Crawford was born in Scotland and emigrated, perhaps via Hobart, Tasmania,[1] to Melbourne, Victoria sometime before 1859 and founded a business at 83 Swanston Street which provided a photographic printing service.

[1] He served that company, which was for a time the chief competitor to Townsend Duryea, from 1864 to 1866, when, at the suggestion of Henry Strangways, he was appointed photolithographer to the South Australian Government's Survey and Crown Lands Department.

Crawford was first sent to study the Lands Office in Victoria, where John Walter Osborne, the pioneer of photolithography, had revolutionised the preparation and promulgation of plans.

He also made a careful study of published accounts of the working of the Ordnance Survey Department in London, with the result that the Section he established was a model of efficiency and productivity.

He had boundless energy and his personal circumstances and official duties clearly left him plenty of time to pursue his lines of research.

Among the pests he studied were: Now named Anguina tritici, it is a nematode that caused diseases in wheat and rye known as "ear-cockle", purples, or peppercorn.

Experimenters, notably Manning of Hobart in 1875, and Sir Robert Ross and Thomas Pugh locally, made successful experiments with iron sulphate sprayed on the tree and applied to the ground.

[8] Cottony cushion mite (also known as "Australian bug" or "fluted scale") was a pest that made significant inroads into orange groves of South Africa (then known as Cape Colony) and California, and for which the only known control was wholesale destruction of infested trees.

In 1887, with considerable effort, Crawford sent drawings and live samples of this insect to both the California Inspector of Fruit Pests Waldemar G. Klee, and to the head of the Entomological Section of the US Department of Agriculture, Charles Valentine Riley, who after initial skepticism in 1888 sent Albert Koebele to Adelaide to collect the dipterids, and to Auckland, New Zealand, to collect numbers of vedalia beetle (Rodolia cardinalis).

[12] He was still in good health and productively employed in October 1890, and had recently been mentioned as the probable successor of A. Molineaux as secretary to the Agricultural Bureau.