessions of an Australian Artist edited by Ian Britain (foreword by Barry Humphries)

Item: The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles & Confessions of an Australian Artist
Author: Patrick Mccaughey

November 2010, no. 326

Text Publishing, $45 pb, 490 pp, 9781921656705

Features

The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles & Confessions of an Australian Artist edited by Ian Britain (foreword by Barry Humphries)

by Patrick McCaughey •

November 2010, no. 326

For some sixty years Donald Friend kept a diary, making his final entry just days before his death in 1989 at the age of seventy-four. The National Library of Australia published them in four massive volumes between 2001 and 2006. They were intractable. You needed an axe to cut through the stream of consciousness which flowed from an uncensoring pen.

Patrick McCaughey

Patrick McCaughey is former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut, and the Yale Center for British Art. His most recent book is Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters (2014). His other works include Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs (2006). He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review. He lives and works on the banks of the Quinnipiac River in New Haven, and has recently finished editing Fred Williams: Diaries 1963–1970 for the Miegunyah Press.