[5][6] After her birth her family lived in Ararat and Cemetery Road, Stawell,[7] where Bertha first studied art, and sometime after her father's death on 20 October 1888, they moved to Melbourne.

A summer school was also offered at Charterisville that Fox and Tucker had established in the old mansion above the Yarra River in East Ivanhoe, the lease of which they had taken over from Walter Withers in 1893.

The women, including Bertha, Ina Gregory, Mary Meyer, Henrietta Irving, Ursula Foster and Helen Peters were accommodated in rooms of the stone house and a chaperon and housekeeper looked after them.

[13] Bertha, then employed as a drawing instructor in the Education Department, joined Lilla Reidy[14] in 1901 for an artists' retreat, with Lucy Sutton and Myrtle Lawrence, at the holiday cottage 'Petite Boheme' in bayside Black Rock.

[17] Merfield exhibited landscapes, portraits, figure compositions and still-life at the Victorian Artists' Society from 1900,[18] serving on its council from 1917,[19] and was a capable craftsperson in a variety of media including fabrics, metal and leather, which she combined with her painting and design.

In February Merfield exhibited thirty landscape paintings of her homeland at the Australian Commonwealth Offices at 92 Fleet Street, London at the invitation of High Commissioner Sir George Reid.

The studies and compositions intended for mural purposes are the most elaborate and important in the collection, and represent a phase of pictorial expression interesting in its relation to architecture, and to the beautification and adornment of homes generally.

[40]Importantly, Merfield throughout her career exerted herself energetically and equally in both the fine and applied spheres of art, whether making landscapes and portraits in the conventional format of the easel painting, or designing labels for medicines.

[41] Registered in 1909 electoral rolls as 'art teacher' living at cnr Princess and High Sts., Kew,[42] from about 1906, she taught painting, drawing, leather repoussé,[43] fabric stencilling, enamelling,[44] and marquetry, and 'preparation for University exams,'[45] at her studio in Alexandra Chambers (demolished and replaced by Burley Griffin's Leonard House in 1924), at 46 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, where May Vale also had a studio, and whose classes Bertha covered while Vale was overseas in 1906.

[50] Bertha was recognised as reviving mural painting in Victoria and internationally,[51] a medium that developed from her decorative screens with 'broad effects, and...charming bits of bush landscape from clumps of gnarled trees or slender eucalyptus standing like sentinels against backgrounds of blue sky and fleecy clouds'.

When complete in 1916[64] her mural depicting the Australian bush at dawn, with the sky painted over gold leaf, and the whole filling the south-end lunette under the decoratively perforated barrel-vault of the dining hall gallery,[65] received public acclaim.

The symbolism in this brings out the dawn of architecture in Australia which combines the arts that the ancient Greeks embraced in their structures—those of sculpture and mural paintings—when craftsmen banded together, each loving his part, to form one harmonious whole.

[64][68] Among her commercial commissions, aside from the popular murals and screens Merfield made for private homes, was the backdrop for a window display for F. H. Brunning seed merchants in Elizabeth Street.

They shared an interest in the decorative potential of the eucalyptus form, and when Bertha invited Marion to go with her, and Mabel Hookey and another 'lady painter', sketching together around Tasmania, she agreed.

[70][71] Marion's memoirs record the rough journey across Bass Strait in the SS Loongana, compensated over December 1918–January 1919 with 'a wonderful fortnight which enabled me to add a number of unique trees to my set of Forest Portraits.

[88] In May 1914, in her studio, which was then at the St James Building in Collins Street where she continued to give art classes,[89] Merfield gave a well-attended party for Adela Pankhurst[90] At meetings in 1915 at the Melbourne Town Hall she supported Frances Higgins' efforts toward a co-operative in which women could learn horticultural and agricultural skills toward employment in rural industries.

It lacks the glow and colour of the Australian atmosphere, but its suggestion of cool greyness seems to emphasise the old-world placidity and charm...[106]The Age critic acknowledged that a 'convincing freshness and spontaneity run through the later small sketches which indicate a growing mastery over her means of expression,'[107] while Julian Ashton of The Argus praised the 'simplicity of motif, delicacy of treatment and sureness of touch' in her oils, but reacted to a 'straining after effect that at times leads almost to the grotesque' in her decorative panels.

[108] Perth's Daily News was likewise impressed with the fine timbers Merfield selected for her frames, but does not miss the opportunity to compare her, in her choice of the eucalyptus as her subject, to a native of the city, May Gibbs.

[109] Her Sydney solo exhibition at Horderns attracted a lyrical review by an unnamed critic with the Sydney Morning Herald to her 'oils on absorbent canvas' and singling out her: Nature's Cathedral with the straight stems of the white gums rising from the dry grasses and withered bushes of the plains towards the blue sky with its fleecy clouds, is remarkable for the luminous quality of the atmosphere and for the simple adaptation of nature with but little change to decorative purposes.

Stuart Gums growing at the very edge of the sea, as is their wont in and around Hobart, are depicted with the radiant light reflected from their bare grey trunks, with heavy masses of yellow foliage above, and behind a lovely tone of blue water, turning to green as it reaches the shallows near the shore.

The reviewer in The Bulletin of 19 September 1918, probably Lionel Lindsay, was dismissive:Miss Bertha Merfield has hung 119 treasured canvases for a fortnight's view at the Athenaeum.

Miss Merfield lures the eye from her undistinguished distances with foregrounds of gums, carefully selected for their pose and style and the ability to stand a sort of lyric illustration without damaging the artistic propriety of the pattern.

[116] Marion Knowles writing in The Advocate mourned her death, and remembered her 'winning some years ago the Longstaff travelling scholarship,' and that 'Merfleld's first laurels were gained in Stawell,' noting that one of her last works 'adorns the New Theatre,[117] corner Glenferrie and Dandenong roads, Malvern.’ She praised the ‘daintiness’ of her art,’ ‘faultless accuracy,’ and ‘smoothness of finish,' concluding that: her skill did not end there, but was made vividly evident in portraiture in oils, one of her figure paintings, a dark-eyed girl in Eastern robe, having been given a place of honour on the walls of a noted art gallery.

Miss Merfield's successes abroad never tempted her to hold less dear the Australian scenes and friends, for whom she never ceased to cherish a fervent and faithful affection.