The family lived in Phillip Street in central Sydney. Garran's mother "had a deep distrust, well justified in those days, of milkman's milk" and so she kept a cow in the backyard, which would walk on its own to The Domain each day to graze and return twice a day to be milked.[2] The Garrans later lived in the suburb of Darlinghurst, just to the east of the centre of the city.