The Tweed Regional Gallery sits amid the rolling, verdant hills just south of the Queensland/New South Wales border. Its nondescript exterior belies the beauty of its artistic contents: a mix of local talent and national celebrity.

The facility is now dedicated to the memory of the late Australian artist Margaret Olley. A small collection of her works grace the walls of a purpose-built extension.

Olley is clearly the gallery's celestial core, but it also pays homage to another shining light of the Australian art world, a contemporary with whom she shared a long acquaintance and who is remembered alongside her in the pantheon of 20th century Australian artists.

His portrait hangs in black and white at the centre of the gallery: a lumbering, jowelled old man, sitting on a chair with his knees spread wide.

The painter Donald Friend was lauded by his admirers as a "legendary figure". But he could just as easily be described as Australia's most celebrated paedophile.

Friend not only liked to paint and draw naked boys, he also liked to have them crawl between his legs.

But here, in this small regional gallery, and elsewhere across the country, Friend is celebrated, his artistic reputation unsullied by the serial sex crimes he committed.

Several copies of a recent biography are on sale in the gift shop, sitting at eye-level, surrounded by the usual souvenir trinkets and postcards.

Published in 2010, long after his offences became publicly known, the biography has a cheery cover and title: The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles & Confessions of an Australian Artist. It was compiled by Ian Britain, a former editor of the journal Meanjin.

Open the cover and there's a glowing forward by the actor/comedian Barry Humphries, who affectionately refers to Friend as both "brilliant and unique".

And yet the subject of this enduring affection was an abuser of boys, a pederast who preyed on poor children in the developing world.

The Tweed Regional Gallery houses works featuring Donald Friend. ( ABC RN: Rosanna Ryan )

For Cathy Kezelman, a long-time campaigner for the rights of the sexually abused, such adulation continues to astound, but not surprise: "Historically we have struggled with a myopic adulation of celebrity," she says.

From personal experience, and having listened to the harrowing testimony of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, she is all too aware of the corrupting influence of power and prestige.

And although he has been dead now for more than 27 years, Donald Friend continues to exercise both.

To his many cultured, intellectual and discerning admirers — gallery owners, art critics, art devotees — he remains a great man. In June this year the Tweed Regional Gallery even organised the public performance of a one-man show entitled "An Evening with Donald Friend".

A Donald Friend painting depicting rescued prisoners of war at Balikpapan. ( Supplied: Australian War Memorial )

It's hard to imagine the life of any other Australian paedophile being thus celebrated.

It's almost impossible to comprehend, for instance, anyone in 2016 publicly praising the pastoral work of convicted Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale given the evidence before the Royal Commission detailing Ridsdale's paedophilia over more than three decades in the diocese of Ballarat.

And it's difficult to conceive of any public institution adorning its walls with a photographic tribute to Rolf Harris; or distributing books praising his career as an entertainer, while simultaneously ignoring or downplaying his sexual assaults on women.

Yet this is the case with Donald Friend.

That Friend was a serial paedophile is beyond dispute. It is also well documented — though not by a court. Friend's crimes weren't committed in any public facility, meaning Friend was not charged in the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.

The documentation, then, comes from his own diaries.

Evidence from Friend's writings

Friend was so delighted by the sexual abuse he committed against young boys in Bali and Sri Lanka that he wrote about it in explicit form. He then left his writings to the National Library of Australia with a request that they be published on his passing.

The Library holds all 44 of Friend's original journals. Over several years they published the works in four volumes, the last of which appeared in 2006. It is from these that Ian Britain's book is composed.

In a passage from the diaries, written in the late 1960s, while he was living in Bali, Friend wrote of one sexual partner: "[He] spent the night with me. I hope life will continue forever to offer me delicious surprises ... and that I will always be delighted and surprised.

"He goes about the act of love with a charmingly self-possessed grace: gaily, affectionately, and enthusiastically. And in these matters he's very inventive and not at all sentimental for all the caresses."

Friend was writing about a boy aged 10.

Elsewhere, Friend rapturously declares that the child made "passionate and expert love"; a "houseboy" he rates as an "enchanting wayward lover".

A Donald Friend portrait of a young Indonesian boy ( Flickr: Herry Lawford CC-BY-2.0 )

It's possible to argue that the Australian Arts community was ignorant of Friend's proclivities during his lifetime. But from at least the late 2000s the evidence of his criminality has been available for any and all to read.

In late 2008, filmmaker Kerry Negara released a damning documentary called A Loving Friend which included interviews with several of Friend's Balinese victims — now middle-aged men.

"Where Donald is talking about having sex with them, clearly they're incredibly embarrassed," Negara told the Law Report on ABC radio, "and all sorts of childhood memories are conjured up."

She went on to accuse the arts establishment of turning a blind eye to Friend's crimes.

The National Library's then director of publications and events, Paul Hetherington, responded to the criticism by saying: "I don't know that we can today go into the complexity of the relationships between Friend and the young men and women who worked as houseboys — essentially that's how he saw them — in the 1960s and 1970s in Bali.

"Friend's activities and attitudes … throughout his life, and still to this day, [have] met with a wide range of responses … people are entitled and should make up their own minds about what they think of Friend and these activities and his artistic work."

Negara remains unmoved: "Basically what they're trying to say is that Donald was a nice paedophile, a culturally accepted paedophile. That everyone in Bali loved him. That the boys actually enjoyed it."

In his Foreword to Ian Britain's book, Humphries reminisces about visiting Friend in Bali and often finding him surrounded by "an army of adoring houseboys".

He goes on to describe the artist as resembling "a mischievous satyr" who, upon eventually returning to Australia, found that he had "fallen out of fashion and his benevolent form of paedophilia was less favourably regarded by the authorities".

No explanation is given for what a benevolent form of paedophilia might entail.

Humphries, at least, acknowledged Friend's crime by name. But eight years after Negara's documentary you really have to go searching to find any mention of Friend's proclivities.

Visit the National Library of Australia's website, for instance, and you'll be told lots of things about Friend's life and career, including the fact that he became a " brilliant writer", residing "like a feudal lord at his home at Sanur, with his gardeners, houseboys and antique collection".

This illustration from Donald Friend's diaries shows two Indonesian boys he knew in Bali. ( ABC: RN )

Until approached for this story, the library's website made no mention at all of Friend's paedophilia. It now includes one guarded reference: "In later years his reputation declined and his hedonistic lifestyle, as well as sexual relationships with minors, received more attention than his art."

Go to the website Art Collector and their glowing bio of Friend rather unfortunately describes him as a "romantic", always "attracted to the exotic".

Nor is his sexual predation mentioned on the website of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. (Since this article was first published, the website has been updated to include reference to his sexual abuse.)

Until earlier this year there was no mention of Friend's paedophilia on the website of the Australian War Memorial.

However, after being contacted by the ABC, the organisation updated Friend's biography, noting that: "In recent years, his relationships with underage children have been questioned, and it is now generally accepted that these relationships were inappropriate, and the actions of a paedophile."

Art industry slow to react

It isn't just that Friend's true nature remains largely downplayed or ignored. In 2016, the "mischievous satyr" continues to enjoy considerable economic and figurative currency.

Menzies Fine Art Auctioneers and Valuers, for instance, recently auctioned paintings by the late artist, including works that are explicit in their depictions of young males and their genitalia.

In June this year an ink, watercolour and gouache picture called Moving Figures went under the hammer for $9,818. The piece shows three naked youth touching and embracing, with one youth sitting directly in front of the other's penis.

Another ink, wash and pastel work called Tamil Boys 1958 sold in late March 2016 for $7,977, while yet another, Moving Figures II, which appears to show one naked youth with his face pressed between the buttocks of another, was advertised for sale recently with an asking price of between $6,000 and $9,000.

That a leading auction house would sell images of a questionable sexual nature, depicting young naked males painted by a known paedophile might seem surprising, perhaps even astonishing, but such is the strange pull that Friend continues to exercise over the Australian arts community.

Many galleries still hold works painted by Friend despite his admitted pederasty. ( ABC RN )

The Art Gallery of New South Wales website lists 48 works by Friend held by the gallery. A brief message notes that none of the works are currently on display — but they can easily be viewed online, including a painting featuring two half-naked youths, called Studies of Accidia, which dates from 1960.

The National Gallery of Victoria also has a collection of Friend's work, as do many other major Australian galleries, including the Australian War Memorial and the National Gallery in Canberra.

Though none of the galleries mentioned make any online acknowledgement of Donald Friend's criminality, they were all quick to distance themselves from any suggestion that their continuing embrace of Friend's artwork should be seen as an endorsement of his misdeeds.

A spokesperson for the National Gallery of Victoria told the ABC: "The NGV does not condone or support child abuse in any form. The NGV is sensitive to community expectations and standards."

For this reason the gallery says it has no plans to "profile Friend's works in the context of a dedicated exhibition".

But that doesn't mean his works are to be kept in storage. In fact, a landscape painted by Friend is currently on display.

Greater awareness of the damage of abuse

So how, at a time when the trauma of child sexual abuse is detailed in our media on a regular basis, can a serial offender like Friend continue to be admired, and even lauded, by the Australian arts community?

Why are his drawings and paintings, including those that are clearly of a sexual nature, still treated as objects of veneration and value?

And why is it that his reputation continues to escape widespread public notoriety?

At least part of the answer to the latter, may lie in the location of his crimes. Friend committed his offences against powerless boys in impoverished countries, long before international sex tourism laws were instituted. And he was not alone.

On her website, Kerry Negara describes Friend as part of a circle of "feted western artist paedophiles" who operated in vulnerable communities across Asia throughout the 20th century.

Then there's Cathy Kezelman's notion of a "myopic adulation of celebrity" which has historically allowed the sexual misdeeds of artists like Friend to be: "perversely sanctioned by the misdirected and purportedly romantic notions of art, and artistic prowess."

"The irrefutable reality is that the sexual exploitation of children is predatory and decimating and all attempts to dismiss its gravity and minimise its criminal status with phrases such as 'benevolent paedophile'are as ignorant as they are poisonous," she says.

Can aesthetic value be separated from moral value?

In a recent article for the Ethics Centre website, philosopher Laura D'Olimpio points to a long philosophic tradition, known as aestheticism, which seeks to separate the artist's moral character from his or her work.

"Aesthetic value is unique to artworks, so aestheticists claim this should be the sole basis for aesthetic judgement," says D'Olimpio. "Any moral message, therefore, should not affect (positively or negatively) the overall value of the artwork."

To those who dispute the aesthetic argument, such a rationale serves only to provide a convenient excuse for misconduct. Art, after all, is regularly interpreted and celebrated as the direct expression of the artist's inner self.

How would it be possible to appreciate Picasso's Guernica, for instance, without realising it as the direct embodiment of his personal morality and ideology?

D'Olimpio argues that aestheticism has also been used as a protection against censorship. By drawing a strict distinction between the artist as a moral entity and his or her artistic realisation, aestheticism becomes a defensive weapon to keep subjective political or moral pressures at bay.

Both aspects of the Aestheticism argument are employed by the director of the Tweed Regional Gallery, Susi Muddiman, who fervently rejects any suggestion that displaying Friend's portrait in her gallery could be seen as inappropriate.

"Fundamentally it is not the gallery's role to make a moral judgement on the work of artists," she says.

"Along with other cultural institutions which have artworks, writings and archival material by Donald Friend in their collections, should the Tweed Regional Gallery begin to make moral judgements along these lines, it is the equivalent of censorship.

"The Donald Friend diaries are available for sale in the gallery shop to contextualise the gallery's representation of visual art practices of Australian artists."

Tweed Regional Gallery director Susi Muddiman. ( Supplied: Tweed Regional Gallery )

The Aestheticism tradition is much more commonplace than one might at first imagine. Many people continue to enjoy the musical works and talent of Richard Wagner, despite being aware of his intense anti-Semitism.

Others appreciate the soulfulness of the American singer Nina Simone despite the fact that she repeatedly preached violence.

Deakin University philosopher Patrick Stokes believes the arguments put forward by the aestheticists become particularly problematic when the subject matter of the artist in question clearly reflects an aspect of his or her behaviour.

The question, he says, is whether you can disentangle the production from the producer, and "keep the former while repudiating the latter".

In the case of Friend then, what's important is that he didn't just paint landscapes or war scenes, he also drew naked young boys in highly sexual ways; and he didn't just diarise his public life, he wrote glowingly about his own paedophilia.

Artists such as Nina Simone present a challenge when separating their work from moral judgements. ( Getty Images: David Redfern )

"You could make the case," says Stokes, "that Roman Polanski [who pleaded guilty to the rape of a 13-year-old American girl in 1977] made great films that aren't conceptually linked to the repugnant things he did.

"But in the Friend case it seems like people aren't even trying to separate the art from the artist at all. It appears many have bought into a genius-figure image of Friend that fuses the man and the paintings and don't want to face up to the contradictions involved in praising an unrepentant paedophile.

"In the case of some of these paintings you can't separate the artist and the art anyway: these are pretty clearly documentary evidence of child abuse."

If you support that view, then the obvious question is what should become of Friend's artworks?

What should be done

One option is to simply destroy them.

In 2014, Frank Penhalluriack, the owner of a Melbourne hardware store, invited members of his local Caulfield community to join him in destroying a large mural painted 20 years earlier by convicted sex offender Rolf Harris.

But the destruction of art sits uncomfortably with the western liberal mindset. It brings forth memories of the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, or the Nazis' burning of books and their distaste for what they labelled "degenerate" art.

Even anti-child-abuse campaigner Cathy Kezelman expresses a certain ambiguity about the destruction of Friend's paintings and drawings.

"I would not necessarily advocate destroying the artworks," she says, "but I do feel that those which represent criminal behaviour and portray the violation of children should not be publicly displayed and hence honoured."

Another option then, Kezelmam suggests, is to hide them away — or at least the worst of them.

The National Portrait Gallery, which holds two portraits of Friend, has indicated it has no plans to put either piece on public display.

The National Gallery of Australia has taken a similar position, despite the fact that it possesses a large collection of Friend's work.

A third option is to ensure that whenever Friend's art is displayed, the viewing public is provided with context.

A Donald Friend work depicting sailors on leave outside a hotel in Melbourne. ( Supplied: Australian War Memorial )

The Australian War Memorial also holds a considerable collection of Friend's art — in their case his many wartime sketches and paintings. A large number of these are currently on display.

The memorial's director, Brendan Nelson, says his organisation finds itself in an "extremely difficult" situation: "On the one hand, despising the now-known behaviour of the long-dead artist, but on the other knowing the power of his works to convey an insight into the Australian experience of war."

In that vein, Dr Nelson says the memorial will in future "examine reference to his paedophilia" in the presentation of Friend's art while continuing to display them.

"Notwithstanding his behaviour," says Dr Nelson, "the only beneficiaries of his works, displayed and in print, are those grappling with the consequences of war and the capacity of the memorial to provide these insights. There is no benefit whatsoever to Mr Friend's estate in any form."

While that may be true in a strictly financial sense, it's hard to argue that there aren't significant reputational benefits to the legend of Donald Friend as a great artist and intellect from the continued mainstream display of his paintings and drawings.

Nor is Friend's reputation harmed by the decision of other institutions and galleries to carefully store their collections away for possible future reconsideration. After all, the mere act of keeping such items is itself an indication of their perceived ongoing value.

That said, at least by providing reference to Friend's criminality, the true nature of the man is laid open to public scrutiny and approbation.

Aestheticists, and those who choose to see Friend as a satyr not a devil, will continue to resist, but with context, the viewing public can make up its own mind about Friend and his place in history.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article related three quotes from Donald Friend's diaries to separate children. Although Donald Friend referred to multiple boys in his diaries, the quotes related to a single boy, aged 10.