What a weird situation it is that the painter Donald Friend once treasured by Robert Hughes for the lyricism of his drawing – OK, minor but grand – should now be effectively banned by every art gallery in the country because his diaries (his stunning candid and eloquent diaries) reveal that in Bali he had sex with underage boys. No one is defending this but it’s barbarous to cancel a significant artist and dazzling memoirist simply because he behaved badly. Somehow the world has come to terms with Gaugin’s South Seas meanderings and the fact that Caravaggio, one of the greatest painters who ever lived, may have killed someone in a duel.

Fortunately we have a very brave book about Donald Friend by Ian Britain, The Making of Donald Friend. Britain edited the selected diaries and wants to do justice to the young Friend, the man John Olsen described as a ‘beautiful’ painter. And Britain does this by presenting Friend before he became such a captivating verbal self-portraitist.

He comes across as normal for much of his earlier life. He seems to have been seduced by an art teacher and he certainly fell in love with a Thai boy whom his mother was suspicious of but nothing happened even though the Asian contemporary was kicked out.

Friend headed for the Torres Strait but there was no sex with the Islanders.

And when he studied at Dattilo Rubbo’s art school he had a sexual relationship of a matey kind with Peter Finch, who would win an Oscar for Network and became Vivien Leigh’s lover. Both Friend and Finch admitted to the sex but they seem essentially to have been mates who did a comedy duo.

Friend went to London and was taught by Mervyn Peake (the Gormenghast genius) among others. He fell in love with a Nigerian and Ted Wilson persuaded him to have sex with his own mistress. All of this is told brilliantly by Britain. Friend goes to West Africa, is dazzled by the majesty of the art and becomes close to the king. He comes back to Australia, to Cairns, during the war and there’s a flaming sexual fling with a contemporary called Bill Beresford. The art remains spellbinding and so does the voice of the writer.

During all of this period Ian Britain makes us aware of the vibrancy of this man-boy who will subsequently be styled as a monster. You don’t have to think of Donald Friend as a kind of embodiment of purity to think the monolithic moralism of the rejection of a fine draughtsman who was also the most eloquent chronicler of the world of art is just a bit crazy.

You don’t have to approve of the sexual abuse to see that Friend was someone who as a young man had an intense identification with every world he could construe as dark, exotic, full of a sort of gleaming darkness which could be dodgy but which was certainly impassioned. For what its worth they’re apparently still interested in buying his art in Bali.

It’s odd how attitudes change in matters of moral posture. Remember how at Cambridge – according to E.M. Forster – tutors in classics would in the vicinity of any mention of homosexuality, in Plato or whoever, say, ‘Omit reference to the abominable vice of the Greeks.’

Well, there are things we might always find ‘abominable’. Donald Friend had an establishment background and he would have known the great Anglican confession, ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us’. All sound morals given flawless expression but let’s not be full of cant about these things.

A baby boomer making her way through something like the classics of the modern period would have read her fill of André Gide for instance, through Les Faux-monnayeurs and The Immoralist and Strait is the Gate, without blinking at the blood-curdling sexual transgressiveness, involving youth and the predatoriness of age without gasping in horror. And think of the kind of horror that can become the subject of the highest art, think of Starrogin’s confession (and the rape of the young girl) in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. We should be aware that various terrible things can feed into the greatest art and that it is the sacred prerogative of fiction to do this. The imagination is never safe ground for the censor.

What did Auden write? ‘God will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardon him for writing well.’ It’s strange in any age of rampant moralistic attitudinising how far we are from the spirit of forgiveness.

In any case Ian Britain has lived up to Thomas Mann’s injunction that an artist should be taken back to his beginnings in life and art.

We have to admit how much of the greatest art comes, in part, out of attitudes that are disturbing to us. There’s the starkness of Greek tragedy and its weird modernity – which is simply the shadow of its truth. And, of course, there’s the comedy which is its complement in Aristophanes. ‘In my mind’s eye I see pea soup,’ he writes. Germaine Greer did an adaptation of Lysistrata about women who go on a sex strike. And The Frogs with the poetry competition between Aeschylus and Euripides is pure Pete and Dud.

All of which is a long way from The Force of Nature: the successor to the bush thriller The Dry with Anna Torv from The Newsreader in a leading role, which opens on 8 February. And how does it tally with Nicole Kidman in the first two episodes of Expats which screened on 26 January and which runs until 23 February on Prime? It’s set in Hong Kong and Kidman’s performance in the first episode has a weird opacity. It was preceded by the photoshoot she did for Vogue Australia which features our grandest star slinking around while snakes entwine her. Nicole Kidman is a wildly uneven actress. There are the things which don’t work and things like Big Little Lies that do. And think of that performance she gave long before playing Virginia Woolf with that nose in The Hours and when she looked like the greatest actress on earth in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For.