Nora Curle Smith (née Murdoch) was a pioneering figure in Australia’s domestic and technological history – a writer, innovator and outback homemaker with a flair for the modern.
Living in Kalgoorlie at the height of the Western Australian gold rush, Nora helped shape the future of domestic life. When her husband, electrical engineer David Curle Smith, developed the world’s first electric cooking stove in 1905, Nora authored the cookbook to go with it – Thermo-Electrical Cooking Made Easy (1907)1 – believed to be the first electric stove cookbook ever published.
Practical, forward-thinking and elegant, she embodied the spirit of modern living from a distinctly outback setting.
Josephine Muntz Adams likely met Nora while visiting her own brother, Edwin Parnell Muntz, in nearby Coolgardie in the late 1890s (see Outback Australia). The resulting portrait, later titled Yellow Sleeve, captures Nora’s quiet strength and refined poise – with a luminous use of colour that drew critical acclaim. One reviewer praised the work’s ‘peculiar fluctuation of light’ and daring contrast: ‘The yellow rises at times into vivid orange… subdued by the soft mass of the material.’2
Few artists dared to paint yellow. Josephine did – and did it brilliantly.
The portrait was exhibited in Josephine’s 1943 retrospective at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Gallery, officially opened by Nora’s nephew, Sir Keith Murdoch – the newspaper proprietor and father of Rupert.
Nora was the sister of Sir Walter Murdoch, after whom both the Perth suburb of Murdoch and Murdoch University are named.
Image courtesy of The University of Queensland Art Museum.
