Sydney artists' camps

Daplyn, another keen promoter of the new style of landscape painting, also stayed at the camp, as did many of the artists working for The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (1886–89), including Albert Henry Fullwood, Frank P. Mahony, John Mather and Frederic Schell.

Other notable visitors were writers Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent a night at Balmoral under canvas, and Ada Cambridge, who included lyrical descriptions of the camp in her 1891 novel A Marked Man and later, in her Thirty Years in Australia (1903).

As she noted: … a cluster of tents, a little garden, a woodstock, a water tub – almost hidden in the trees and bushes until one was close upon it; and the camp looked out upon the great gateway of the heads, and saw all the ships that passed through, voyaging to the distant world and back again.

Both spent considerable periods at Curlew and the paintings they did at this time, of Sydney Harbour, Mosman Bay and nearby Cremorne Point, are among the masterpieces of Australian art.

His friend the composer Marshall Hall, visiting from Melbourne, was inspired by the harbour setting to write his "Hymn to Sydney", which began: City of laughing loveliness!

In 1991 the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented an exhibition, "Bohemians in the Bush", in celebration of the artists' camps, bringing together an impressive collection of works from the period.