Hal Gibson Pateshall Colebatch (7 October 1945 – 10 September 2019) was a West Australian author, historian, poet, lecturer, journalist, editor, and lawyer.
His mother Marion, Lady Colebatch, was the daughter of long-time Fremantle mayor and parliamentarian Sir Frank Gibson, and had served as an Australian Army nursing sister.
His Return of the Heroes is a study of heroic fantasy including The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter, and he contributed several articles to the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia; Scholarship and Critical Assessment.
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."
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.
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.
He was also a co-author of a book on traffic law in Western Australia, published in 2007 with Barrister Patrick Mugliston and former police sergeant Stewart Ainsworth.
His book Australia's Secret War won the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for history, attracting significant controversy due to accusations of political bias.
The book details strikes and purported sabotage by left-wing unions during World War II, although many of his examples were criticised for inaccuracy or for relying on unsubstantiated statements by individual servicemen.