Sir Harry Pateshall Colebatch (29 March 1872 – 12 February 1953) was a long-serving figure in Western Australian politics. He was a member of the Western Australian Legislative Council for nearly 20 years, the twelfth Premier of Western Australia for a month in 1919, agent-general in London for five years, and a senator for four years. He was known for supporting free trade, federalism and Western Australian secessionism, and for opposing communism, socialism and fascism. Born in England, his family migrated to South Australia when Colebatch was four years old. He left school aged 11 and worked for several newspapers in South Australia before moving to Broken Hill in New South Wales in 1888 to work as a reporter for the Silver Age. In 1894, he moved to the Western Australian Goldfields following the gold rush there, working for the Golden Age in Coolgardie and the Kalgoorlie Miner in Kalgoorlie. Two years later, he moved to Perth to join the Morning Herald, but after that newspaper collapsed, he moved to Northam where he started The Northam Advertiser. He also became friends with local bank manager James Mitchell and convinced Mitchell to run for state parliament. Colebatch was the mayor of Northam between 1909 and 1912.
Colebatch became a member of parliament himself when he was elected to the East Province of the Legislative Council in 1912. Upon Frank Wilson becoming premier in July 1916, Colebatch was appointed Minister for Education and Colonial Secretary. During a Spanish flu outbreak in South Australia and Victoria in early 1919, Colebatch was Acting Premier as Premier Henry Lefroy was travelling interstate. Colebatch chose to close the Western Australian border, leaving Lefroy and two ministers stuck outside the state. In April 1919, Lefroy resigned as premier and Colebatch took over, making him the only premier to come from the Legislative Council rather than the Legislative Assembly. The major event during his premiership was the 1919 Fremantle Wharf riot, in which two unions were fighting with each other. Colebatch resigned as premier one month after taking the job and was succeeded by Mitchell.
Colebatch served as a minister in the James ministry for four years, but resigned to become agent-general in 1923. He served most of his time as agent-general under a Labor government as Phillip Collier beat Mitchell in an election in March 1924. While agent-general, he toured Italy and met Benito Mussolini, which led him to form his anti-fascist political beliefs. After returning to Australia in 1927, he wrote a book at the request of Collier on the history of Western Australia to commemorate the state's centenary. He also sat on the Royal Commission on the Constitution. In 1928, he was elected to the Australian Senate, where he spent much of his time criticising protectionism, blaming it for worsening the Great Depression. He resigned in 1933 to take the position of agent-general again.
The Western Australian secession referendum occurred soon after Colebatch became agent-general, in which 66.23% of electors voted in favour of seceding. Colebatch was thus appointed to lead a delegation to the British Parliament to request secession. The delegation was unsuccessful, with a parliamentary select committee deciding that allowing Western Australia to secede would go against constitutional conventions. Colebatch continued on as agent-general until 1939, where he would make several trips to Germany to meet with anti-fascists as well as Nazi political figures. After returning to Australia, he was elected to the Legislative Council again, this time for the Metropolitan Province. He would serve there for eight years, and during this time, would frequently write in The Northam Advertiser about his view on World War II. He contested the 1948 election but failed to be elected. Colebatch died in 1953 and was buried in Karrakatta Cemetery.
Early life and career Colebatch was born on 29 March 1872 in the village of Underley near Wolferlow in Herefordshire, England, Published online 2006. Retrieved 3 March 2023 to George Pateshall Colebatch, a chemist and farmer, and Georgina Gardiner. The family had six sons and one daughter, with an additional two children who died as infants. They were low church Anglicans. They are descended from John Colebatch, a physician who was knighted by King George I. The Colebatch family once owned a castle at Colebatch, Shropshire, and had extensive lands elsewhere in England and France long before Hal was born, but was by this point quite poor. Due to bad economic conditions in England, the family travelled to South Australia on the St Vincent in 1878. Although it nearly sank along the way, the ship reached Adelaide on 30 November 1878 after 91 days at sea. They settled in the coastal town of Goolwa, South Australia, where they had relatives.
At age eleven, Colebatch left school as his father could not afford to continue with it. The normal leaving age was thirteen, but Colebatch sat and passed an examination in August 1883 to allow him to leave. He got his first job as a junior reporter, printer's devil, compositor and office boy for the Norwood Free Press, a small newspaper in suburban Adelaide. He also attended evening classes in shorthand, literature and Latin at the Pirie Street Literary Institute. This ended when the Norwood Free Press collapsed, leading Colebatch to work for a series of short-lived newspapers in the South Australian goldfields, including the Petersburg Times.
In 1888, aged 16, Colebatch moved to Broken Hill in New South Wales, working as a reporter for the Silver Age for six years. Broken Hill suffered three droughts, four typhoid epidemics, and numerous worker strikes during the time that Colebatch was there. He reported on a number of strike meetings in the latter half of 1892 and was summoned as a Crown witness in the prosecution of strike leaders. Although he was opposed to the strike leaders' actions, he knew them well and did not want them to go to jail. Several of the leaders were convicted, and Colebatch wrote that "I like to think that my notes were instrumental in securing either acquittal or light sentences for the lesser offenders ... I am glad to say Dick Sleath bore me no animosity for the part I had played in securing his conviction." Meanwhile, Colebatch had developed a hobby in chess, becoming the Broken Hill chess champion.
Western Australia Gold was discovered at Coolgardie, Western Australia, in 1892 and at the nearby town of Kalgoorlie the following year. This triggered a gold rush in the colony of Western Australia, which had been an economic backwater up until that point. Meanwhile, waning demand for silver combined with a general economic recession in eastern Australia hurt the prosperity of Broken Hill. The Silver Age, by then known as the Broken Hill Age, was on the verge of collapse and the payment of Colebatch's wages had become irregular. Colebatch was ready to leave Broken Hill when in 1894, he received a letter from his friend Sidney Hocking saying that he had just purchased the Western Argus, Kalgoorlie's weekly newspaper, and wanted Colebatch to take his place at the Golden Age in Coolgardie. Colebatch left for Western Australia later that year. Upon arriving in Fremantle, he had made just enough money gambling to catch the train to Southern Cross, but he had to walk the remaining across the desert to Coolgardie instead of taking a coach, arriving there in early 1895.
Coolgardie soon died down as all the surface gold was taken, and Kalgoorlie overtook it to become the Goldfields' largest town. The Golden Age burnt down in September 1895, and so Colebatch moved to Kalgoorlie to work with Hocking on the Kalgoorlie Miner, a new daily newspaper. In Kalgoorlie, he met his future wife, Mary Maud Saunders, born in South Australia. At the start of 1896, they moved to Perth, the colony's capital city, for Colebatch to join the Morning Herald as its mining and chess editor. He also became the Western Australian correspondent for the British Australasian and the Financial Times and the metropolitan correspondent for several regional newspapers. Among the things he reported on was Premier John Forrest's announcement of the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme. Colebatch married Saunders on 29 April 1896 in St George's Cathedral, Perth.
In 1898, Colebatch was banned from the parliamentary press gallery for reporting on a supposed fistfight that had occurred between two members of parliament. A police inspector who had been in Parliament House at the time had told the story to a journalist for the Morning Herald, who then passed the story on to Colebatch who then telegraphed it to the Kalgoorlie Miner. Later that day, Colebatch discovered that the story had been exaggerated and that it was merely a verbal disagreement. The telegraph office was closed by that time, and so the Kalgoorlie Miner on 23 September 1898 had printed the details of the supposed fist fight on its front page. Forrest was furious, and he attempted to have the publishers prosecuted for published libel. After that failed, Forrest discovered that Colebatch was the reporter who passed the story along, and he had Colebatch banned from the parliamentary press gallery. Colebatch was dragged out by the sergeant-at-arms on 19 October 1898, and the following day, Colebatch sent a letter that he intended to sue the sergeant-at-arms for assault. After heavy media criticism, the ban was lifted and the police inspector was demoted and transferred.
Colebatch became the state chess champion in 1898. By the late 1890s, the federation of Australia had become a major political issue. The Morning Herald, which by this time Colebatch had become assistant leader-writer under Archibald Sanderson, campaigned against federation. Colebatch was inspired by Sanderson's anti-federation arguments and became anti-federation himself, unusual for someone from eastern Australia. Writing for the Royal Western Australian Historical Society's Early Days journal in 1951, Colebatch said that "Sanderson's anti-federal articles — from the Western Australian point of view — could be examined line for line [today] and proved to be an absolutely accurate forecast of what has happened to the State under federation." Sanderson was not ideologically opposed to federation but was against the terms with which Western Australia was going to enter, saying that "no words in a written constitution could protect a small state in a federation against larger and more powerful ones making policies against its interest." Western Australia ended up voting for federation in a 1900 referendum, and so it became one of the six states of Australia on 1 January 1901.
Northam The Morning Herald eventually collapsed, and so in 1904, Colebatch moved to Northam, a town in Western Australia's Wheatbelt. Largely using borrowed money, he bought his own newspaper: The Northam Advertiser. A friend from Broken Hill, J. T. Nichols, was put in charge of printing the newspaper, leaving Colebatch in charge of the journalism, allowing the newspaper to prosper. By this point, he had two sons: Harley and Gordon Lindsay, and was looking for a more settled life. He lived in Northam for years to come.