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.
Bibliography
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, (Poets of the Month Series), 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 TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected "Noah" 1965 The Rebel General, Angus and Robertson, 1967, p40 "Other People" 1971 We Took Their Orders and Are Dead : An Anti-War Anthology edited by Shirley Cass, Ros Cheney, David Malouf, and Michael Wilding, in 1971, Where the Wind Came : Poems, Angus and Robertson, 1971, p47
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, (with Peter Pierce), 1984: Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984 (with D. Goodman and D.J. Hearn) 1991: Multicultural Australia: the Challenges of Change, Newham (with Kerry Flattley), 1992: From the Republic of Conscience, Melbourne: Aird Books in association with Amnesty International; and New York: White Pine Press, 1992 (with Kerry Flattley and Sigurdur A. Magnusson), 1994: Ur Riki Samviskunnar, Reykjavik: Amnesty International 1998: Author, Author! Tales of Australian Literary Life, Melbourne: O.U.P., 1998 (with Harold Bolitho) 1998: Associate Editor (with Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss): 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, (with Simone Kadi) 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 (with Gregory Kratzmann), 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" (after Dante), 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
References
External links Poetry library Website Michael Sharkey 'Starting from Melbourne: The Coherence of Chris Wallace-Crabbe' JASAL 6 (2007)