‘Brisbane the Fair’ and Other Queensland Postings
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Battalion Intelligence Office on Trek
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/13/48 |
Michele Helmrich explores the compelling wartime diaries of artist Donald Friend
On 30 August 1944, artist Donald Friend wrote in his diary: ‘Death is in the air: we are no longer responsible; we’re off to the wars, and for the moment there are parties and people and no morals … I’m enjoying the army from my labour battalion so very wholeheartedly.’
Friend wrote these words in Brisbane, on his third Queensland posting in the Pacific war. This was a time of ‘Brisbane the fair … Brisbane the scented’. What he found intoxicating was not the ‘Australians in Brisbane’, who were mostly ‘a tribe of crude dullards’, but ‘Australia in the toils of an American invasion: that is what so spices the life here’.
Not all of Friend’s army experience on the home front was relayed in such positive terms, certainly not the fraught time spent at Hume in New South Wales after he enlisted as a gunner with the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) in June 1942. Looking back in early 1945, on being offered a commission and appointment as an official war artist, Friend described his army life as ‘years of gun drill, marches, cleaning grease traps and pig tins, being a barman, a gunner, a Permanent Shithouse Scrubber, Flash Alfie’s pet aversion, a wharf labourer, a cloak-and-dagger merchant’.
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Los Medicos
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/16/64 |
From July 1942, when General Douglas MacArthur located his HQ in Brisbane, Queensland played a vital role in the Pacific war, providing the major land base for the staging of the Allied counteroffensive against the Japanese. Friend’s diaries are invaluable in their record of daily life in regional and metropolitan Queensland, and add to our understanding of the cultural climate and social history of the period.
They proved a compelling resource when preparing Defending the North: Queensland in the Pacific War, an exhibition of art and social history held at the University of Queensland Art Museum until 13 November, and subsequently touring to Mackay, Townsville and Murwillumbah. Four of the diaries were displayed in Brisbane and will be on view in Mackay until 29 January 2006.
Of the 44 diaries by Friend held by the National Library of Australia, some 25 cover his wartime experience. Recorded with one or two exceptions in soft-covered exercise books, they bear the title Las Desastres de la Guerra, after Goya’s The Disasters of War.
Friend’s first military experience of Queensland fell between March and April 1943, when he undertook a training course for the Intelligence Corps at ‘Seabrae’ at Redcliffe, outside Brisbane, on the edge of Moreton Bay. While Friend recounts with excitement some of his reconnaissance exercises, such as ‘mapping tracts of wild mountain country, sloshing through swamps and jungles at night on long compass marches’, other details remained veiled in wartime secrecy. Failing the course by a small margin, he returned south.
Friend’s visual acumen provides an almost cinematic glimpse of scenes of wartime life. We hear of Americans at Redcliffe who ‘land on the beach from great invasion barges such as they use in New Guinea’ and who ‘walk with a sort of mooch, a roll, a little like a camel, or like the striding Texan cowboys in films’, as if ‘every man is his own Gary Cooper’. He weaves the tale of a raconteur, told with style and wit, interspersed with fragments of letters received and sent, poems, critiques of art exhibitions, reminiscences and sketches.
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Rocky Creek Theatre de luxe
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/16/60 |
In September 1943, Friend travelled to Far North Queensland to an unknown destination, proving to be Rocky Creek just north of Atherton. He had volunteered to participate in the important malaria research then being undertaken to assist the war effort. Three of the diaries bear the subtitle, ‘Decline and fall of a guinea pig’. The volunteers, he believed, faced risks: ‘we knew when we volunteered that there was a fair chance of pegging out as the result of this jaunt, so a few hypodermic jabs en route won’t make much difference’. In his drawing Los Medicos, an oversized guinea pig receives a ‘jab’ from a huge needle as its rider, clad in Roman armour, draws a sword on fleeing Japanese troops.
Friend’s account of the weeks he spent in the malaria ward is alive to the social milieu. Precise details of the medical treatment are deferred in preference to recounting evenings with the gramophone club, books read from the Army Education library, attempts to learn Japanese, conversations with Sister Mummery, visits by ‘the Tivoli Girls’ or Lady Blamey, or the pleasure of listening to ‘Count Basie making wonderful
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Sister Mummery
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/18/158 |
boogie-woogie’ on the radio. With time to spare in the wards of the Rocky Creek camp hospital, he sent for his art materials and paints. We become Friend’s confidant as he writes about his art, and of images that want to find their way onto canvas or paper. At Rocky Creek he paints two versions of the war memorial in Atherton’s main street, now in the collections of the Australian War Memorial and the Cairns Regional Art Gallery. Atherton is summarily described in the diaries as ‘a scattered handful of dusty sun-bleached shops and shacks, listlessly facing a decayed war memorial’.
Diary sketches vary enormously. Some are quick records of people and places, others he describes as ‘satirical drawings’ in the tradition of Thomas Rowlandson or George Cruickshank, a book of whose ‘witty, bitter’ drawings he read at Rocky Creek. In Per Ardua Ad Astra, for instance, a bloated general floats in triplicate like so many tethered balloons high above a country town.
Returning to Brisbane and Sydney in November 1943, he and other ‘guinea pigs’ were diverted for a brief sojourn in the searing heat to Charters Towers, west of Townsville. While Friend reveals little of Charters Towers as an important air base, he does observe: ‘A lot of Americans in the streets, and our air force men from the nearby ‘drome—a few Negroes. The locals looked like old-time miners, their womenfolk washed out, vitiated by the climate, and dressed in the appalling pinks of West Queensland fashion.’
Friend departed Charters Towers in a ‘stuffy brake van’ on a Queensland train. In a few succinct lines, he draws a picture of armies on the move:
All the armies and all the nations seemed to be on Townsville station. There were troop trains arriving, the scramble of men loaded with gear, New Guinea green sourly brilliant in the yellow lamplight. Then in the river of shouting and swearing men, we would see two or three turbaned Afghans standing, grey bearded, impassive; and Malays, and vivacious Chinese.
May 1944 once more saw Friend in Brisbane, this time in the outlying suburb of Chermside with the nd Battalion, 31st Army Works Company. He labours ‘lumping cement and loading oil drums’—arduous work needed to sustain the northern forces. Yet this period is one of great artistic productivity for Friend. To his delight, the army provides him with a studio space affectionately dubbed the ‘gas chamber’.
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Sketch for The Incinerator
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/26/25 |
The art he produces in Brisbane in 1944 is by far the most ambitious of his work to date. Gone are the satirical drawings, though he did execute designs for a ballet for Hélène Kirsova during this period. An increased gravitas permeates such works on paper as Japanese Radar Tower and The Incinerator, the latter now held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Could it be that his association with the American war artists, such as Barse Miller, Frede Vidar and Sidney Simon, and his many conversations with Edgar Kaufman, from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, impact on his work even more so than his association with Drysdale? Did talk with those who had served in New Guinea and the islands to the north—as had the American war artists—contribute to a darker vision?
The year 1944 was a time of ‘Historic Moments’. An unexpected entry in this period places Friend in a room with Prime Minister John Curtin. In a hilarious scene, Friend recounts how he and Barse Miller drunkenly gatecrashed Curtin’s press conference at the Hotel Canberra, on his return from England and America. Then, within sentences, we are reading a letter from poet Harold Stewart, confiding in Friend about the Ern Malley literary hoax.
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Lt Edgar Kaufman
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/27/141 |
Friend’s diaries of this period provide an entrée into what he described as Brisbane’s ‘Little Harlem—that very disreputable square mile on the southern side of the bridge where the Negroes congregate’. Friend would ‘go down to the Ma Delaney’s [pub] to see how all the coloured folk were doing’ and to enjoy the company of ‘Negro sailors’.
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Le jazz hot au chez côte de Carver Club
Donald Friend Diaries
Manuscript Collection
MS5959/27/134 |
On 4 February 1944, Friend first visited the Carver Club (named after scientist George Washington Carver), proclaiming he was the ‘first white man to do so’. In late 1944, he disguised his friend Edgar Kaufman as ‘the most fantastic digger’ for an evening at the Carver Club—such a disguise was necessary given the enforced segregation of American servicemen. Friend describes the Carver Club as being filled with ‘thousands and thousands of Negroes and the weirdest assortment of women’. He writes: ‘An orchestra of white sailors played hotly and the dance floor was just one extraordinary beautiful tangle of superb dancing.’ His diary sketches of their ‘black and liquid movements’ are fluid improvisations of calligraphic movement. ‘Watching Negroes, being with them is more lovely than being half full of liquor’, he enthused.
In contrast, Friend’s descriptions of Brisbane artists, studios and exhibitions are often less than flattering. His comments about a visit to ‘the great Brisbane Art Lady’s Sketch Club’, Caroline Barker’s studio—represented in a drawing held by the Queensland Art Gallery—approach farce. Similarly dismissive are comments about ‘kindly’ arts patron Dr J.V. Duhig who ‘naively scurries in the wake of 0th-century cultural trends’ and the Queensland National Art Gallery as a ‘chamber of horrors’. A visit to the ‘curious attic studio owned by the Queensland Art Society’ proved more successful.
With brevity, Friend writes on 16 September 1944 that ‘Chermside sees me no more’ and his ‘new military address is, with pristine simplicity, just 21 Henry St , Ascot’. What he did not, and could not, explain was his work here as a ‘cloak-and-dagger merchant’. Those who worked at Central Bureau—which had its headquarters at 1 Henry Street—were sworn to secrecy under the Commonwealth Act, their secrecy to be observed for some 30 years after the war. Central Bureau performed vital work breaking Japanese codes for MacArthur’s northern offensive.
But by late 1944, with MacArthur’s HQ moved to Hollandia, Friend observes that, ‘In the pubs about town one runs into English Tommies and Canadians’, with rumours that ‘the Yanks will all be gone in a month or two’. By 14 December, he writes that ‘Brisbane is becoming quite bare of soldiers—sometimes, in pubs and cafés, the Australians outnumber the Americans’. On the eve of his departure for Melbourne, he is certain that ‘the Great Period of Brisbane has fizzled out: gone forever’.
In Sydney, a week after he turned 30 on 6 February 1945, he received his commission as a war artist, when, as Lieutenant Friend, he served with the Royal Australian Air Force in Labuan and the 7th Division AIF in Borneo. Passing through Brisbane on his return south in October 1945, he enjoyed seeing the exhibition of ‘French and British contemporary art’ at the Art Gallery and visited the town, describing it as ‘a sort of pilgrimage: drinks at the Criterion, still dreadfully crowded as ever, but dead without the old people’. For Friend, the time of ‘Brisbane the fair’ had passed.
MICHELE HELMRICH is Coordinator of Public Programs at the University Art Museum, The University of Queensland, and co-curator of Defending the North: Queensland in the Pacific War. The Defending the North exhibition is a joint project of the University Art Museum and The Brisbane Institute, in partnership with the State Library of Queensland
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