His English parents emigrated to Australia when he was roughly 7 years old,[4] and the family settled on a dairy farm[4] in the rural north of Victoria, just outside Shepparton, where Crowley received his early education.
[8][a] Crowley enrolled at the Australian National University in 1971 with an Asian studies scholarship, with a major in Indonesian,[6] while also taking coursework on Aboriginal languages under Robert Dixon.
[9] Given diplomatic tensions between Australia and Indonesia at the time, Crowley did his post-graduate thesis work on Vanuatu,[9] where 195,000[6] to 200,000 people speak approximately 100 distinct languages.
[b] He obtained a doctorate in 1980 with a dissertation on Paamese,[9] managing in the meantime to do linguistic salvage fieldwork describing several moribund Australian languages such as Djangadi, Gumbaynggir[11] and Yaygir in New South Wales, and the Mpakwithi dialect of Anguthimri,[12] together with Uradhi, both formerly spoken in the Cape York Peninsula.
Almost nothing of structural value was transmitted in written archives by the time of Truganini's death, a fact which deprives all Palawa of Aboriginal descent of both their cultural identity and the land claims which can only be pursued if continuity can be proven.