Amanda Beresford, curator and critic, has commented that working on illustrated manuscripts ‘allowed Donald Friend greater freedom than did his painting to explore ideas of diverse kinds requiring verbal as well as visual expression’. An important part of Friend’s originality was to combine words and images in a series of shifting and suggestive relationships where both elements depended on and were enhanced by the other. Friend could make a success of this enterprise because, as well as possessing rare skills as a draughtsman, he was highly literate. His diaries remained important to the process of creating illustrated manuscripts, because in them he often rehearsed preoccupations that later received more formal expression.

Friend’s diaries have now been published in four edited volumes by the National Library. The importance of these diaries has long been acknowledged by a variety of writers and artists, including Robert Hughes, whose first book, published in 1965, was an insightful monograph about Friend that drew on Hughes’s reading of Friend’s diaries. In his recent memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, Hughes has written that Australia found a ‘near-equivalent to the writings of James Boswell in these extraordinary journals’.

The newly released fourth volume of The Diaries of Donald Friend includes text and images from the artist’s final nine diaries, covering the years 1966 to 1988. This was the period during which he produced the series of illustrated manuscripts, among which Amanda Beresford has counted the superb diary dating from 19 May 1982. Begun after Friend had returned to Australia from Bali, this leather-bound volume was given to Friend by the curator and publisher Lou Klepac,  and contains numerous accomplished works of art. Friend wrote that this diary was an attempt to ‘revive something of the spirit of those earlier diaries full of drawings and letters and the excitement of life’ – although he never came close to regaining his youthful fluency as a diarist capable of writing 14000 words a month in 1944, and nearly 8000 words a month in 1945, when he was experiencing the frustrations of life in the army.

Indeed, in the final two decades of his life, Friend’s diary writing became increasingly irregular. During this period he focused attention on producing books and manuscripts and, particularly during his twelve years in Bali, on producing numerous popular works of art. He also suffered from ill health. In 1984, for example, he made no entries for April, June and December. His last entry for 1985 was made in early November and there were few entries in 1986. On 10 November 1986, Friend noted that ‘Lou Klepac with his rapid staccato enthusiasm and willing helpfulness insisted I should not neglect this diary any longer’. Subsequently, he wrote fairly consistently between 1 January and 26 August 1987, but then wrote nothing more until an entry on 1 November, after he had suffered the first of a series of strokes in September. There are only a handful of entries for 1988 and, physically incapacitated and demoralised, Friend did not write in his diaries in 1989 during the final eight months of his life.

Despite Friend’s difficulties, the entries from his last years remain consistently lucid and searching, confirming his status as one of Australia’s finest twentieth-century diarists. It was as if he was finally able to put away the sometimes brittle mask of the extrovert performer, which he had donned so often and with such pleasure in his life and writing; as if bodily decrepitude, in Yeats’s phrase, allowed him access to a kind of wisdom and a coming-to-terms with himself.