What’s In A Name delves into the fascinating stories and personalities behind some of the city’s best-known street names. This week the Journal looks at central Dandenong’s McCrae Street, named in honour of one of Australia’s first surgeons, Farquhar McCrae.
ALTHOUGH he never lived in Dandenong, Dr Farquhar McCrae lent his name to one of the city’s key thoroughfares.
Born in Scotland in 1807 into a well-to-do family, Farquhar McCrae underwent medical training in Edinburgh and Paris, before being commissioned as an assistant surgeon in the British Army.
On 29 February 1839 Dr McCrae left Leith, Scotland, on the Midlothian with his mother, wife Jane and sisters Margaret and Thomasine.
The party arrived in Port Phillip Bay on 15 June 1839.
As a surgeon and a squatter, he quickly established himself in Port Phillip society, soon becoming a magistrate and member of the Melbourne Cricket Club.
In 1839 he leased what was known as the Eumemmering Run. He employed men to run the Dandenong station, never settling there himself. He is also believed to have purchased land where the Dandenong Town Hall stands.
Instead Dr McCrae built La Rose in 1842, a mansion later known as Wentworth House in Pascoe Vale.
According to the Dandenong and District Historical Society periodical ‘Gippsland Gate’, Dr McCrae eventually sold his run to Leslie Foster. Feeling he had been thoroughly fleeced by Dr McCrae on the land sale, Foster denounced Dr McCrae to all and sundry in the upper strata of Melbourne society.
Not long before Christmas 1843, Dr McCrae was riding his horse up Queen Street when Foster waylaid him and “whipped him so severely that McCrae fell off his horse in a most undignified manner”.
Newspapers of the day record the legal proceedings under Judge Jeffcott. Ironically, when naming streets after the early settlers of Dandenong the councillors of the time arranged for Foster Street to run into McCrae Street.
He got into financial difficulties during the depression of the early 1840s, and in about 1845 moved to Sydney, where he practiced medicine.
Farquhar McCrae died in 1850.
A drawing in black pencil and watercolour by his sister-in-law, the artist and diarist Georgiana McCrae, hangs in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
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