Design and Art Australia Online

painter, printmaker, journalist and publisher, was born in Queensland on 25 May 1900, younger son of the three children of George(?) and Harriet Wallace-Crabbe. The family moved to provincial Victoria, where Ken completed school and enrolled in a mechanical engineering course. His brother Keith was killed in WWI and Ken, aged 17, enlisted in 1918(?). He served briefly in the air flying corps, then became a journalist on the Sunraysia Daily at Mildura after the war. By the 1930s he was living in Melbourne, a motoring writer on the Herald and a 'distinguished dilettante’, friend of many leading artists and encourager of many younger ones (acc. McCulloch).

Wallace-Crabbe was a great admirer of Norman Lindsay's nudes and pirates, according to Robin Wallace-Crabbe [R. W.-C.], who states in his autobiography, hostile to his father (A Man’s Childhood, p.185):

“Kenneth based his drawing style on that of his hero, Norman Lindsay. Without trying too hard, he absorbed the two principal characteristics of a Lindsay image of a woman, and learnt to replicate them in his own work. He mastered the Lindsay idea that the features of the human face are stuck like a mask in front of where the face should properly be, and he got the feel of anatomical discontinuity between the torso and the neck and the head. Also, come to think of it he was able to draw breasts so that they didn’t fit naturally over the rib cage.”

Wallace-Crabbe did a large number of cartoons, illustrations and paintings in the course of his career, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, e.g. A Divorce Suit, original cartoon (Mitchell Library Px*D457/105) published in the Bulletin 20 April 1922 (re clothing available in shop for every role in a divorce), signed 'K. Wallace-Crabbe/ 1922’, address Box 269, PO Mildura, Vic. He contributed cartoons to Smith’s Weekly, according to Robin Wallace-Crabbe (Australia Australia). During the three years of its existence he was publisher, editor, story writer and illustrator of Cross Roads, a magazine for girls and boys published fortnightly, price 3d. Cover of 1/21 (14 November 1939), a cavalier/pirate with a sword signed 'asole’, is presumably by him (ill. Lindesay, Way We Were, 123).

His art prints include a colour linocut, Kava c.1936 (ill. Josef Lebovic Gallery, 20th Anniversary Exhibition Collectors’ List 1997 No.63, 12 April-17 May 1997, no.129), and an etching, Peacock (nude Indian woman with peacock feathers) 1925, edn 10/15, (ill. R. W-C, 1997). Also a keen photographer, he took lots of images of Asian women with his Leica during WWII.

Wallace-Crabbe was working as a motoring journalist at the Melbourne Herald at the outbreak of WWII, when he tried to join the RAAF but was considered too old (according to Robin Wallace-Crabbe). Accepted as a pilot by the British RAF, he was lost, believed dead, in the jungles of Burma for over a year. After being found he worked in India for Lord Mountbatten and was awarded the OBE. Then, still in the RAF, Group Captain Wallace-Crabbe worked at the Australian army barracks on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. After he left the RAF, he returned to the Melbourne Herald as sub-editor. Later he became public relations’ officer with General Motors in Victoria, where he edited and wrote much of its in-house magazine, People. From 1955 he hand-printed 22 books, including many of his own.

Wallace-Crabbe married Phyllis Vera May Cox Passmore (who predeceased him). They had two sons: Christopher (Prof. English, University of Melbourne, born 1934?), and artist, writer, lecturer and farmer Robin Wallace-Crabbe (born 1938).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007