Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe 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 time and again to the energetic mixture of demotic and elevated 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 sacred art with its attention divided between ontology and finely detailed 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
2011 – appointed a Member of the Order of Australia
2015 – Melbourne Prize for Literature
2019 – NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, shortlisted for ''Rondo.''

Poetry

;Collections

1959: The Music of Division, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1962: Eight Metropolitan Poems, Adelaide: Australian Letters; with John Brack
1963: In Light and Darkness, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1963: Eight By Eight, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1963: anthology of eight poems each by Vincent Buckley, Laurence Collinson, Alexander Craig, Max Dunn, Noel Macainsh, David Martin, R.A. Simpson, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
1967: The Rebel General, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1971: Where the Wind Came, Sydney: Angus and Robertson
1973: Selected Poems, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1976: The Foundations of Joy,, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1979: The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1985: The Amorous Cannibal, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1988: I'm Deadly Serious, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1989: Sangue e l'acqua, translated and edited by Giovann Distefano, Abano Terme: Piovan Editore
1990: For Crying Out Loud, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1993: Rungs of Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1995: Selected Poems 1956–1994, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1998: Whirling, Oxford: Oxford University Press
2001: By and Large, Manchester: Carcanet; and Sydney; Brandl and Schlesinger
2003: A Representative Human, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
2004: Next, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
2005: The Universe Looks Down, Brandl & Schlesinger,
2006: Then, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
2008: Telling a Hawk to a Handsaw, Manchester Carcanet Oxford Poets
2010: Puck, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
2012: New and Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet Oxford Poets
2014: My Feet Are Hungry, Sydney: Pitt Street Poets
2018: Rondo, Carcanet Press

;Recordings

1973: Vinyl record: Chris Wallace-Crabbe Reads From His Own Verse, St Lucia
1999: "The Universe Looks Down", with Linda Kouvaras, Move Records
2000: The Poems; Brunswick: Gungurru Press
2009: "The Domestic Sublime", Sydney: River Road Press
2024: "Melbourne", Melbourne: River Road Press

;Selected list of poems

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected
Noah	1965

Fiction

1981: Splinters, Adelaide

Literary criticism

1974: Melbourne or the Bush: Essays on Australian Literature and Society, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1979: Toil and Spin: Two Directions in Modern Poetry, Melbourne: Hutchinson
1983: Three Absences in Australian Writing, Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies
1990: Poetry and Belief, Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1990
1990: Falling into Language, Melbourne: Oxford University Press
2005: "Read It Again", Cambridge: Salt

Book reviews

Review of

Edited

1963: Six Voices: Contemporary Australian Poets, Sydney: Angus & Robertson; American Edition, Westport, 1979
1971: Australian Poetry 1971, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1980: The Golden Apples of the Sun: Twentieth Century Australian Poetry, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
1981: The Australian Nationalists: Modern Critical Essays, Melbourne: Oxford University Press,,
1984: Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984
1991: Multicultural Australia: the Challenges of Change, Newham,
1992: From the Republic of Conscience, Melbourne: Aird Books in association with Amnesty International; and New York: White Pine Press, 1992,
1994: Ur Riki Samviskunnar, Reykjavik: Amnesty International
1998: Author, Author! Tales of Australian Literary Life, Melbourne: O.U.P., 1998
1998: Associate Editor : The Oxford Literary History of Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press
1998: Approaching Australia: Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies
2002: La Poésie Australienne, Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires,
2004: "Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World", Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies. With Judith Ryan
2009: "Mappings of the Plane: New Selected Poems" by Gwen Harwood, Manchester: Carcanet Fyfield Books

Artist's books with the artist Bruno Leti

1994: "Drawing", Melbourne: Australian Print Workshop
1995: "Apprehensions", Melbourne: the artist
1996: "New Year", Melbourne and Canberra: the artist
1996: "The Iron Age", Melbourne: the artist
1999: "Timber", New York: the artist and Raphael Fodde; with Inge and Grahame King
2001: "The Alignments Two", Melbourne: the artist
2002: "Colours", Melbourne: the artist
2004: "The Alignments One", Melbourne: the artist
2005: "Morandrian", the artist and Alan Loney
2011: "Camaldulensis", Melbourne: the artist

Other artists' books

2006: "All Writing Still is to be Done", Vicenza: L'Officina; with Marco Fazzini and Gianluca Murasecchi
2005: "The Flowery Meadow", Melbourne: Electio Editions; with Alan Loney and Bruno Leti
2007: "Skin, Surfaces and Shadows", Warrandyte; with Tommaso Durante
2011: "limes", Warrandyte; with Tommaso Durante

Critical studies and reviews

;New and selected poems
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