post of Public Service Commissioner in Tasmania. He investigated the conditions of the service, and recommended reforms. He then took up a position as Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police in Victoria, but failed to get the Victorian government to agree with his recommendations for reform, and resigned in 1922. While in Melbourne, Gellibrand commanded the 3rd Division, but had to resign when he returned to Tasmania in 1922. He entered Federal politics in 1925, and was elected the member for Denison. He was defeated in the 1928 and 1929 elections, and returned to farming, first in Tasmania, and then in Victoria. In the late 1930s, he was consulted by Prime Ministers Joseph Lyons and Robert Menzies about defence matters. He campaigned for an increase in the size of the Australian Army, and, after the outbreak of the Second World War, lobbied the Menzies government to appoint Major General Sir Thomas Blamey as Commander in Chief of the Army. In June 1940, he was appointed commandant of the Victorian Volunteer Defence Corps, the Australian version of the British Home Guard, but ill-health forced him to resign. Early life and career John Gellibrand (known as Jack to his family) was born at Leintwarden, near Ouse in Tasmania, on 5 December 1872, the sixth child and third son of Thomas Lloyd Gellibrand, a grazier, landowner and local politician and his wife Isabella née Brown. Thomas Lloyd was the son of Joseph Gellibrand, a member of the Tasmanian House of Assembly from 1856 to 1861, and a captain in a Militia unit, the 3rd Rifles (Southern Tasmanian Volunteers). Gellibrand had two older brothers, Tom and Walter; three sisters, Annie, Lina and Mary; and a younger brother, Blake. His father died on 9 November 1874, and on 7 February 1876, his mother took her seven children to live in England, sailing on the clipper Sobroan. En route she met the ship's surgeon, Dr Edward Clayton Ling, and they were married in Saxmundham, Suffolk, where his family lived, on 28 December 1878. They had two more children, a daughter, Muriel, and a son, Maurice, but Ling died on 28 June 1882. Gellibrand was initially educated at Crespigny Preparatory School at Aldeburgh in Suffolk. In 1883 the family moved to Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, where he continued his education before completing it at the King's School, Canterbury in 1888 and 1889. After a visit to Tasmania with his mother