Stanley Argyle. Colebatch also edited many books, including Lucky Ross, written by John Ross, an Australian Navy officer who was transferred out of HMAS Sydney 19 days before it was sunk with all hands in November 1941. He wrote commissioned histories of the Parents' and Friends Association and The Victoria League in Western Australia. He had two novels published by Acashic— Counterstrike, set in Western Australia in the near future, and Time Machine Troopers, a sequel to H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, set in 802,719 and featuring Wells himself, Winston Churchill and Lord Robert Baden-Powell as characters. Counterstrike has been described in The American Spectator Online and the Perth "Record" as a "thriller of ideas, one of the first books to grapple with the problems of false and manufactured counter-knowledge." (9 July 2011) Time Machine Troopers has been described as "better than Wells" and "a subversion of Wells". In 2011 Picaro Press published his small "chapbook" of poetry, The Age of Revolution, No. 113 in its Wagtail Poets series. Poetry Many of his poems concern Perth and its suburbs, the Swan River and Rottnest Island, as well as travels in Britain, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. His poetry, which has won various prizes, is in both free-verse and highly structured forms including sonnets and sestinas. Colebatch was described by Peter Alexander, Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, in his biography of Les Murray, as being among Australia's best writers. His seventh book of poetry, The Light River, with a foreword by Les Murray, was published by Connor Court Publishing in 2007. In the foreword Murray stated that Colebatch's work had been unjustly suppressed by the Australian literary establishment because of his refusal to join poetic cliques. This book contains, among other works, the long narrative poem The San Demetrio, telling of the salvaging of a burning petrol-tanker at sea in World War II, and a poem It, on the return of terrorism. The long poem Red-Head with Phosphorus is a romantic love story. His poems are included in about 25 anthologies. The Light River was awarded the West Australian Premier's literary prize for poetry in 2008. Other activities When working as a reporter on The West Australian in the early 1970s, Colebatch made several trips to the Kimberley to report on the construction and filling of the Ord River Dam and associated animal rescues