Donald Friend was a major mid-twentieth century painter who made many visits to Queensland from the early 1930s onwards, and who had a long and intense interest in various locations in the State. This exquisite early painting was made in Brisbane during World War Two.

Friend was recruited to the war effort in mid-1942 but he continued to make art despite his erratic and discontinuous postings. While he was working in Brisbane in early June 1944, his fellow artist Lindsay Churchland helped him find acceptable working premises, which Friend called 'The Gas Chamber'. This was a period of significant development for Friend, as he recorded in his diaries shortly after: 

It's almost fantastic, when one looks back at the paintings I've done since Christmas leave, the sudden huge development and deepening of the feeling, the change of technical method and outlook, yet all a logical outcome of those glorious days of escape...¹

This painting can be probably dated between 28 June (after Churchland provided Friend with a copy of the literary journal Angry Penguins sourced in Brisbane) and 17 July 1944, when Friend despatched a group of works including the 'Interior' with a nude to Russell Drysdale.² The inscription 'Ern Malley 16th Poem, by Harold Stewart and James McAuley', seen on the newspaper in the foreground of A Brisbane bedroom refers to the greatest literary hoax perpetrated in Australia, the Ern Malley affair; its effects continue to resonate today.

Ern Malley was a fictional character created by the poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The story was that Malley had just died and his equally fictional sister, Ethel Malley, had forwarded her brother's supposed poems to Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins which was produced with the support of the prominent Melbourne art patrons John and Sunday Reed. Stewart, who was considered 'the first critic in Australia' by Donald Friend,³ and McAuley loathed the emergence of contemporary poetry and its supporters, especially the Angry Penguins group. They devised the Ern Malley hoax because they wanted to know whether the Angry Penguins literary coterie could distinguish between genuine poetry and a mish-mash of unrelated lines of text. Harris did in fact publish 16 of the poems and Sidney Nolan created a special cover for the autumn 1944 edition of 'Angry Penguins', before the hoax was revealed.

The Ern Malley deception was revealed in early June 1944. Friend was with Lindsay Churchland when he discovered that Churchland had a copy of the Sydney Sunday Sun of 18 June which reported the Ern Malley affair and the debunking of the personalities involved. Friend realised immediately that Harold Stewart was a figure in the affair as he had written to Friend some months earlier asking for information on Friend's own faux colonial painting and suggesting that he and some friends were preparing a colossal literary hoax in Melbourne.⁴ Friend had little sympathy for the victims of their efforts as he considered Max Harris was '... a very bogus Melbourne intellectual who, in partnership with John Reed (equally bogus and very rich) runs a quarterly on modern Australian Art of the womb-tomb-pelvic variety.'⁵ Indeed, the inscription on this painting is significant as it provides a link between artists and intellectuals in Brisbane and the events and artistic conflicts between Sydney and Melbourne. 

Friend himself generally kept a reserve between himself and the local art scene in Brisbane, as his sketch La vie de Boheme au chez cote de C. Barker 1944 makes obvious. Though Barrett Reid and Laurence Collinson of the Barjai group of writers had direct contact with the Reeds and Harris, Friend was their senior by a decade, and was not part of their immediate circle, either through social contact or by aesthetic affiliation. Friend had reason to be even less sympathetic to the Angry Penguins debacle a few days later when Stewart wrote asking whether he had seen '... the stinking review which John Reed wrote about you, Drysdale and Dobell in the same issue of hate Penguins? Cheap, insulting and ignorant.'⁶ Angry Penguins had clearly taken up cudgels in the cause of Melbourne art against that of Sydney. 

All this controversy is now seen as quite ironic, as it is now generally conceded that the poems are significant: despite their avowed intentions, the two poets couldn't help but produce poetry of substance. As Friend observed at the time: 'The poems are good, damned good. I can imagine Harold and McAuley in ecstasies of malice, bending their minds like bows, each poem an arrow to transfix their victim'.⁷ By that time the authorship of the poems had become common knowledge, as Friend acknowledged in his use of the inscription by McAuley and Stewart on A Brisbane bedroom. 

The reference by Donald Friend to the 16th Ern Malley poem, 'Colloquy with John Keats', in conjunction with a male nude, is suggestive, as both the poem and the painting share a sense of regret and loss. There is also the suggestion of vulnerability in A Brisbane bedroom, as the solitary figure of the young man gazes out over the blacked-out city. The quiet setting of deep rich blues and greys in the painting suggests a sense of foreboding and even a melancholy mood. As the young man is evidently of combat age, like Friend himself, the painting captures a moment of intimate respite from the arduous commitments of wartime, perhaps suggesting a tender interlude, a moment apart.

Finally, A Brisbane bedroom has an interesting provenance for the Queensland Art Gallery, as it was included in the collection of Major Harold de Vahl Rubin (the donor of Picasso's La Belle Hollandaise), which was sold in 1972. But the major interest for the Gallery in this work is its tender and unexpected view of war-time Brisbane through the bedroom window of a young soldier. 

Essay by Glenn R Cooke, former Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, December 2007.

Endnotes

1. Hetherington, Paul. 'The diaries of Donald Friend volume 2'. National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2003, 9 June 1944, p.106.
2. Op. cit., 17 July 1944, p.132. A study for A Brisbane bedroom was illustrated in Donald Friend's Painter's Journal, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1946, p.101.
3. Op. cit., 16 June 1944, p.109.
4. Op. cit., 22 June 1944, p.115.
5. Op. cit., 22 June 1944, p.114.
6. Op. cit., 27 June 1944, p.121.
7. Op. cit., 28 June 1944, p.123.