Alfred Arthur Greenwood Hales

He occasionally contributed to country newspapers, never staying long in one place, until he came to Broken Hill, New South Wales, where he was a mining reporter for some years.

For a time he wrote fearlessly and critically of the way in which the British were conducting their operations, but was wounded and made a prisoner by the Boers, and was not released until the end of the war.

Hales wrote a book on his experiences, Campaign Pictures of War in South Africa, (1900), and in the following year appeared his first novel, Driscoll, King of Scouts.

Hales was not content to be merely a writer of fiction, he went to Bulgaria and fought in the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising against the Turks in 1903 in the band of general Ivan Tsonchev – the leader of the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee.

Wherever there was a mining field Hales visited it, and in South America he made a special study of the agricultural and pastoral possibilities of that continent.

Hales worked as a war correspondent in France, and then went to Italy, where he met General Garibaldi and endeavoured to join the Italian army.