Dot Murphy was born Augusta Winifred Norris at Port Adelaide, South Australia, on 28 April 1886 and married Michael Alphonsus Murphy in 1913 – a son, John, born in 1914. She was nicknamed 'Dot’ because she was so diminutive and slight.
According to Lawrence King, Murphy had been practising china-painting in Adelaide from the late 1920s and was an accomplished practitioner of this craft. She was a friend of King’s mother, Violet King, who she had met while they lived in Adelaide. Murphy taught Lawrence King the basics of china painting when she visited Brisbane in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Norris Ioannou recorded that Dot Murphy lived in the suburb of Mitcham and fired the work of other china painters in her wood-fired kiln. As maintaining a kiln was an expensive procedure, anyone who fired the works of others would have been a committed craftworker and probably taught as well. It is possible that Murphy learned her craft at the South Australia School of Art in the period 1923-29 as there were often twenty-five or more enrolled each year, although only seven or eight entered for and passed the exams at the end of the year (Ioannou 1986, pg 293).
Her grand-daughter, Maureen Prichard, recalls that Murphy was living at 65 The Grove, Lower Mitcham, in the 1950s. Prichard produced her first piece of china painting under her grandmother’s supervision in 1951 at age three years.(Prichard, Maureen, Pers.Comm., 2001). This may have been the address noted by Ioannou but by then she was using a more practical, albeit primitive, electric kiln which was made by her son John who had some experience working in Adelaide’s commercial potteries.
The manufacturer of the coffee cups and saucers 'in the white’, Decoro Pottery Co., operated in England between 1933 and 1949. The set of coffee cups in the Queensland Art Gallery is decorated with the Australian wildflower motifs which were very popular in the 1930s even in Brisbane where china painting was in a very nascent state. Connie Bishop, who learned china painting with Dot Murphy in the 1950s, also favoured the pink and orange tonalities which is evident in these pieces (Smith, Avis, Pers.Comm. 1998). Much of Dot Murphy’s decorative work was sold through a local firm, Budgen Jewellers (Prichard, op. cit.).
- Writers:
- Cooke, Glenn R
Audiophile_AU
- Date written:
- 2011
- Last updated:
- 2011
