Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe (6 May 1934 – 16 December 2025) was an Australian poet and academic who was an emeritus professor at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne.

Life and career Wallace-Crabbe was born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. His father was Kenneth Eyre Inverell Wallace-Crabbe, painter, printmaker, journalist, publisher and a pilot in the RAF who ending World War II as a group captain. His mother Phyllis Vera May Cox Passmore was a pianist, and his brother Robin Wallace-Crabbe became an artist. He was educated at Scotch College, Yale University and the University of Melbourne, where for much of his life he worked and was a professor at the Australian Centre. He was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and at the University of Venice, Ca'Foscari. He was also an essayist, a critic of the visual arts and a notable public reader of his verse. He was the founding director of the Australian Centre and, more recently, chair of the peak artistic body, Australian Poetry Limited.

After leaving school, Wallace-Crabbe set out to be a metallurgist but was drawn back to his childhood interest in books and art. After training in the Royal Australian Air Force, he worked as an electrical trade journalist while studying for his B.A. in the evenings. He published his first book of poetry while doing his final honours year. In 1961, he became the Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Over the next decades he became a reader in English and then held a personal chair from 1988. On the initiative of H. C. Coombs, he was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University from 1965 to 1967, mixing widely with American writers and developing his poetry in new directions. In later years, he spent time in Italy, reading and translating Italian verse, including two contrast cantos from Dante. He was also a member of the Psychosocial Group, an occasional body with psychoanalytic as well as cultural interests.

Wallace-Crabbe's early collections were published in Australia, but in 1985 he began to publish with Oxford University Press, reaching an international public. Although he published some of his criticism and his one novel elsewhere, he remained with Oxford until 1998, after which date it ceased publishing live poets. He then took his work to Carcanet Oxford Poets in Manchester. Back in Australia he brought out two books with the Sydney firm of Brandl & Schlesinger. One of these was a highly experimental long poem, or "zany epic", on which he had been working for a dozen years. The dense and difficult poem divided the poet's readers.

Reviewers over the years have drawn attention to the mixture of language which very often marks Wallace-Crabbe's poetry. For the poet, this not only testifies to his wide interest in language but also to his sense of the stubborn plurality of our experience. Such mixed diction certainly persists in his last books, particularly in his sonnets and in the "Domestic Sublime" sequence of lyrics. This corresponds to his sense that poetry is, residually, a art with its attention divided between ontology and epistemology. For Wallace-Crabbe our lives unreasonably mingle the comic with the tragic.

Following his retirement from university teaching he continued to live in inner Melbourne, adhering to poetry, reading history and playing tennis.

In May 2014, Wallace-Crabbe alluded to the possibility of a collaboration with a Melbourne writer, Christopher Bantick. He was working on the history of Western magic and a series of prints with Kristin Headlam based upon his long poem mentioned above.

Wallace-Crabbe died on 16 December 2025 at the age of 91.

Awards 1958 – John Masefield Prize for Poetry 1984 – Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 1985 – Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for The Amorous Cannibal 1987 – The Dublin Prize for Arts and Science, awarded through the University of Melbourne 1992 – Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Poetry Award with Kerry Flattley for From the Republic of Conscience 1995 – winner of "The Age" Book of the Year, and the D.J. O'Hearn Prize for Poetry 2002 – winner of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at the Mildura Writer's Festival 2002 – Centenary Medal 2006 – Doctor of Letters honoris causa (Melb.) 2011 – appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) 2015 – Melbourne Prize for Literature 2019 – NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, shortlisted for Rondo.