His father, Kenneth Wallace-Crabbe, was a journalist with the
Melbourne Herald. His mother, Phyllis Cock Passmore, was from a working-class background, had trained to be a secretary, and, according to Wallace-Crabbe in a 1996
Australian Literary Studies (ALS) interview, was "also, marginally, a concert pianist."
From 1935 to 1936 Wallace-Crabbe, known as Kit, traveled with his parents to Europe, where his father was a journalist. On 17 October 1938 Rollo (later Robin) Wallace-Crabbe was born. He became a well-known artist (and also a writer). In late 1941 Kenneth Wallace-Crabbe went to war, and in 1942 his family lived briefly with his mother and sister in Black Rock, a Melbourne seaside suburb. With her husband away (at one stage "missing, believed dead"), Phyllis Wallace-Crabbe suffered from mental illness. When she and her sons returned to Melbourne, they lived in a flat in the comfortable suburb of Toorak. Wallace-Crabbe's father returned from World War II in 1946.
In a 1996 interview with David McCooey, Wallace-Crabbe described his father's Scottish family background as "middle-class bohemia, or Celtic-military bohemia." In his autobiography, A Man's Childhood (1997), Robin Wallace-Crabbe presents his mother as having "the power of madness" and his father as right-wing and lacking in insight.
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