Georgiana McCrae

[3] Her first art teacher was Louis Mauleon, a civilian prisoner of war on parole who earned his living by making box cartons and jumping jacks for London toy stalls.For the next two years he arrived at her house each morning and helped develop her artistic skills, such as how to burn her own charcoal sticks.[10] Around this time (Georgiana did not give a definite year in her memoirs), Jane Graham fell out of a wagon and struck her head.Her father needed to deal with crushing debt left to him by Alexander, as well as rebuilding the east wing of Gordon Castle after it burnt down that same year.Eventually, after a failed land purchase in New Zealand, he moved to the newly established town of Melbourne and began practising law.[17] After a four month journey involving the usual excitements, including a severe storm and a birth at sea, the Argyle anchored in Hobson's Bay, near Melbourne on 1 March 1841.The newly reunited family moved into Argyle Cottage in Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, its steep rent of £100 per annum reflecting the lack of housing in the new town.A third McCrae brother, Alexander, arrived in Melbourne in 1841, joining Andrew and Farquhar to start his life afresh —- albeit with a lot of quarrelling between their respective families.Georgiana was kept busy looking after her four sons, whom she took on lengthy walks, as well as entertaining guests at dinner parties and painting portraits for friendship.[21] Lacking the money to return to Britain, which was Georgiana’s preference,[22] the next option to present itself to Andrew was a pastoral lease at Arthurs Seat.The birth of their seventh child (named Margaret) in June 1844 delayed their departure, as did the time needed to construct a homestead and to dissolve his legal partnership.The homestead (still in existence and now owned by the National Trust) had a floor plan designed by Georgiana and was built with local timbers, including messmate, stringybark and wattle.[26] The next six years at Arthur’s Seat were spent living simply, with the surrounding area providing them with enough fish, game, vegetables and wheat to be almost self sufficient.[27] The family continued to entertain visitors, ranging on the social scale from Charles and Sophie La Trobe to passing travellers.Georgiana greatly enjoyed the intellectuals who brought to Melbourne ‘the sense of the living world of art and literature which books and newspapers from Britain could not adequately convey’.[31] Despite the artistic and intellectual stimulus of gold-rush Melbourne, McCrae seemed to have done little of her own painting for the next two decades, except for a portrait of Meredith and two studies of another friend, Edith Howitt.In her last years, alternating homes with the families of her daughters in Kew and Hawthorn, Georgiana occasionally travelled to Cape Schanck, where she painted and spent time with Edith Howitt at the house she shared with her husband, Robert Anderson.Georgiana was 'prevented by the conditions of her life from reaching her full height as an artist':[39] this included her illegitimate birth, marriage to a man who was not her first choice, and an exile to Australia, where she was repeatedly dislodged from beloved homes.However, her household was a beacon to artistic men and women, some ‘as isolated and unhappy as she was’,[40] and she showed herself as a woman 'of great courage, personality and ability'.