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…