Steadfast Knight: A Life of Sir Hal Colebatch.(Book Review)

• Author: Dunkley, K.H.
• Position: 140825976
• Pages: 67(6)

STEADFAST KNIGHT: A LIFE OF SIR HAL COLEBATCH by Hal G.P. Colebatch Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2004, pp. 320, $32.95

The life of West Australian Premier, Senator, Agent-General and chess wizard Sir Hal Colebatch (1872-1953) is, in many ways too improbable for fiction. One of West Australia's greatest adopted sons, and a figure of international stature, his remarkable story has been largely ignored by Australia's predominantly leftist history establishment.

This biography by his son, well-known author, poet, journalist and lawyer Hal G.P. Colebatch, helps to rectify this and accord him some of the recognition that is his due.

The son of poor English immigrants, Hal Colebatch aged 11 left school in South Australia in 1883 and immediately commenced work as a junior reporter on a succession of small back-blocks newspapers. Penniless and in poor health, he sailed to Western Australia in the 1890s and, despite a bad leg, walked through the desert to the typhoid-ridden Coolgardie gold-fields, where, a journalist too poor to own a typewriter, he camped in a tent and slept wrapped in newspaper against the cold.

Within a few years he was bowls champion, chess champion and then, in 1919, Premier of Western Australia. He was first the greatest critic and then, as a Minister before the First World War, the deconstructor of many of the Scadden Labor Government's well-meant but economically disastrous and often corrupt schemes of socialism, including State-owned sawmills, fishing fleets, bakeries and brickworks. As first Acting-Premier and then Premier he had to deal with the Spanish Influenza epidemic in the face of the active non-co-operation of the Commonwealth Government under acting Prime Minister Watts, and then with a violent and homicidal riot on the Fremantle wharves inspired by union thugs and Communist agitators in which a man was killed and in which he, personally meeting the rioters in an attempt to obtain a settlement, narrowly escaped assassination. He resigned the Premiership after a month because he could not get a suitable lower house seat, but remained the most influential member of the government and its only member in the Upper House, responsible for the passage of all legislation as well as Parliamentary business and his own range of portfolios.

Because he had so little formal education, education was his special interest, and his proudest achievement in this period was probably, as Minister of Education, to establish Western Australian's first country high schools, in Kalgoorlie, Albany, Geraldton and Bunbury. When he left this office no more were established for many years. As first Minister for the North-West, he personally led an expedition through wild and virtually unexplored country, and was involved with...