Located in an untouched area of native vegetation and wildlife, they flourished under the guidance of their artistic father and Harriet Calcott, their mother.

Together with their father, they collected live specimens from their neighbourhood, then determined the proper food plants to take back home and feed the hungry creatures.

Harriet produced botanical illustrations for the 1879, 1884 and 1886 editions of the "Railway Guide to New South Wales", and both were involved in the production of Australia's first Christmas cards in 1879.

[4][5] By 1864, a large number of plates of moths and butterflies had been completed, ready for the publication of the first volume of their father's Australian Lepidoptera and Their Transformations.

When the prominent natural historian William Swainson examined the growing number of paintings a decade earlier, he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, ... these drawings are equal to any I have ever seen by modern artists ... every tuft of hair in the caterpillar, the silken webs of the cocoon, or the delicate and often intricate pencillings on the wings of a moth, stand out with a prominence of relief which it is perfectly impossible to reproduce by simple water colours...

The standard of their work led to their being elected honorary members of the Entomological Society – a signal honour for women in that period of history.

[1] Vanessa Finney (2018), Transformations: Harriet and Helena Scott, Colonial Sydney's Finest Natural History Painters, NewSouth Publishing, ISBN 978-1-74223-580-6