Hugh McCrae

Hugh Raymond McCrae OBE (4 October 1876 – 17 February 1958) was an Australian writer, noted for his poetry.

Life and career McCrae was born in Melbourne, the son of the Australian author George Gordon McCrae and grandson of the painter and diarist Georgiana McCrae. Originally he trained as an architect, but later took up drawing, writing and acting,

McCrae starred as Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon in W. J. Lincoln's 1916 feature film The Life's Romance of Adam Lindsay Gordon, shot in and around Melbourne. In the 1920s, Australian-born composer John Gough set McCrae's poem "Song of the Rain" (from the collection Colombine) to music. McCrae wrote a fantasy play, The Ship of Heaven, which was produced by the Independent Theatre in 1933, for which Alfred Hill composed and conducted the music.

McCrae was well known to a number of distinguished figures in Australian artistic and literary circles. He is remembered for his friendships with Norman Lindsay and Kenneth Slessor, but he was also friendly with such figures as Christopher Brennan and Shaw Neilson.

McCrae was awarded the OBE in 1953. However, he has not retained his critical standing, and is now esteemed mostly as the poet who first offered "an alternative to the balladry that had dominated Australian poetry". Judith Wright called him "a singer, not a thinker, [who] freed the notion of poetry from the portentousness of the Nationalist and radical schools". They had three daughters, including artist Mahdi McCrae. Nancy died in 1943. He married Janet Le Brun in July 1946, but their marriage was dissolved in 1948.