19 MARCH 1927, Page 15

LMI WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

From overseas have conic to London many High ommissioners and Agents-General whom London has much Pnreeiated. High in that honourable list comes Sir Hal olehateli whom London is about to lose. He has played any parts outside the Imperial role. Helped by a memory, ore accurate, though rather less tremendous than Macaulay's, e has achieved an ahnost unique distinction at the game of less. Though a regular player in the Hamilton-Russell 1111) Cup—a competition growing yearly in excellence- ( failed for three years to achieve a single defeat. His eer at the chessboard reminds one of Barlow's at the wicket, ugh his chess is not by any means all stonewalling. He as also been undefeated on his hind legs. Both his rade speeches and, more remarkably, the smaller friendlier eeches at club dinners and such occasions, have been arked by an aristocracy of style and felicity of expression at would be conspicuous in any company. A less subjective tribute, that is not less in his favour, is that he comes from extern Australia, where he arrived from England at the age r five• It is to my eyes parallel with New Zealand Vancouver as a gem of Empire.- The great forests and little

farms, the inlets, harbours and rivers, with their many fish, the new corn lands, the scenery and the flowers and, above all, the people compose a paradise in the South-West corner. As for the North, there is no region in the world that touches the imagination quite so shrewdly. Those hills and cliffs of iron that make the compass stand on its head. The pearl fisheries. The immense and empty harbours. The spacious and almost empty pastoral lands, perhaps the oil and the gold— all this and more body forth an Eldorado of which the wealth and the charm have been wholly neglected. In the great future that we trust lies before Sir Hal Colehatch, one of his activities will be sympathetically to connect his permanent home at Perth or Northam with his temporary habitation in London. After all he began life as a journalist.