In 1991 he relocated to Hamilton in New Zealand where he taught at University of Waikato, rising to a full professorship in 2003. Ĭrowley 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, which Crowley directed until 1990. He obtained a doctorate in 1980 with a dissertation on Paamese, managing in the meantime to do linguistic salvage fieldwork describing several moribund Australian languages such as Djangadi, Gumbaynggir and Yaygir in New South Wales, and the Mpakwithi dialect of Anguthimri, together with Uradhi, both formerly spoken in the Cape York Peninsula. Given diplomatic tensions between Australia and Indonesia at the time, Crowley did his post-graduate thesis work on Vanuatu, where 195,000 to 200,000 people speak approximately 100 distinct languages. He went on to graduate with first class honours, winning a University medal in linguistics, with an honours thesis on the dialects of Bundjalang. Ĭrowley'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. Crowley enrolled at the Australian National University in 1971 with an Asian studies scholarship, with a major in Indonesian, while also taking coursework on Aboriginal languages under Robert Dixon.
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. Ĭrowley had already made inquiries as a fifteen-year old in 1968 by addressing a personal letter to Stephen Wurm asking if there were employment opportunities for people who took up languages. He decided to become a philologist early, during his high school years at Shepparton High School, from which he graduated as dux in 1970. His English parents emigrated to Australia when he was roughly 7 years old, and the family settled on a dairy farm in the rural north of Victoria, just outside Shepparton, where Crowley received his early education. Crowley was born in Billericay, Essex in 1953.