Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming was a Scottish-born travel writer, a daughter of Sir William Gordon Gordon-Cumming of Altyre and Gordonstown, second baronet and his first wife Eliza Maria, nee Campbell. In 1867 she was invited to spend a year with a married sister in India and this proved the start of twelve years of travel during which time she produced numerous watercolours. She was well off and well connected, and her globe trotting has been described as having the "air of a series of rather far-flung social calls". [ref: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004]. She arrived in Sydney in late May 1875 and remained in New South Wales until early September. In her book
Memories [Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1904] she makes a brief reference to this visit and her recollections of the fragrance and beauty of the harbour headlands and "many lovely scenes in the numberless creeks of the great harbour" [p.218].
