Alfred Arthur Greenwood Hales, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetAlfred Arthur Greenwood Hales
Australian writer
Date of Birth: 
About Alfred Arthur Greenwood Hales
- Alfred Arthur Greenwood Hales (21 July 1860 – 29 December 1936) was an Australian novelist and war correspondent. Hales was born at Kent Town, Adelaide, the son of Frederick Greenwood Hales, a wood-turner, and his wife Sarah Leigh, née Veal.
- He had the ordinary primary education of his time, and after being apprenticed to a carpenter began a wandering career by going to the country.
- For years he worked as a farm hand and rouseabout and became a magnificent rider.
- 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.
- There he wrote his first book, The Wanderings of a Simple Child, which was published in 1890.
- This went into a third edition in the following year.
- Hales then visited America and England and returning to Adelaide started the Adelaide Standard.
- He next went to the goldfields in Western Australia and started the Coolgardie Mining Review.
- A fire destroyed his plant and he was penniless, but after working for some time as a dry-blower he went to Boulder and with his brother Frank started the Boulder Star and later the Boulder Miner's Right.
- Hales stood as a labour candidate for parliament but was defeated, and when the South African war broke out became a war correspondent for the London Daily News.
- 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.
- He made a success with McGlusky, published in 1902, afterwards followed by a long series of stories with this Australian of Scottish descent as the hero. Hales was not content to be merely a writer of fiction, he went to Bulgaria and fought in the Preobrazhenie Uprising against the Turks in 1903 in the band of general Ivan Tsonchev – the leader of the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee.
- This was followed by experience as a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War, and in the following years much lecturing in England, South Africa, Australia and South America.
- 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.
- When World War I began he endeavoured to enlist but was too much over age.
- 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.
- Garibaldi, who was born in Australia, tried to help him without success, and Hales again worked as a correspondent.
- In 1918 he published Where Angels Fear to Tread, a series of able sketches on matters arising out of the war.
- After peace came Hales lived mostly in England and wrote a large number of novels, of which about 60 are listed in Miller's Australian Literature.
- Many of these had large circulations; of the McGlusky series of some 20 volumes about 2,000,000 copies were sold.
- Hales published a volume of verse, Poems and Ballads, in 1909, which is not important as poetry, and he also wrote some unpublished plays.
- He died in England on 29 December 1936.
- He was married twice; firstly to Emmeline Pritchard of Adelaide who died in 1911, and secondly in 1920 to Jean Reid.
- There were four sons and a daughter by the first marriage. Hales was a large man known to all as "Smiler" Hales.
- He took part in and was much interested in every form of sport.
- He was a good journalist and a good teller of tales, who believed in wholesome decent living and was not afraid to say so.
- His My Life of Adventure, 1918, and Broken Trails, 1931, show interesting adventures from his life.
Read more at Wikipedia