[1] Shortly after his birth, Bolte's parents moved the family to Skipton in the Western District where they ran a local pub, the Ripon Hotel.

He entered Ballarat Grammar School as a boarder in 1922 on a technical scholarship, attending alongside his future parliamentary colleagues Tom Hollway and Edward Montgomery.

[1] In 1934, with money from his grandmother, Bolte purchased Kialla, a sheep farming property of 900 acres (360 ha) at Bamganie near Meredith.

He was stationed at Puckapunyal for periods as an artillery instructor and pay clerk, but was rejected for overseas service and discharged in January 1943.

[1] Bolte was founding president of the Liberal Party's Meredith branch in 1945 and was a delegate to its inaugural state council.

He first stood for parliament at the 1945 state election, running unsuccessfully in the seat of Hampden, but reprised his candidacy in 1947 and defeated the incumbent Australian Labor Party (ALP) member Raymond Hyatt.

The electoral system was malapportioned in favour of rural areas, which gave the Liberals' junior partner, the Country Party disproportionate power.

In 1951 Hollway tried to reform the electoral system, which caused a split in the Liberal Party and his replacement by Les Norman, with Bolte as Deputy Leader.

Due in part to the DLP continuing to direct its preferences to the Liberals at elections, Bolte was reelected six times.

Many believed he was foiled when Robert Peter Tait who had murdered Ada Hall, an elderly widow, at the Hawthorn vicarage where she lived with her son, and who subsequently had been sentenced to hang for the crime, was granted an eleventh-hour reprieve in 1962 after the High Court had found him insane.

Bolte had the power to recommend clemency, but declined to exercise it, arguing that the death penalty was a necessary deterrent for crime against government officials and law enforcement officers.

"[7] Peter Blazey later wrote 'For a man practically devoid of political or social idealism, the hanging had proved a way of tightening his control over cabinet, the party and the press.'

But Bolte had correctly interpreted the populist appeal of his putative law-and-order stand, and at the 1967 elections the Liberals went from 38 of 66 seats in 1964 to 44 of 73 in 1967.

After 1968, when Bolte turned 60, his appeal to younger urban voters declined, and he showed little sympathy with new issues such as the environment and civil liberties.

At the 1970 state elections the Liberals seemed in serious danger of losing office, or at least being forced into a coalition with the Country Party, but Bolte was saved by Holding's left-wing enemies in the Labor Party, who sabotaged his campaign by publicly opposing government funding for non-government schools (which Holding and Gough Whitlam had made Labor policy).

Bolte was shrewd enough to see that the Liberals had a year at most to broaden their appeal before a statutory general election, and concluded that they needed a new leader and a new image for the 1970s.

[1] On 24 March 1984, Bolte was involved in a serious head-on accident when he was driving home after an evening in the local hotel near his property at Bamganie.

[1] Bolte was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG) in the New Year's Day honours list of 1966.