sketcher, was born in Sydney, New South Wales, daughter of Harriet Calcott and Captain Robert Stirling. As aide-de-camp to Sir Thomas Brisbane her father left Sydney in 1825 and soon afterwards her mother moved to Newcastle and became a seamstress. There Harriet Calcott had two daughters, Harriet and Helena ( Scott ), with Alexander Walker Scott whom she later married. Frances lived with her mother, step-father and half-sisters. A small, delicate oval watercolour painted in 1841 of the Scotts’ home on Ash Island, a place well known for its hospitality to many visiting scientists and artists, is her only known work. It may have been done as a souvenir, for in that year she married Wilhelm Kirschner, a Prussian businessman who had migrated to Sydney in 1839.
Some time after their marriage, probably in the late 1840s, the Kirschners visited Frankfurt-am-Main where Wilhelm published a handbook for German migrants to Australia. In 1858, when the German naval vessel Novara was in Sydney, its ethnologist, Karl Scherzer, visited the Kirschner’s home on five acres at Darling Point and afterwards wrote in his diary that Mrs Kirschner was 'very pleasant and speaks fairly good German’, adding, 'you would never think by looking at her that she has seven children’. By then Wilhelm Kirschner had made a fortune manufacturing stearin candles for the goldfields and was consul for Hamburg, Prussia and Austria. Although Scherzer commented that Mrs Kirschner’s two sisters were 'busily preparing a substantial work on the beetles, butterflies and moths of New South Wales’, he made no mention of any drawings by Frances.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
