Beyond the wallpaper: the life and work of Phyllis and John Murphy

A significant donation of more than 3,000 wallpaper samples to the Caroline Simpson Library reflects just one facet of the remarkable careers of Phyllis and John Murphy, partners in life, architecture and heritage conservation.

In December 2022, Phyllis Murphy AM generously donated to the Caroline Simpson Library more than 3,000 wallpaper samples collected by Phyllis and her late husband, John Murphy (1920–2004), over almost 40 years. For Phyllis in particular, wallpaper had begun as a retirement project and become an abiding passion. But the Murphys also have a fascinating longer story as architects and pioneers in the Australian heritage movement stretching back to the 1950s.

Starting big: an Olympic pool

Phyllis Murphy (nee Slater) was born in 1924 to Shell Oil executive and Australian Rules footballer Arthur Slater and housewife Edith Slater. She recalls that her early interest in architecture was encouraged by her parents:

As a small girl, [I] always played with building blocks … [At] about ten … I read in the newspaper that the first escalator had been installed in Melbourne in the Manchester Unity Building so I begged [my mother] to take me into the city to see it.

Modern Melbourne: Phyllis Murphy interview¹

Despite disapproval from her school principal, who considered a profession in architecture ‘most unsuitable for a girl’,² Phyllis pursued her fascination, commencing her architectural education at the Melbourne Technical College in 1942. After disruptions to university teaching due to World War II, she transferred to Melbourne University to continue design studies in 1948 and 1949 and graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1950. In her fourth year, Phyllis topped the class as one of only two women out of a cohort of 80 students. Her profile with other female architectural graduates in The Australian Women’s Weekly, intended to celebrate their achievements, is a glimpse into attitudes at the time: ‘They’re an enthusiastic band of career girls … attractive and feminine in appearance and outlook, but they have made up their minds to hold down man-sized jobs’.³

While studying, Phyllis met John Murphy, who had returned from war service in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea as part of the 3 Field Survey Company (1941–44). A romantic and creative partnership that would last a lifetime bloomed. In 1949, they modernised a flat in East Malvern in Melbourne, and married the following year. The newly married pair set up a practice together, building on John’s experience working for cinema company Gaumont-British and renowned theatre architects Cowper, Murphy and Appleford, and Phyllis’s experience with theatre architect Reg Appleford and famed modernist firm Yuncken, Freeman Brothers, Griffiths and Simpson. In 1950, they started designing small houses, often for returned servicemen, and became adept at working with material shortages and the small loans offered by the War Service Homes Scheme, a Commonwealth program established to encourage postwar reconstruction and home ownership. These houses were simple and elegant, channelling the Murphys’ formative observations on modernist architecture from their travels in Sweden in 1947.

The Murphys’ careers changed forever when they won the design competition for the Swimming and Diving Stadium for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, in partnership with architects Kevin Borland and Peter McIntyre and engineer Bill Irwin. The stadium – which now operates as the AIA Vitality Centre, a commercial health and wellbeing service – is considered one of the most significant modernist structures in Australia.

New designs and old: John & Phyllis Murphy Pty Ltd

While John continued to develop the Olympic stadium design, Phyllis ran their architectural practice, John & Phyllis Murphy Pty Ltd. It was then highly unusual for a husband-and-wife team to be credited equally for their work. They continued to design elegant, modernist houses which were admired by the German-American architect Walter Gropius, famous as the founder of the Bauhaus art school, who told them the houses had an ‘Australian feeling’ about them. At this, their friend and fellow Australian architect Roy Grounds immediately told the pair ‘not to get swelled heads!’⁴ The couple also designed halls, school buildings and small commercial work (including for hotels and a television station), and contributed to the Hotham Gardens redevelopment of North Melbourne.

While the Murphys were known for their sophisticated translation of European modernism into an Australian context, another important part of their career was working with heritage buildings. Encouraged by Robin Boyd – one of Australia’s foremost modernist architects and author of several books on architecture, including The Australian ugliness (1960) – they joined the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) in 1958 and were its honorary architects for over a decade. It was the early days of the Trust, and the Murphys were instrumental in the preservation of heritage buildings across Victoria, including Bacchus Manor, La Trobe’s Cottage and Castlemaine Market. This also led to commissioned work on the restoration of Emu Bottom Homestead, the facade of Melbourne’s Block Arcade, Collingwood Town Hall and other projects. Phyllis and John never saw modernism as the antithesis to respecting heritage, declaring in 1961 that it was ‘wicked to alter these lovely old places’.⁵ Following a central tenet of heritage practice, their rule was ‘if you could leave anything and not alter it, you left it alone’.⁶

A fascination with wallpaper

The Murphys’ wallpaper collection, which eventually grew to more than 3,000 samples, began by chance. In late 1978, planning for their future retirement in Kyneton, Victoria, the pair were told by their friend and keen local historian Fay Bolton about ‘a shed full of old wallpapers destined for the tip’.⁷ The shed had belonged to the painting and decorating business O J Price, started by Joe Perkin in 1859 and run by Oswald J Price until 1967; its contents reflected 108 years of the business’s continuous operation in Kyneton. The hundreds of wallpaper rolls and samples were a glimpse into more than a century of evolving tastes in colour, texture and pattern, and they ignited Phyllis’s keen interest in wallpaper. She became the custodian of the O J Price collection, which grew over time as she received donations from the community.⁸ Assessing the Murphy collection in its entirety, Museums of History NSW Curator Michael Lech remarked that ‘finding one wallpaper from [the 19th century] in good condition is rare, but coming across thousands is remarkable’.⁹

Phyllis became an expert on and curator of historical wallpaper in Australia. She was fascinated by wallpaper, as a decorative element used in the grandest to the humblest of buildings, and ranging in quality from sumptuous, flocked wallpapers to affordable, machine-made ‘pulps’ applied directly to lining boards. Accordingly, the collection contains wallpapers from houses like the Rotha mansion in Hawthorn, Victoria, and the Mona Vale country house in Ross, Tasmania, as well as from modest homes, including small ‘Singapore’ cottages prefabricated overseas and shipped to Australia in response to housing and labour shortages. Although the vast majority of wallpapers used in Australian homes were imported until an appreciable local industry developed in the 1950s, the way that they were used tells a local story. Wallpaper offers unique insights into the domestic realm and the aspirations of those who lived there. It can convey the residents’ yearning to be in a picturesque place such as that shown on the wallpaper, or the desire to keep up with decorating trends. It can suggest a concern with more practical issues, such as replacing wallpaper to keep a house clean and tidy according to the latest medical advice. Wallpaper can tell stories that are at once intimate, but also inflected by broader economic, technological, social and cultural changes.

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