 The painter Jane Sutherland was her aunt and the physicist and mathematician William Sutherland was her uncle.Her sister, Ruth Sutherland was a painter and writer.Her first piano teacher was another aunt, Julia Sutherland (1861-1930), a pupil of Louis Pabst, a German émigré then considered to be Melbourne's leading piano teacher (himself a pupil of Anton Rubinstein, and Percy Grainger's first teacher).