Douglas Stewart's record of thirty years' close friendship with Australia's most controversial artist.
Norman Lindsay and Douglas Stewart were friends for close to thirty years, enjoying a creative companionship that spanned from their first meeting in 1940s bohemian Sydney to Lindsay's death in 1969. In this moving record of that friendship, Douglas Stewart remembers Norman Lindsay the man - his richly talented family and circle of friends, his quicksilver and vital personality and his exceptional gifts as painter, etcher and writer. But above all, this is an act of homage to a man whom Douglas Stewart saw as one of the greatest figures of Australian art and literature.
Poet, dramatist, short-story writer and critic, Douglas Stewart was a highly influential literary figure. Born in New Zealand in 1913, he came to Australia in 1938 and was for twenty-one years literary editor of the Bulletin before he joined Angus & Robertson where he worked for twelve years as an editorial adviser. He is remembered both for his finely observed nature poetry and his verse dramas, including his most significant work The Fire on the Snow concerning Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition and which was written during his second year in Sydney. He also published a number of books of prose including a collection of short stories A Girl with Red Hair and other Stories (1944) and the non-fiction works The Seven Rivers (1966), Norman Lindsay: A personal memoir (1975), A Man of Sydney (1977) and Springtime in Taranaki (1983). Written in 1984, the year before he died, his last book Douglas Stewart's Garden of Friends about t