Elizabeth Jackson, who was Mayor of Brunswick when it merged with Coburg to create the City of Moreland, recently noted in an interview on 3AW that there was ‘considerable disquiet in the community’ over the name in 1994 and active lobbying against it, yet Moreland was chosen as an effective compromise between Brunswick and Coburg. In late 2021, the political and cultural climate has shifted; within a week, Mayor Mark Riley had agreed to ditch the name and to commit to ongoing community consultation and to consultation with the Indigenous community. On 13 December, Moreland Council passed a motion to replace the name in 2022, with a letter of support from the local government minister.

The Moreland Council not only represents a highly diverse section of Melbourne’s inner-north, but also includes Australia’s second most progressive electorate, according to ABC Vote Compass Data. Resistance to this petition would not have been politically savvy, at least in the suburbs of Brunswick, Coburg, and Pascoe Vale. Anecdotally, almost none of my neighbours in Pascoe Vale (apart from other historians) was aware of the origins of the Council’s name. Nor were they particularly attached to the name. The connection between the McCrae family and the slave trade is documented (if sparsely) in the historical literature and has been previously noted on the Moreland Council website and on a Council-supplied historical marker beneath the Moreland Road sign. Farquhar McCrae’s heritage-listed house being one of Melbourne’s oldest houses, it is surprising that Moreland’s slavery connection was news to the mayor and to the Council.

(La Rose Farm in November 1967, now Wentworth House, corner of La Chateau & Mitchell Streets, Pascoe Vale South (photograph by John Collins/State Library of Victoria)

McCrae’s name has been long overshadowed in the history books and in public memory by his more successful (John Pascoe Fawkner) and more monstrous (John Batman) peers. Born in 1807 in Scotland, McCrae studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and demonstrated both skill and ambition in his early professional life as a surgeon. Aged twenty-five, McCrae injured himself while dissecting a body. This led to an intractable illness from which he never recovered, despite moving his wife and young family to Melbourne in an attempt to benefit from a warmer climate. McCrae purchased a rectangular block of land to the north of the city, between the Moonee Ponds creek and Sydney Road, in what is now Pascoe Vale South, and called it Moreland. ‘La Rose’ still stands, a beautifully preserved family home built in 1842.

Neither the exact nature of the McCrae family’s connections to this plantation nor McCrae’s precise motivations for using the name Moreland can be established without further historical research. Whether the McCrae family actually owned the Moreland plantation, merely managed it, or had some other financial interest in it remains an important question, but it is not crucial to the issue of renaming that the Council faces today. It seems clear that McCrae was purposefully commemorating the Jamaican plantation (and perhaps his grandfather) by drawing a connection between the two spaces and linking the process of European colonisation in Australia to the institution of slavery. McCrae and his family lived at La Rose for only two years before moving to Sydney, where McCrae, whose investments had turned sour and whose medical practice had failed to flourish in Melbourne, hoped in vain for a fresh start. Debts, disagreements, and poor health followed McCrae to Sydney, where he died six years later, at the age of forty-three.

Some advocates for the name change have cited McCrae’s financial and personal difficulties and the fact that he left Melbourne for Sydney in 1844 as evidence that he was an unscrupulous financier whose various bad deals caught up with him, but this is not supported by the historical record. As historian Douglas Wilkie has highlighted in his recent study of McCrae, almost all colonial investors were affected by a severe but short-lived economic depression in the early 1840s and Farquhar’s experience was far from unique.

The major historical distortions have occurred during the conservative backlash to the Council’s decision, most prominently on Sky News and in the pages of the Herald Sun and The Australian. News Corp columnist Caleb Bond described Farquhar McCrae as a ‘swashbuckling surgeon and magistrate’ – a journalistic flourish that is more romance than reality, given McCrae’s lifelong tribulations. With rather circular logic, Bella d’Abrera, Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute for Public Affairs, suggested in The Age that rather than condemning McCrae’s pro-slavery sympathies, Moreland Council should be thanking him, for without him it wouldn’t exist. Additionally, as a doctor, Farquhar ‘devoted his life to tending to the sick’. According to d’Abrera, the Council should honour him for ‘the service he rendered to fellow human beings’, as if a profession in medicine provided a moral carte blanche.

What is clear is that McCrae was an active participant in the dispossession of Wurundjeri land and that he – or, more accurately, his family, after his death – profited from it. McCrae marked this act of dispossession by naming the land after a Jamaican sugar plantation. Caribbean sugar plantations were brutal places; the back-breaking labour of cutting sugar cane was matched only by the hellish work of transforming that cane into crystallised sugar. The process of grinding the cane and boiling it to make sugar was often deadly. Children would work alongside adults in sugar mills and exhaustion could mean losing both arms in the mill grinder or suffering horrific burns in the boiling house. For enslaved people, it meant a horrible combination of the worst aspects of both farm and factory labour. The mortality rates for labourers on sugar plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, Louisiana, and elsewhere were extremely high, even by eighteenth-century plantation standards.

Renaming Moreland Council provides an opportunity to educate Australians about this history and about the links between slavery in the British Empire and European colonisation of Australia. Historians have already begun this work in earnest; the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, funded by the Australian Research Council, and featuring a team of researchers from across the country, has already made a significant impact in academic circles (see Georgina Arnott’s essay ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British Slavery in Australia’ in ABR, August 2020). A public discussion about the legacies of slavery in Australia could significantly improve popular knowledge and understanding of Australian history – how the country was colonised and by whom, and how Australia sits within broader transnational historical narratives. Renaming Moreland could provoke such a discussion.

A common tactic among those who oppose such changes is to position themselves as the defenders of history against a rising tide of political correctness. Only by shuttering one’s own interpretation of history and its role in society is this perspective tenable. The issue of renaming goes to the heart of history’s purpose and function. Is history simply the preservation of the past or is it something more relational, more abstract, and more to do with the present than we might like to admit? Advocates for change are often accused of ‘presentism’ in such debates – of applying contemporary moral standards to the past and decrying any individual who falls short of these standards, but these accusations fundamentally misrepresent the task and motivations of the historian. Historians should neither venerate nor denigrate historical figures, but rather seek to investigate how people in the past understood themselves and their place in the world – what historians of the French Annales school termed histoire des mentalités. Moral judgements are necessarily a part of historical scholarship; to pretend otherwise would highlight either a blindness to one’s own individual biases or a complete moral relativism. It would also negate much of the function of history: to continually reinterpret and examine the past in order to better understand and deal with contemporary issues (moral, political, social, and cultural). Those who oppose renaming on principle rightly point out that societal values inevitably change over time and that what is considered acceptable in one era is often unacceptable to us today. It simply does not follow to argue that because we can’t change the past we are somehow restricted in the present or that we therefore should not apply a critical lens to the past.

Place names, statues, and memorials do not represent historical scholarship, which is constantly challenged, debated, and amended – they are often, by their nature, set in stone, and present a simple, celebratory and easily comprehensible narrative to the public. As Zoë Laidlaw, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, told me recently, while we can’t change the past, ‘we do choose how we engage with the past – what events we solemnly commemorate, whom we celebrate, whom or what we condemn. As we make those choices we demonstrate our empathy, not just for historical actors, but for those in our own times too.’ History serves the present, as much as the past, and the removal of a name can provoke a discussion about our history that does more to impact public memory and consciousness than leaving them there ever could.

Another common objection to renaming historical places is that it is the thin end of the wedge. If we rename Moreland, what about Melbourne, and what about Victoria. What about, what about, what about? Well, what about it? We live on Indigenous land, and if white Australian identity is too fragile to consider recognising that in our place names, we are far from reaching any form of racial justice (which must ultimately involve both sovereignty and some form of economic reparations). Ultimately, the issue of renaming in Australia is less about condemning a historical figure to the dustbin, but more about thinking practically about what kind of future we want and what kind of country we want to live in. It’s about empathy and honesty. It’s about recognising more of our history, not less.