Mervyn Napier Waller CMG OBE (19 June 1893 – 30 March 1972) was an Australian muralist, mosaicist and painter in stained glass and other media.

Nicholas Draffin, author of a monograph on Waller, in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, writes that his work "was strongly influenced by Pre-Raphaelite and late-nineteenth century British painters; his monumental works show an increasingly classical and calmly formal style, using timeless and heroic figure compositions to express ideas and ideals, sometimes with theosophical or gnostic overtones".

[4] He went into action in France as a bombardier in the 111th Howitzer battery of the 4th Division, Australian Imperial Force[3] serving there from 1916 then in May 1917 at Bullecourt where he sustained wounds from an exploding artillery necessitating the amputation of his right arm.

In 1927 he completed murals at the Melbourne Town Hall[12] commissioned for £1,700[13] (a 2021 value of A$138,340.00)[14] and which are classified by the National Trust as historically significant at the State level.

[15] They were painted directly, as line drawings, onto the newly installed asbestos Celotex acoustic tiles in a redecoration of the Auditorium after a fire in 1925.

[16] Given a free hand in devising the artworks he explained that the figures were not intended to be allegorical, but to create rhythm, and that line-work was used because a skin of paint would interfere with the panels' sound-absorbing quality.

The actual painting on the series of 7 metre high by 4m wide wall sections from Waller's half-scale cartoons produced in his Darebin studio was undertaken by H. Oliver and Sons under the artist's supervision.

How splendidly the heroic and monumental Phidias endures with the noble Parthenon’s severe beauty; then later, the change of mood producing the graceful Praxiteles and the Erechtheum.

[21]In 1925, Julian Ashton writing on Waller in Art in Australia considered him the 'very antithesis' of Norman Lindsay, who was then enjoying notoriety for his erotic imagery, and rated Waller's works by comparison as "dignified; they have a certain grandeur about them; the figures suggest a statuesque nobility of character; his coloration is rich but low-toned...It pleased me to imagine this young Australian sitting with his Homer on his knee, while he dreamed of that more spacious period when no hunter might roam the woods without Arcadian adventure.

"[22] The Wallers' Ivanhoe half-timbered English Arts and Crafts style house was constructed in the Ivanhoe precinct known as Fairy Hills by builder Phillip Millsom in 1922, through a War Services loan, to the artists' design and specifications, lit by windows high up on a mezzanine 'minstrel gallery' above a large hall in which they entertained their friends including Percy Meldrum, architect of Newspaper House decorated with Waller's mosaic I'll put a girdle round about the earth, designed fixed furniture in a Moderne style constructed by H. Goldman Manufacturing Co. Meldrum and installed in the 1931, 1934 and 1937 alterations to the Wallers' house and studios.

Architecturally the house design is innovative in its internal use of space, specifically in the organisation of the studio/living room and displays a high degree of artistic creativity in the interior decoration (Criterion F.1).