News Archive

A prolific historian and former history lecturer at The University of Western Australia whose work for many years shaped the way Western Australians viewed their State has died.

Emeritus Professor Francis Keble (Frank) Crowley, passed away on 16 October, aged 88 years.

Educated at The University of Melbourne and Balliol College, Oxford, he was a lecturer in history at UWA in 1949 and 1952-64.  He later held a chair at The University of New South Wales.

Professor Crowley established the second course in Australian history taught at any Australian university and published Australia's Western Third (1960) - for many years the standard history of this State.

Eminent historian and author Geoffrey Bolton said Professor Crowley was remembered as a stimulating and lively-minded teacher and supervisor - if at times a provocative colleague - who made a constructive and lasting contribution to his discipline.

In the Oxford Companion to Australian History, Bolton said Professor Crowley played an early and important role in the growth of Australian history after World War II.

"Based on meticulous archival fidelity, Crowley's writings largely eschew ideology; his quest for empirical objectivity somewhat masks the crisp and sardonic spoken style which made him a stimulating lecturer and supervisor," Bolton wrote.

Professor Crowley wrote and edited numerous books on Western Australian and Australian history, including:

Big John Forrest 1847 - 1918: A Founding Father of the Commonwealth of Australia (2000, UWA Press)

A New History of Australia (1974)

A Documentary History of Australia - five volumes examining colonial and modern Australia from 1788

Tough Times: Australia in the Seventies (1986)

A Short History of Western Australia (1969)

Degrees Galore:  Australia's Academic Teller Machines (1998)

Modern Australia in Documents (1973)

A Citizen's Guide to Marihuana in Australia (1977)

Westralian Suburb:  The History of South Perth, Western Australia (1962).

Media references

Michael Sinclair-Jones (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8)  6488 3229  /  (+61 4) 00 700 783