Chris Wallace-Crabbe was a poet of international renown, a beloved teacher and a generous man |
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who died at the age of 91 on Tuesday, was one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved poets. He was one of the few Australian poets of his generation, or any other, to have a significant international reputation.
His literary career stretches back over 60 years, to his debut collection, The Music of Division, published by Angus & Robertson in 1959. My copy of the book, only slightly foxed, is signed and dated by its author in May 1960, and then again, dedicated to me, in December 1997.
This sense of history – of the links across time and space – seems especially appropriate for a poet whose work was so wide-ranging in interest, so generous in its attention to people and things, and so sensitive to the continuities and discontinuities between times and places.
Wallace-Crabbe was born in Richmond, Melbourne, in 1934, the son of a journalist and a pianist, and the elder brother of Robin Wallace-Crabbe, the renowned artist and writer.
He was an enthusiastic traveller and held a number of international academic appointments, including at Harvard University, but Melbourne was a constant in his life and work. He lived almost his entire life in the Victorian capital and had a long and distinguished academic career at the University of Melbourne. Indeed, along with colleagues, such as Vincent Buckley and R.A. Simpson, he was for a long time considered one of the “Melbourne poets”, a term that took in the university as much as the city.
He was one of the earliest teachers of creative writing as a university subject, and he was instrumental in the development of Australian studies as a discipline, being the founding director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne, where he was emeritus professor at the time of his death.
It is appropriate that two of the numerous literary awards that Wallace-Crabbe received........