[2] While serving overseas he met and married Australian woman Hilda Gertrude Hartnett on 24 October 1916 in Westminster Cathedral in London, where he had been sent after falling ill in the trenches.

[3] On his return to Australia Abbott bought a "Murrulla",[4] a grazing property near Tamworth, New South Wales, this purchase was financed by his uncle William.

He made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1925 via the seat of Namoi, but defeated Lou Cunningham to win Gwydir for the Country Party at the federal elections of that year.

No longer a member of parliament, Abbott became secretary to the Primary Producers' Advisory Council, and it has been suggested that he was an organiser of the paramilitary Old Guard.

[citation needed] As administrator, Abbott was "devoutly" opposed to organised labour and came into conflict with the North Australian Workers' Union (NAWU).

In 1937 he unsuccessfully submitted to the local arbitration court that "half-caste" Indigenous waterside workers should have their award wages docked on racial grounds.

[1] The pair were lucky to survive and, hearing the air raid siren, he and his family sought shelter in a room beneath the building.

[7] In 1943, Abbott wrote to Joseph Carrodus, secretary of the Department of the Interior, proposing that the federal government use compulsory acquisition to destroy Darwin's Chinatown and thereby reduce the territory's Chinese population.

[8] In August 1943 Abbott also sought help from the Commonwealth Government for improved housing options for 'part-Aboriginal' people, many of whom had grown up at The Bungalow, in Alice Springs.