1.3.1
Alexander and Sarah (1892-)
Alexander and Sarah were married, according to family records, at "Mr. Oliver’s residence, Duchembegarra.... according to the rites of the Bible Christian [Methodist] Church," on 30 March 1892. (Alexander became a Methodist in compliance with the wishes of the Oliver family.) They made their first home nearby on Alexander’s farm, which he bought in 1891 or 1892.
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Alexander McRae and Sarah Oliver, about 1890.
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The marriage yielded five children and twelve grandchildren:
David (1893—1982) m.1925 Alice Macdonald (1901—1986) (John, Mary, Cynthia, Brian, Gordon, Patricia).
Marion (1894—1960) m.1916 George Iddles (1883—1962) (Mavis, Roy).
Roderick (1897—1920).
Dorothy (1899—1995) m.1922 Alexander Fraser (1888—1957) (Jean, Donald).
Ian (1903—1975) m. 1929 Blanche Gittins (1910—1987) (Eion, Gwyneth, Graeme).
The first two children, David and Marion, were born at the Olivers’ house in Duchembegarra.
Though their proximity to the Olivers made their family life easier, Alexander and Sarah were discouraged with the struggle to survive on their relatively unproductive land, and soon began to think about moving away to some more fertile area.
Poor soil was not their only cause for dissatisfaction; Alexander resented the intrusion into his farm affairs of Victorian government bureaucrats with their petty requirements and regulations.
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| Family locations in Australia |
The last straw was the arrival in the mail of a notice of a fine for some infraction of government rules. According to family tradition, Alexander slapped the offending paper on the kitchen table and declared—Sarah, we’re going to Western Australia!
Why remote Western Australia, rather than one of the nearer and better-established colonies South Australia or New South Wales? There may have been several reasons, but a family connection was certainly one of them: Alexander knew he could count on Ernest Carter, a nephew by marriage (husband of the daughter of one of Alexander's sisters) and a prominent farmer and produce merchant in Meckering, WA, to help him establish a farm in that district.
In order to make the arrangements, in 1896 Alexander went to WA and stayed for a time at Carter’s farm in Meckering. He traveled by steam ship from Melbourne to Albany, by coach to Kojonup, probably by mail cart to Katanning, and thence by train to the railhead, then located at York. From York he walked to Meckering. He could have taken the train from Albany, directly to York, but it seems he was under an obligation to detour to Kojonup to hand-deliver a package too valuable to entrust to the mail.
Having with Carter’s help secured an option on two 160-acre homestead blocks three miles to the south-east of Meckering, Alexander went back to Victoria, sold the farm at Duchembegarra, and then in 1897 he returned to WA with Sarah and their two children Dave, then four years old and Marion, three.
The family made the first leg of their journey—to the port at Melbourne—by wagon drawn by four draught horses. Alexander had hoped to sell the horses at the port, but failing to receive any good offer he left Sarah and the children to go by ship to Albany via Adelaide while he took the horses overland to Adelaide, a distance of some 400 miles, and sold them there for a better price. He completed the transaction in time to rejoin the family on board the ship when it docked at Adelaide.
A scene at the port made an indelible impression on four-year-old Dave: an agricultural-machinery salesman on a bicycle, towing a harvester on the cobble-stoned pavement to demonstrate how easy the machine was to pull.
The family continued to Albany on the same ship, but while Sarah and the children traveled second class Alexander went steerage to save money. He arrived in Albany with 500 gold sovereigns in his pouch from the sale of his farm and livestock. Alexander's pouch would be worth about $US135,000 at current (2012) bullion prices.
Having completed the purchase of his 320 acres in Meckering, Alexander made a camp on the property and set about clearing the land and building a rudimentary cottage on it. Meanwhile Sarah and the children stayed in Northam, at a boarding house run by Alexander’s sister Jean (Mrs. Jack McKay) by this time a widow.
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Family Locations in Western Australia
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The family’s arrival in WA came at a time of economic expansion there. Boarding houses like Jean McKay’s were doing a capacity business catering to the unmarried men then flooding into WA to find work on the railroad or in the goldfields around Kalgoorlie or on the new farms opening up to the east of Perth.
Ernest Carter also benefited from the boom, and on a scale that eventually led to his undoing. Carter became WA’s biggest supplier of the fuel for the horses and camels which were the engines of transportation of the era—hay. The magnitude of his business may be appreciated from the anecdote that in one year he sold so many twine-bound sheaves of hay, at the handsome price of £3:15:0 per ton, that the twine alone cost £1000 (about $US4000 at that time). Elated by success, he attempted to corner the WA hay market with the goal of driving up the price to £5. But his plan failed when South-Australian suppliers started bring in hay by ship, and Carter reacted to the setback by shooting himself.
Sarah stayed with Jean for several months, during which she gave birth to the third child of the family, Rod. Meanwhile Alexander had transformed the property at Meckering into a viable farm, and had constructed a dwelling with an iron roof, dirt floors and walls of wheat bags sewn together. Sarah and the three children moved there from Northam in 1898.
Though their home may have been less comfortable than the one in Victoria, in WA the family enjoyed the relatively pleasant West Coast type of climate with hot dry summers and cool winters. They still had to contend with the constant annoyance of flies, and the proliferation of rabbits was a growing menace to farmers throughout Australia.
Thanks to the good soil and reliable rainfall of Meckering, the farm prospered with wheat as the main crop. With a growing family to consider, Alexander decided to put more land under cultivation. Being unable to add to his holding in Meckering he sold it in 1910 to his nephew Billy Draffin and bought a wheat farm of 1400 acres in the Jennerberring district, eleven miles north-east of Quairading. By then the last two children, Dorothy and Ian, had been born on the farm at Meckering.
The McRae family, Meckering 1904/05, from left: Marion, Dot, Sarah* holding baby Ian, Rod, Dave. *Regarding this identification, please see ID Question at the end of this section.
Incidentally, the town of Meckering no longer exists. On 14 October 1968 all buildings in and around the town were destroyed by an earthquake. Its magnitude, 6.9, was the greatest ever recorded in Australia.
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Sarah and Alexander with baby Mavis Iddles, Marion's daughter.
Jennerberring, about 1919
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Though the family’s life at Jennerberring was prosperous and relatively comfortable—they had a real house instead of the shack at Meckering—it was darkened by misfortune after Rod, the second boy, had an accident in 1907 in which he suffered irreparable brain damage.
As young boys, Dave and Rod played at riding a bull calf. As the calf grew and began to sprout horns, it became more and more difficult to stay on its back. Rod’s injury came as he was about to fall, and the animal tossed its head and drove a horn into the eight-year-old’s skull.
The outer wound healed, but Rod began to suffer fits of mental disturbance which became more frequent and severe with the passage of time. On occasion he would interrupt a placid family meal with a horrifying howl, leap up from the table and run about outdoors in a frenzy, temporarily unable to recognize anyone and unaware of his surroundings. Rod never found rest until he died in 1920.
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Front row: Sarah and Alexander. Behind them: Ian, Dot, and Rod, Jennerberring 1917.
Pictured separately: Dave, at Port Suez, 1917, and Marion, 1916.
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In a photo of Alexander and Sarah and three of their children taken at Jennerberring in 1917, Sarah seems "worn out," as she often described herself, by the troubles of the time. Rod’s fits were her chief concern, but she also had the two eldest children on her mind. Both Dave and Marion had asserted their independence by leaving home, and this left both the farm and the household seriously shorthanded.
The war later known as World War I had broken out in 1914, Australia had immediately declared war in support of Britain, and in 1915 Dave joined the army to fight overseas. Alexander strongly opposed Dave's action. He was philosophically opposed to war, did not believe Australians should have anything to do with Britain's battles, and anyway he wanted Dave to stay home to help work the farm. But Dave, inspired by the warlike tradition of the Clan MacRa and the military record of his great-grandfather Quartermaster Sergeant Alexander Macrae, would not be held back. By 1917 he was serving in the Middle East with the 10th Light Horse, an Australian regiment celebrated for exemplary performance in battle, particularly in Gallipoli and elsewhere in the Middle East during World War I.
Marion had also left home at about the same time as Dave had, and also against her parents’ wishes. For a time she served as a maid on another farm in the Shire of Quairading. Then in 1916 she married George Iddles, and the couple’s first child, Mavis, was born the following year.
Marion's departure was a heavy blow for Sarah. Now with only her younger daughter Dot for assistance, Sarah had trouble coping with the cooking and cleaning, the washing and ironing, the bread making, the sewing and all the other work that fell to the distaff side on farms of the time. To make matters worse, Dot, a lively talkative girl, fell into a habit of grumbling about Marion's defection. Sarah's patience was tried, but she remained calm.
Alexander was also overburdened in Dave's absence, but soon the youngest boy, Ian, stepped in to take up the slack. Ian figures in a 1917 family photo as a schoolboy in short pants, but already he had begun to share the heavy work on the farm. He was the only member of the family who did not in some way distress his parents, and in the following years their hopes came to center on him.
Meanwhile Dave served with the 10th Light Horse in Gaza, was wounded at Samson Ridge in 1917 but recovered and returned to Australia in good health in 1919. The same year he was granted a 1700- acre farm near Alexander’s through the Government’s War Service Land Settlement Scheme, and he named this farm Royston.
At first Dave ran into serious problems on Royston, chief among them the plague of rabbits that came close to wiping out his first wheat crop. But he persevered, and with Royston as his base holding, he managed eventually to expanded his activities greatly. In 1937, with John already making a substantial contribution to the work, he leased a 1600 acre farm known as Mulien Estate located 7 miles east of Royston. The family moved to Mulien Estate and worked that farm as well as Royston until the lease expired in 1940, at which time the family moved back to Royston. Dave served in the army from 1941 through 1944. In 1945 he leased a 2000-acre farm 5 miles south of Quairading, and the family lived there until the lease ended in 1953. In 1949 he sold the Royston farm and bought a 1500 acre farm called Stranraer located 11 miles north of Quairading. In 1953 he bought a 3000-acre farm, Craigmile, 15 miles north-east of Quairading.
Back now to pick up Ian's story, about 1920. At that time Dave and Ian began to work together for mutual benefit, combining their efforts alternately on Dave's Royston and Alexander's farm in Jennerberring. This was a satisfying time for Ian because he had already formed what would be a life long liking and admiration of his older brother.
In 1922, however, Alexander upset the brothers' arrangement, to Dave’s disadvantage, by selling his farm and taking Sarah and Ian on a tour of Victoria to visit old friends and relatives there.
With part of the proceeds from the sale of the farm, £6000, Alexander bought a new 1922 Dodge car, and with Ian at the wheel the tourists spent two years traveling about and renewing old associations.
At the end of the trip Alexander made an extravagant gesture in keeping with his increasingly impulsive personality. Instead of keeping or selling the Dodge, still a valuable vehicle, he simply gave it away! The recipients were members of the Roach family, owners of a station on which Alexander worked in the 1870s, and the gift of the car may have been in recognition of some kindness extended to him by the Roaches at that time.
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Tambellup and vicinity. Homestead and other locations mentioned in the text.
(Corrections: for Byrnes read Byrne, for Hoodby read Hodby).
(Click the red rectangles to zoom in; click edge of map to zoom out)
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Back in WA in 1924, Alexander, Sarah and Ian did not return to the Quairading but settled instead in Tambellup, a wool-growing district about 150 miles to the south. Alexander bought 3000-acres of particularly good land east of the town, and in the next two years Ian cleared much of it with a newly-purchased steel-wheel Fordson tractor hauling a scrub roller. (A scrub roller consists of a log fitted with cleats to beat down and cut brush).
Land prices were going up at the time, and after two years Alexander sold the improved property for twice what he'd paid. The buyer, Jack Simpson, farmed the property for many years, and the place is still known locally as "Simpson's."
Buoyed by this quick profit, in 1927 Alexander, Sarah and Ian took another extended vacation in Victoria. They traveled in a new 1927 Chrysler. Effectively this car was a Maxwell, since it was the first model to be sold after Walter Chrysler bought out that company. Happily, Alexander kept the car instead of giving it away at the end of the trip.
Upon returning to Tambellup in 1928, Alexander bought a farm comprising 1400 acres of relatively poor land a few miles south of the town. He named it Gilella, after the doyenne of the Clan, Ella née Gilstrap MacRae. He gave Ian a life interest in the property, and willed it upon Ian’s death to Ian’s and Dave’s sons.
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On the veranda at Gilella, about 1932. Alexander, Ian, Jean and Don Fraser, Sarah.
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Gilella included a small house located on a sand dune a quarter-mile from the property’s northern boundary, where it coincided with the course of the Gordon River. Built about 1900 by a local builder named Backhouse, this "settler’s cottage" as this type of dwelling was called, had a corrugated-iron roof, weathered-jarrah board or "weatherboard" cladding, and a board floor. The interior was lined partly with pine boards, partly with whitegum slabs (whitegum is a gnarled hardwood common in the area) hand-hewn with an adze, and the rest was left unlined. One of the few comforts of the place was a half-dozen surrounding pepper trees whose dense foliage provided protection from the heat of the summer sun.
The nearest neighbors were Ernie and Daisy Fairweather and their children Betty, Jack and Les. Their house, relatively commodious though also built by Mr Backhouse, was located just across the river about a half-mile distant from Gilella's. Their property, Moree, much larger than Gilella, stretched from the river far to the north and west.
Alexander, Sarah and Ian moved to Gilella in 1928 and the older couple continued to live there much of the time until a few years after Ian’s marriage in 1929.
With advancing age, Sarah retained her dignified and kindly manner but Alexander became more inflexible, self-righteous and intolerant of the human error. Even minor sins irked him. He bristled at the slovenly handwriting with which the clerk at the Tambellup Coop store kept the grocery accounts, and he tried to teach the fellow a lesson by writing his weekly grocery order just as illegibly. But this "lesson" fell flat when the clerk, a suave and efficient young man named Eugene Tomney whose writing was indeed borderline illegible, neatly turned the tables. Having perhaps noticed that Alexander’s purchases varied little from one week to the next, he managed to make up the order correctly anyway.
Throughout their life together, Alexander and Sarah invariably attended the Methodist church service on Sunday morning. From Gilella the couple traveled to the church in Tambellup by sulky pulled by an aged mare. They allowed over an hour for the five-mile drive.
Sarah longed for a garden, or at least a patch of green around the house, but at Gilella the surrounding sand supported nothing but stinging-nettles. The closest Sarah ever had to her own garden there was a collection of noxious-looking dark-green plants that she managed to keep alive in kerosene cans on the veranda.
Worn out at last at 69, Sarah died in her sleep at Gilella, of a heart attack, in 1934. She was was buried at Tambellup.
After Sarah died, Alexander stayed sometimes with Marion and George Iddles in Tambellup and with other relatives in Quairading, as well as at Gilella. In 1937 he went to Melbourne for radiation therapy for skin cancer. On this his last trip to Victoria he was accompanied by Marion, and by Gilella neighbors Daisy and Jack Fairweather. After his return, he lived three more years.
Bound to Melbourne, 1937, from right: Alexander, Jack Fairweather, Marion Iddles, Daisy Fairweather.
To the last, Alexander’s greatest pleasure was the printed page. While at Iddles’ he often received a fellow bibliophile, an elderly man named Bill Gallagher who had lost an arm in a long-ago mining accident. A Tambellup identity, Gallagher tended the diesel engine that supplied the town’s electric power. He lived in a room to one side of the shed occupied by the engine, at the rear of Andy Bessen’s garage. The two friends habitually sat side by side on Iddles’ veranda, reading for hours without exchanging a word—except at the end, to say how they had enjoyed each other’s company.
Alexander died of cancer in Quairading in 1940 and was buried there. He was 82.
Sources
McRae family portraits were supplied by Mary Strickland, John McD. McRae and Betty Fraser, with help from Jennifer McRae (now Marchment).
ID Question
In the 1904/05 photo the central figure is identified as Sarah by both Mary and John, but the image bears little resemblance to Sarah's in other photos. Who is that mystery lady if not Sarah? One possibility is Alexander's sister Jean McKay. No photo is available to check this, but Jean lived nearby and had been of great help to Sarah after previous confinements.
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Ian McRae (1904-1975) Background and Youth (-1929)
1.3 Western Australia
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1.3.1 Alexander and Sarah (1892-)
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1.4 Quairading to Tambellup
egend from before1200 AD, people bearing the Gaelic name Mhic-Rath came from Ireland to settle on the shores of the estuary Loch Duich, east of the Isle of Skye. [Area indicated by the red rectangle in the map of Scotland] In early times the Gaelic Mhic-Rath, meaning Son of Good Fortune, was most commonly rendered MacRa. Many variants of MacRa came into use over the years, all of them being a "Son of" part (Mac or Mc) followed by a "Good Fortune" part (Crea, Creath, Kreth, Ra, Rae, Rath, etc.). In some versions the second part is not capitalized e.g. Macrae. Little significance attaches to these variations in spelling. For instance, the son of Macrae might well use the surname MacRae or McRae. 
