His father was an accomplished speaker of rhyming slang, and Blake was raised listening to talks in which a priest would be called 'cream and yeast', nuns 'currant buns' and being drunk ('pissed') 'Brahms and Liszt'.
He was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1987,[6] and in the following year was appointed to the Foundation Chair in linguistics at La Trobe University.
He has recently reconstructed aspects of the extinct dialects of the Kulin languages from fragmentary evidence retrieved from various ethnographic reports made in the 19th century.
Robert M. W. Dixon had reconstructed the elements of the proto-Australian pronoun system, and Blake did similar work for the non-Pama-Nyungan languages, showing that their verb pronominal prefix forms may well have descended from a single proto-language, with a distinct set of proto-pronouns, the implication being that there were two distinct proto-languages in the Australian continent.
[8] His linguistic interests have extended beyond Australia, in work on south East Asian languages[9] where he has shown that the phenomenon of ergativity is much more widespread than had previously been thought.