Crew, Gary (1947-…), is a popular Australian author of books for children and young adults. Crew’s books include horror and suspense fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, picture books, and short stories. He won the 1991 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) award for older readers for Strange Objects (1990) and shared the 1994 award for Angel’s Gate (1993). He also won the CBCA picture book award in 1994 for First Light (1993) and the 1995 award for The Watertower (1994).
Crew gained recognition with his first novel, The Inner Circle (1985), about the friendship that develops between an Aboriginal teenager and a white teenager. He began exploring Australian history with his third novel, Strange Objects. The story’s hero is a 16-year-old boy who discovers a journal and other objects in a cave. The objects may have come from a ship that sank off the coast of Australia in 1629. The story examines the troubled relationship between European colonists and the Aboriginal peoples who were the original inhabitants of Australia.
Crew edited the “After Dark” series (1998-1999) of horror novels. He also wrote such horror novels as Mama’s Babies (1998) and Gothic Hospital (2001). Crew and Australian illustrator Mark Wilson created the “Extinction” trilogy that explores the human dangers to wildlife. The trilogy consists of I Saw Nothing: The Extinction of the Thylacine and I Said Nothing: The Extinction of the Paradise Parrot (both 2003) and I Did Nothing: The Extinction of the Gastric-Brooding Frog (2004). His other books include Beneath the Surface (2005), a sequel to The Watertower; the fantasies In the Beech Forest and The Boy Who Grew into a Tree (both 2012); and the historical novel Voicing the Dead (2015). Crew collaborated with the English-born Australian illustrator Paul O’Sullivan on the science fiction picture books The Visions of Ichabod X (2015) and Timing the Machine (2016).
Gary David Crew was born on Sept. 23, 1947, in Brisbane. He worked as a draftsman from 1962 to1972 and then as a high school teacher from 1974 to 1988. A draftsman makes technical drawings for machinery or for buildings and other structures. Crew received degrees from the University of Queensland and from the Queensland Institute of Technology (now the Queensland University of Technology). He became a lecturer in creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology in 1989 and at the University of the Sunshine Coast in 1990. He also became a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast .
