Terry Crowley (linguist)

Crowley was the son of English immigrants who raised their child in the outback. He was born in Billericay, Essex in 1953. His parents emigrated to Australia when he was roughly 7 years old,[4] and the family settled on a dairy farm[4] in the rural north of Victoria, just outside Shepparton, where Crowley received his early education.[5] He decided to become a philologist early,[6] during his high school years at Shepparton High School, from which he graduated as dux in 1970.[4]

Crowley had already made inquiries as a fifteen-year old[7] in 1968 by addressing a personal letter to Stephen Wurm asking if there were employment opportunities for people who took up languages. Donald Laycock answered, since Wurm was away at the time, and encouraged him to pursue linguistics by enclosing a copy of his own work on Sepik languages.[8][lower-alpha 1] Crowley enrolled at the Australian National University in 1971 with an Asian studies scholarship, with a major in Bahasa Indonesian,[6] while also taking coursework on Aboriginal languages under Robert Dixon.[9]

Crowley's precocity was already in evidence in his third year, when he produced a paper on the Nganyaywana language once spoken by the Anēwan of New England, in which, in the words of Nicholas Evans, Crowley made a brilliant demonstration of the fact that the Anewan language, far from being a language isolate as long thought, could be correlated with Pama-Nyungan once initial consonant loss was taken into account.[6] He went on to graduate with first class honours, winning a University medal in linguistics, with an honours thesis on the dialects of Bundjalang.[9]

Given diplomatic tensions between Australia and Indonesia at the time, Crowley did his post-graduate thesis work on Vanuatu,[9] where 195,000[6] to 200,000 people speak approximately 100 distinct languages.[lower-alpha 2] He obtained a doctorate in 1980 with a dissertation on Paamese,[9] managing in the meantime to do linguistic salvage fieldwork describing several moribund Australian languages such as Djangadi, Gumbaynggir[11] and Yaygir in New South Wales, and the Mpakwithi dialect of Anguthimri,[12] together with Uradhi, both formerly spoken in the Cape York Peninsula.[13]

Crowley was appointed lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea where he worked (1979-1983) under John Lynch, who subsequently recommended him to Ron Crocombe when the latter's Institute of Pacific Studies decided to set up a Pacific Languages Unit (PLU) at Port Vila in Vanuatu in 1983,[9] which Crowley directed until 1990.[14]

In 1991 he relocated to Hamilton in New Zealand where he taught at University of Waikato, rising to a full professorship in 2003.[15] Over the following decades, he wrote salvage descriptions of several Malakula languages, including Tape, and others, ranging from coastal Nāti, to the interior Malakula languages of Avava, Nese (spoken by a single family) and Naman,[16] as well as documenting Sye on the island of Erromango and Gela on the Solomon Islands

At the time of his death Crowley was working on writing grammars and dictionaries of 18 languages.[7] In a book published posthumously, Crowley wrote of the urgency of doing dirty-boots linguistic fieldwork, with the ethical imperative of enabling thousands of cultures at risk of extinction to have their linguistic patrimony recorded, so that their descendants might thereby avoid the tragic consequences of the loss of Tasmanian languages. Almost nothing of structural value was transmitted in written archives by the time of Truganini's death, a fact which deprives all Palawa of Aboriginal descent of both their cultural identity and the land claims which can only be pursued if continuity can be proven. Crowley perceived his salvage campaign among far-flung languages in this light, as securing for future generations a heritage that would otherwise be lost, to their detriment.[17]