Robert Crawford was born in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, in 1868 and is known for a small collection of poetry that was largely self-published in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not much is known about his life though he was reasonably well educated and attended King’s School in the area of Parramatta and then went on to university in Sydney.
After leaving there he tried his hand at farming, as many of his family had done before him, but found the life hard and was not terribly successful. Unable to make a living, he returned to Sydney where he took up a job as clerk but later managed to start his own business selling typewriters.
At about the age of 30, he was already beginning to write poetry and succeeded in getting a number of verses published in a local Sydney magazine, The Bulletin. This began around 1898 and a year later he won a literary prize run by the publication for his haiku about Australia.
By 1904, Crawford had enough verses to put into a collection which he self-published under the title Lyric Moods: Various Verses. The book did catch the eye of some critics and it was republished a few years later through the Melbourne press Lothian. It wasn’t until much later that Crawford published his second collection under the title Leafy Bliss.
Although A G Stephens was an admirer of his work and published the later collection, Leafy Bliss, Crawford’s work largely faded from public view and he appeared to publish only two further poems in The Bulletin in the later part of the 20s – The Opinions of Mr Crawford and A Shopman and His Wares both in 1928.
Crawford died suddenly in 1930 at the age of 61.
