macrae_c

Mr Colin Cospatrick Farquhar
Macrae was the second
President of the Beaumaris Tree
Preservation Society, which began at its Inaugural General Meeting
on 28 January 1953. It changed its name to the
Beaumaris Conservation Society in 1970.

Colin Macrae was a trustee
of the Gramatan Avenue
Heathland Sanctuary, which the former Sandringham City
Council leased to the Beaumaris Tree
Preservation Society, for the thirty years from
1960 to 1990.

The important fossils at the Beaumaris Bay
Fossil Site were a major interest of Colin’s.
Fossils he has found are now in the collection
of Museum Victoria. His discovery of fossil
remains of a significant extinct penguin there
led to that being reported in a 1970 paper by a
Harvard University palaeontologist, and the
species being named after him as Pseudaptenodytes

macrei.

Colin was made an Honorary

Life Member of Beaumaris Conservation
Society Inc. at the 1988
Annual General Meeting.

Colin was born in
Elsternwick, Victoria, on 05 May 1911, and
died on 17 October 1994. He

married Miss Joan McIntosh in 1940. Colin and
Joan bought the land at 2 Point Avenue,
Beaumaris, in 1945, from the neighbours there
they knew well, Major

Harry Shaw and his wife, who owned the
adjoining property known as ‘The Point‘. The
Macraes built their house on their land in 1949.
Colin was survived by his widow, Mrs Joan
Macrae, and their son and daughter.

Colin was a mechanical engineer. His father, Captain

Norman Farquhar Macrae, was killed in
action at Pozieres in the First World War, and
is buried

at Villers-Bretonneux, France. Before the
Second World War, Colin served in the Army
Reserve in the Victorian Scottish Regiment, a
kilted regiment. During the Second World War, he
served in that Regiment in Darwin, and in Ambon,
which was then a part of the Dutch East Indies,
and is now a part of Indonesia. At the end of
his service, he had become a Warrant Officer.

Mrs Joan Macrae represented Colin’s significant

place in the Society’s annals at its 60th Anniversary
Celebration, at the Beaumaris Community
Centre, 96 Reserve Road, Beaumaris, on Sunday,
19 May 2013. Joan died on 18 September 2017 at
the age of 99.

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