Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe was born in Richmond, Victoria on 6 May, 1934 and died on 16 December, 2025 at the age of 91. He was born into an artistically gifted family. His father, Kenneth Eyre Inverell Wallace-Crabbe was a Group Captain in the RAF during World War II. After the war he was a motoring journalist on the Melbourne Herald Sun, but also a black and white artist, print-maker and publisher of limited edition books. Chris’s mother, Phyllis Vera May Cox Passmore, was a pianist. His brother Robin Wallace-Crabbe, four years younger than Chris, is a writer and visual artist. Chris was educated at Scotch College and the University of Melbourne. After school he worked as a cadet metallurgist at the Royal Mint, Melbourne, then in the RAAF for six months, before attending Melbourne University. He graduated B.A. in 1956 and M.A. in 1964. He was appointed Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at Melbourne University, a position he held from 1961-1963. In 1977 he was appointed Reader in English, and on two occasions was Chairman of the Department of English, from 1974-1976 and 1984-1985. He was elected to the Academy in 1984 as a distinguished poet and scholar of English and Australian literature and held a Personal Chair at Melbourne University from 1988. He was Director of the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne from 1989 to 1994 and Emeritus Professor in the Centre from 1998.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe was a prolific writer across both creative and critical modes. He was the author of more than 20 collections of poetry, including Blood Is the Water (1969), The Amorous Cannibal (1985), Selected Poems 1956–1994 (1995), By and Large (2001), The Universe Looks Down (2005), Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008), and Rondo (2018). He collaborated with the artist Bruno Letti on a number of artists’ books. He published the novel Splinters (1981) and numerous critical works, including Melbourne or the Bush: Essays on Australian Literature and Society (1974), Toil and Spin: Two Directions in Modern Poetry (1979), Falling into Language (1990), Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World (2004, with Judith Ryan), Read It Again (2005), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998, with Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss), and Approaching Australia: Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium (1998, with Harold Bolitho). He edited the anthology The Golden Apples of the Sun: Twentieth Century Australian Poetry (1980) and co-edited the Amnesty International anthology From the Republic of Conscience (1992, with Kerry Flattley). His career as an academic and as a poet led to a number of distinguished fellowships and prizes: Harkness Fellow at Yale University 1965-67, Visiting Fellow at the University of Exeter 1973, Visiting Professor at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, 1973, Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University 1987-88, the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences, the St. Michael’s Medal, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Grace Leven Prize, the Farmer’s Poetry Prize, the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize, the Human Rights Award for Poetry, and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature.
Chris once related a self-deprecatory anecdote, with a twist at its end, about a formative moment in his writing life. It was in his Introduction to the collection Author! Author!: Tales of Australian Literary Life (1998) that he edited for Oxford University Press: ‘In the early 1950s,’ he wrote, ‘I bought a Faulkner novel in a Penguin edition. On the back cover it noted, among other things, that “he wrote As I Lay Dying between midnight and 4.00 a.m. without changing a word.” Brooding on this amazing feat, as it seemed, and thinking of my own slow writing process, I realised that I would just have to stick to that short-distance genre, poetry. Misunderstandings are so important.’ That collection of anecdotes was a multi-faceted and vernacular window onto Australian literature, very different from Chris’s other critical work, although his interest in authors and authorship was a characteristic of his criticism generally. As the first sentence of the introduction, ‘Writing the Self, to his 1990 collection of essays, Falling Into Language announces, ‘What could be more compelling than the temptation to catch the author, right there, in or behind the lines of the text?’ Chris’s tendency was to read biographically, a mode of reading that often had the strongest academic warnings. Although his topic in his critical writing was always the layers, as he put it, of the ‘self-life’ of writers, he didn’t believe in the separation of Life and Literature. He was also hyper-aware of how autobiographies all have something wrong with them, are vivaciously impure, like all literary works. All his critical writing was focused on the intersections of the lives and work of Australian writers, about whom he was deeply knowledgeable. But his readings of these writers’ work were also framed by his extensive knowledge of the work of American, European and English writers, and often painters too. His work broadened out in the 2000s to embrace readings of Australian culture that allowed him to identify more connections between social and artistic expressions in Australian history. The cover of the collection of critical essays he co-edited, Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World, a reproduction of Russell Drysdale’s perplexing 1941 painting, ‘Man reading a newspaper’ was emblematic of this direction in his curatorship of Australian studies. His essay on language and landscape, with its reading of Judith Wright, Fred Williams and Les Murray is another.
Chris was also autobiographical about his reading. In chapters like ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Carlton’ he wrote about the encounter with American poetry in the course of the 1950s in terms of his own development as a poet. And it is the antipodean distortions of such reading that he owns: ‘For those of us who were beginning to write poetry in the 1950s the situation had a number of readily distinctive features. It goes without saying that the literature we had been taught at school, university or teachers’ college was English literature. T.S. Eliot, as he would dearly have wished, was thoroughly assimilated into English poetry: it was only well after graduating that I realized how many of his early poems are essentially about Boston life, rather than the London we firmly located him in.’ This rearrangement of the Anglopoetic traditions included other counter attractions of American poetry, its striking regionalism, its experimentation, and of course its celebration of the narcissistic self in poets like Walt Whitman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane and Theordore Roethke. Chris’s story about the trajectory of his seductive encounter with American poetry concludes with one of the dichotomies he lived by: ‘As far as we are concerned, most American poetry might well have been written on the moon. That is its secret; this is its charm.’
But it was Chris’s poetry itself that he is remembered and admired for most. That is where he offered his most brilliant and protean self. He started out as a poet of suburban Melbourne, subject to the expatriate desires of that city’s denizens: ‘The artists sail at dawn/ For brisker ports, or rot in public bars./ Though much has died here, little has been born’ (‘Melbourne’, from In Light and Darkness, 1963). Despite this sense of his hometown’s disadvantage as the critic Paul Kane recognizes Chris managed to domesticate Melbourne ‘as his locus amoenus – where, indeed, the most pleasant place can be the home itself, a domicile for what he terms ‘The Domestic Sublime’ where love and truth can be fitted together’. But he was always ambivalent, there are always two worlds, or two dimensions to the one world. His poem ‘In the Suburbs of Private Life’ can’t help but display the claustrophobic everyday world of houses and gardens: ‘Pussyfooting indoors, the tacky/ media bunging your sinuses with newsy/ economies going through the floor,/ it’s time to take the air.’ Chris was a lifelong friend of other Melbourne poets Vincent Buckley, Ron Simpson and Evan Jones who together expressed a strongly urban consciousness in Australian intellectual life. By contrast with the ubiquitous presence of Melbourne in his poetry, there is also the late, rapidly moving quest poem in seven line stanzas, The Universe Looks Down (2005). The narrator and chorus of this poem take a kind of Wildean ownership of the heroine Milena and her characters’ stories. This poem is a structurally exuberant exploration of Chris’s deep awareness of the fragmentariness of existence. Milana ‘believes the universe to be absurd/ fragments, orphaned, in need of family/ Or narrative coherence.’
One of the most visible threads in Chris’s poetics is the one about consciousness and dreams. He is always interested in the way the mind works, particularly with the genetic material of language. That is one reason why his poetry is full of jokes. The irrepressible and tonal riskiness of word play is everywhere in his poetry. His essay ‘A Tour of Dreams in Space and Time’ is one of his most brilliant pieces of writing, alternating between a European travelogue and a dream diary. There he reflects on the connections between dreams and poems, that have, he decides, a ‘family relationship.’ They are both things we want to understand, that are interpretable. We are tied to them in close, emotional, consanguine ways.
Always genial, Chris was a generous and supportive colleague for both emerging and established scholars, for authors and activists, within the university departments and centres where he worked, opening up teaching opportunities, participation in conferences, publication possibilities and much more. He was also generous and supportive of many individuals and communities of critics, artists, and writers, especially poets, discussing writing and being a writer, communicating, and enjoying talkative lunches and dinners with friends and colleagues across the field.
In 2011 Chris was made a Member of the Order of Australia for service to the arts, and in 2015 was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature.
Emeritus Professor Philip Mead FAHA
University of Western Australia
Emeritus Professor David Carter FAHA
The University of Queensland
