Mary Anne Friend’s illustration of the Swan River Colony in its second year of colonisation
MARY ANNE FRIEND left one of a handful of remaining eyewitness accounts of Perth and Fremantle during her visit in 1830.
The WA state library invited descendants to view Friend’s diary for the first time since its purchase last year at Christie’s in London for $200,000.
Senior conservator Cristina Albillos told visitors the diary had been pulled apart page by page for better preservation and for public viewing.
“It came to the library in a bad condition,” she explains, pointing a gloved finger at fragile pages where images are missing and paper ripped away, leaving spots of old glue.
“Most images are watercolours, but there are instances of the use of coloured pencils.”
As the family views the unbound stacks of pages from the diary, following Friend’s flowing writing style, history expert Steve Howell puts the artefact into its colonial context.
“She was scoping out the lay of the land,” he says. “She was very perceptive about what she described.”
The diary includes three unpublished watercolours of Fremantle, some of the earliest images depicting the new settlement, and two manuscript charts of rivers of the region probably drawn by her husband Matthew Curling Friend.
Captain Friend had been commissioned privately by merchants Gale and Company to command the Wanstead, which brought free migrants to the Swan River Colony and to Van Diemen’s Land.
Mary accompanied her husband on that voyage from August 14, 1829 to June 12, 1831. The section she wrote from January 30 to March 30 in 1830 is the most significant to WA and includes anecdotes of daily life in the fledgling colony, founded just the year before.
Captain Friend’s great-great-grand-nephew James Platt, who flew in from Victoria to see the diary, says he’d first heard of Friend’s journal when told about the Christie’s auction.
“My grand-daughter Lilah was doing a history project at school when she noticed a story in the paper about the diary,” he told the Herald. “The family’s interest grew from there.”
The charts of the Swan and Canning rivers reveal a little-known site at North Fremantle, Village Lillburn near Rous Head, and Thomas Peel’s ill-fated Clarence town near Woodman Point.
Friend’s watercolours show Fremantle in its infancy as a British frontier town, “the striped tents scattered over the west end, the difficulty of unloading precious cargo (on Bathers Beach) and the challenges of the Swan River’s harsh environment”.
“The town of Fremantle strongly resembles a country fair,” Friend writes as she arrives in bad weather. She did not have children and died in Tasmania eight years later. Her husband remarried.
by CARMELO AMALFI