‘If goods cannot cross frontiers, armies will.’ This prescient remark was made by the Western Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch, well before the German and Japanese armies started their march in 1936. In a federation not lacking in strong state politicians – Thomas Playford, Henry Bolte, Don Dunstan, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Charles Court and Jeff Kennett come to mind for the twentieth century – Colebatch (1872–1953) stands out by virtue of his interests and priorities. He is a reminder (and the eastern states often need reminding) that Western Australia has been from the start, and remains to some degree, another country.

Although written with characteristic energy by his son and namesake (poet, science fiction writer and controversialist), this biography should not be dismissed as a work of filial piety but read as a study of the preoccupations of a non-partisan politician. In the important matters, history has vindicated his often solitary stand. Thus Colebatch opposed the terms of federation, warning that they would damage Western Australia, as indeed they did. He remained a free-trader throughout his long careers in journalism and politics, at a time when protectionism was the ruling ideology. Colebatch formed one of the few links in public life between the nineteenth-century free-traders and the small band of activists who fought protectionism from the 1950s onwards. Naturally, he opposed the planned society that the Labor government introduced in World War II, ostensibly as part of the war effort, in fact as a means of advancing socialism.