One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora, and people of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California.

He was from Hawaii, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley,[1] United States General Land Office employee, and, later, Potash War lawyer.

[9][10] There Austin was part of the cultural circle that included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Harry Leon Wilson, George Sterling, Nora May French, Arnold Genthe, James Hopper, Alice MacGowan, Gelett Burgess, Sinclair Lewis, and Xavier Martinez.

[9]: p49 In 1906, she had a tree house constructed, that she called “Wick-i-up”,[11] built by M.J. Murphy, based on a design by San Francisco architect Louis Christian Mullgardt.

In July 1914, she joined William Merritt Chase, the distinguished New York painter who was teaching his last summer class in Carmel, at several society "teas" and privately in his studio, where he finished her portrait.

[9] Apparently, Chase was not deterred by Austin's "pushiness and claims to extra-sensory perceptions", but was more interested in her appointment as director of East Coast publicity for San Francisco's Panama–Pacific International Exposition.

[9][17][16] In August 1914, one of Chase's students, Helena Wood Smith, was brutally strangled and buried on the beach by her Japanese lover, art-photographer George Kodani,[9][18] Austin joined the mob who disparaged local authorities for their incompetence.

[21] Austin also was active in preserving the local culture of New Mexico, establishing the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1925 with artist Frank Applegate.