Terry Crowley

In 1991 he relocated to Hamilton in New Zealand where he taught at University of Waikato, rising to a full professorship in 2003. 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, as well as documenting Sye on the island of Erromango and Gela on the Solomon Islands

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 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.

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, which Crowley directed until 1990.

Crowley 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. 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. Crowley enrolled at the Australian National University in 1971 with an Asian studies scholarship, with a major in Bahasa Indonesian, while also taking coursework on Aboriginal languages under Robert Dixon.

Terence Michael Crowley (1 April 1953 – 15 January 2005) was a linguist specializing in Oceanic languages as well as Bislama, the English-lexified Creole recognized as a national language in Vanuatu. From 1991 he taught in New Zealand. Previously, he was with the Pacific Languages Unit of the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu (1983–90) and with the Department of Language and Literature at the University of Papua New Guinea (1979–83).

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, and the family settled on a dairy farm in the rural north of Victoria, just outside Shepparton, where Crowley received his early education. He decided to become a philologist early, during his high school years at Shepparton High School, from which he graduated as dux in 1970.