During her studies she joined the Buonarotti Club, a bohemian society of writers, painters and musicians to which other members of the Heidelberg School belonged.

[5] When in Melbourne Southern shared a studio at Grosvenor Chambers, 9 Collins Street, with Jane Sutherland and Tom Roberts[7] from 1888.

[4] Her residence at cottage 'Blythe Bank' in Warrandyte was integral to the development of the artistic community there, with regular visits from the McCubbins and Colquhouns, and Jo Sweatman becoming her neighbour at 'Kipsy.

[8]Miss Clara Southern (Mrs J. Flinn) is a sweet and original singer of the Australian bush in colour, which, by the most skilful use of her pigments, she realises in all its beauty and charm, its majestic silences, its harmonies, and those mysterious distances we all know and feel when in its midst.

We can almost hear the wind sighing and sobbing through her trees and that furtive movement of life beneath the beautiful undergrowth that trembles in her foregrounds.

Her landscapes are truly poems, full of sentiment and feeling, and that artistic reticence so seldom met with, which never allows nature to be for one moment oppressed or overstepped, or the note forced under any pretence.-'A Lyrical Painter', Kyneton Guardian, 14 March 1914[11] Southern died in Melbourne on 15 December 1940.