HARRIET AND HELENA SCOTT
by Cherylanne Bailey (2019)
Over the last three decades Alexander Walker Scott’s daughters, Harriet and Helena, referred to largely as “The Scott Sisters“, have been celebrated on Ash Island. The Sisters’ list of Ash Island plants as well as their sketches and paintings of the flora and fauna that surrounded them on the Island in the mid-1800s is proving an invaluable blue print of the vegetation to be replanted and the caterpillars, moths and butterflies which may one day return to call Ash Island their home. In the last decade media exposure and museum collection showings has meant the legacy they have left for early Newcastle’s flora and fauna is being celebrated and the fact that these sisters were made honorary members of the Entomological Society in 1864, after the publication of the father Alexander’s book Australian Lepidoptera and Their Transformations, is becoming more well known.
The Sisters were born to Alexander Walker Scott (Scott Street Newcastle named after him) and Harriet Calcott, who had married in Sydney on 29 December 1846 when the sisters were still young. Following marriage their father moved the family, including their older sister Mary Ann, to his Ash Island cottage to set up house for the first time. Their mother Harriet was a dressmaker who unusually, for the time, was a property owner due to inheritance and their father Alexander was a businessman, entrepreneur, JP, trained artist and naturalist and brother-in-law of Dr James Mitchell. The Sisters’ extended family and cousins included the Merewether and Mitchell families.
Ash Island welcomed many visitors, its appearance from the river captured for posterity by the artist Conrad Martens (working with the scientific team aboard the Beagle with Charles Darwin) in his 12 May 1841 drawing. In 1842 the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt noted the artesian bore and commented that it was “a romantic place” and he would be “content to live and die there”. It is also reported that William Kirchner (German Immigration Shipping Agent), John Macarthur (Camden Park) and John Gould (ornithologist) counted their father as a friend, Helena (Nellie) and Harriet (Hattie), today affectionately known as “The Scott Sisters”, accordingly growing up with many of these intellectual visitors. In growing up,curious about their natural world, the spent their days on foraging trips, collecting plants and insects, shells, nests and eggs, which were painted and documented in diaries and journals in meticulous detail using magnifying glasses, and brushes consisting of a single hair, and the like to capture the minute detail.
The Sisters were without peer in natural history circles at the time and their stunning, life-like drawings of mainly butterflies and moths and associated flora, which are still considered resource material today. They had inherited their artistic skills from both their grandfather Dr Helenus Scott and their father Alexander, a trained artist.
The Sisters etched and painted what they experienced in their Island paradise, in many instances capturing complete lifecycles and the associated flora, thus capturing for posterity and future generations the breathtakingly beautiful moths and butterflies which called Ash Island home.
Their father published 7 papers on butterflies and moths with the first volume of Australian Lepidoptera and Their Transformations(London, 1864), spectacularly illustrated by them and followed by Mammalia, Recent and Extinct (Sydney 1873). On the initiative of Helena, Alexander completed the second volume of his Lepidoptera which was published in five parts, 1890-98, by the Australian Museum.¹
An edited extract from Vanessa Finney’s Transformations: Harriet and Helena Scott, Colonial Sydney’s Finest Natural History Painters published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 7 December 2018 in part reads: “Harriet and Helena Scott made their first marks as natural history illustrators in 1846 with their first butterfly and moth drawings for their father, Alexander Walker Scott.”
“…The Island proved a place of sanctuary and stability for everyone, as opposed to the hustle and bustle of The Rocks, Sydney, where the rest of the family resided.
Ash Island was still a naturalist paradise – grassland and tall oak forests encircled by mangroves, oyster crusted rocks, tidal flats, sheltering swamps and saltmarsh. The prized Ash and cedar trees had been cut down by explorers and Tim Geddes in the early 1820s, but pockets of dense coastal rainforest still remained. Birds and fish were plentiful, and the island was still a stopping place for migratory birds.
As well as snakes there were frogs, birds, crabs and shells, all concert insects, bats and a very profusion of rare flora. For the colonists, the Island’s main drawback was its lack of fresh water. Until Walker Scott installed an artesian book, the little community had to travel by boat to nearby Tomago on the north bank of the Hunter River to draw water from its spring. Too tall, straight Norfolk Pines, visible from miles around, stood sentinel in front of the Scott’s single story house. Built on piles above the flood level, it had four bedrooms, a study and two parlours, one of which was used as a drawing. It was modest but comfortable, and reflective Walker Scott’s taste, class and interest – there was a grand piano for his daughters to play, an assortment of artworks and paintings on the walls (including the works of Conrad Martens), a library of books, as well as cabinets of his natural history collections. Importantly there was a study, dedicated to business and natural history work, although this social work was most likely also done at work table in the drawing room. House was racked by a deep shaded veranda – a place to sit and observe, enjoy the breeze, the distant horizon, the flow of the river and the play of light across its surface.
Ash Island was mostly bushland, and the sisters explored all its haunts, not just its gardens and orchards but also its grasslands and forests, leech- ridden mudflats and mosquito-infested mangroves along its riverbanks.”
ASH ISLAND TODAY
The provenance of the continuing work of the dedicated Island volunteers really commenced with Charlie (CE) Smith and his 1960’s research of Alexander Walker Scott and his talented daughters. More recently, the wonderful work of Marian Ord in her research and books published featuring the Scott Sisters artistic endeavours are continuing to assist volunteers in the revegetation of the Island with many of the plants which the Sisters documented as growing there when the Island was flourishing in the mid 1800’s. It is hoped that in doing so the moths, butterflies and caterpillars will one day return to again call the Island home.
For more information on the Scott Sisters visit https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2017/03/27/the-scott-sisters-of-ash-island/
¹ https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Scott-22105