Above: Nora Mitlan died two months short of her 100th birthday.– Narelle Coulter
OBITUARY
Eleanor Mitlan
Born:29 July 1910
Died: 4 June 2010
ELEANOR Mitlan, a long serving teacher at Olinda Primary school and the muse for Arthur Streeton’s Portrait of a Girl, has died two months short of her 100th birthday.
Eleanor, known as Nora, died at Rhodoglade Retirement Village in Olinda on 4 June.
She was just 14 when Arthur Streeton asked her to sit for him at his Olinda home, Longacres.
A cascade of thick red hair flows over the shoulders and down the back of the young girl who looks pensively out of the frame of the finished portrait.
It was those long red tresses that inspired the artist to paint his young neighbour. The two would sometimes chat over the front fence of Longacres, as Nora made her way home from school.
So distinctive was Eleanor’s hair that Olinda storekeeper, Mr Boulter, nicknamed her Carrot Tops.
Nora remembered Streeton telling her grandmother that, even though he wasn’t a portrait painter, he was captivated by Nora’s hair and colouring and wanted to capture her on canvas.
It was more than 80 years before Nora saw the finished portrait. A television news reporter arranged for Nora, then in her 90s, to view the painting when it was put up for auction in Melbourne.
Nora remembered Streeton as a “nice old boy” and that when she sat for him she would have to untie her hair, which normally hung down her back in two thick plaits, and let it hang loose.
It is said Nora was also a model for Streeton’s 1929 painting Classic Romance, though she denied this to family and friends.
Eleanor Catherine Lyle McLarty was born on 29 July 1910 at Swifts Creek to sheep farmers Julia and Archibald McLarty.
Nora was one of nine children. She was around 10 years old when her mother died and she went to live with her step-grandmother and aunt in Olinda.
Her aunt’s house, ‘Gwandoban’, was tucked among tree ferns and towering trees halfway between Olinda and Sassafras.
Nora spoke of childhood memories of an orchard full of raspberries and currants at the bottom of the garden and the wombat who lived there in her imagination.
Nora attended Olinda Primary School and eventually became the sewing mistress. She went on to become an assistant teacher and then a qualified teacher.
Among her fondest memories of her days at Olinda Primary School were those occasions when the school would journey off the mountain on the back of a truck to the seaside, enjoying a day out at Mordialloc, Mount Eliza or Aspendale.
It was at Olinda Primary School where Nora met her future husband, fellow student Herman Mitlan. The couple married in 1950 at St Michael’s Anglican Church, Kalorama. Nora’s students lined up outside the church to see their beloved Miss McLarty on her wedding day.
Nora nursed her aunt Jessie until she died in 1956, when she and Herman left Olinda to settle on land they had purchased in Toolangi.
The couple lived in a makeshift house with no electricity or running water – but loved the beautiful isolation of their Toolangi home.
When Herman was diagnosed with leukaemia, the couple returned to Olinda. Nora was 80 when Herman died in 1991.
She then moved to Lilydale, where she loved tending her garden.
Nora spent her final years at Rodoglade Retirement Village in the care of owner John Faull, whom she taught when he was a student at Olinda Primary School.
Nora is survived by a large family of nieces and nephews.
