Donald Friend

After the war, by the end of 1946, Donald Friend was keen to get away from Sydney: to get back to a more simple, and, if possible, vital way of living.¹ At the end of the year he headed north to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. ‘He threw away his white man’s clothes and put on a lava-lava. He joined the crews of the luggers that plied between the islands, Thursday, Darnley, Yam Island and the Two Brothers… His life was bounded by the jungle, the sea’s flat dazzle… and the gentle, unthinking rhythm of island life’. ² Friend drew constantly, but mostly he collected images for future paintings. Boy with a dog appears to be one of the Thursday Island paintings he completed after his return to Sydney in 1947.

As Nicholas Usherwood has pointed out, this is a fine example of Friend’s sometimes underrated ability as an artist to invest his subject matter with genuine passion and innocent sensuality. Typical of his best work, there is in Boy with a dog a sensitivity and seriousness underlying the precise observation and delighted response.³  In the words of Robert Hughes, ‘Et in Arcadia ego: the keynote of Friend’s Thursday Island pictures is a relaxed, confident sensuality, edgeless and without bite’.⁴ There, away from the trappings of western society, Friend was wholly at peace with himself.

1.  Hughes, R., Donald Friend, Edwards & Shaw, Sydney, 1965, pp. 48ff.
2.  Op. cit., p. 50.
3.  Usherwood, N., You Beaut Country, A selection of Australian Paintings 1940-2000, Agnew’s, London, 2001.
4.  Hughes, op. cit., p. 52.