McRae was educated in Lower Hutt before studying design and illustration at the Wellington Polytechnic's School of Design and being awarded a Diploma in Visual Communication Design. He also studied at the City Art Instutute, Sydney. McRae then engaged in television graphics and animation until an Oxford University Press publisher commissioned his illustrations for Joy Cowley's picture book, The Terrible Taniwha of Timberditch (1982). He won a Queen Elizabeth Arts Council grant to travel to the UK to observe illustration techniques. Having studied illustration in London, he worked in Europe, Russia and the United States before settling in Australia. Here he worked in film illustration and did freelance illustrations of books and readers, illustrating over sixty books. During the 1990s he lectured in graphic design at Randwick College of Design and the University of Western Sydney. Subsequently he conducted a course in Design Fundamentals at the Design Centre of the Sydney Institute of Technology and co-owned a shop called Animal Fetish dedicated to taxidermy. He has lived in Redfern, Sydney.
(Source: Walter McVitty Authors & Illustrators of Australian Children's Books (1989); The Source database).
