Cirrus@Austlit

'One of Australia’s most prolific and impressive writers, Hal G.P. Colebatch, died on September 9. He was seventy-three. Hal was well-known to Quadrant readers for both his prose contributions and his poetry. He was a frequent contributor to the magazine for nearly fifty years. He had a fine combination of a journalist’s sense of what was newsworthy and a traditional scholar’s commitment to thorough research and the historical perspective of the events he was writing about. Our late literary editor, Les Murray, published a great deal of Hal’s poetry over the years, singling him out in the introduction to the Quadrant Book of Poetry, 2001–2010, as “a brave writer of excellence”. 'In October 2013, his friend and journalist colleague, Tony Thomas, wrote a profile of the man and his work for Quadrant Online. We re-publish it here, with some slight amendments.' (Introduction)