Nearly half a century ago, a young Australian journalist without a newspaper decided to try his hand at writing a novel.
He was Brian Fitzpatrick, who was later to win public notice as an historian, as a radical polemicist and lobbyist on the fringe of the Labour movement, and as first General Secretary of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties.
Yet The Colonials is far more a ‘psychological’ novel than a social panorama or a story with a plot. Its was surely the first Australian novel to capture the nuance of a school-teacher’s condition underpaid, conscious of moral superiority to his more vulgar and less well-informed neighbours, resentful of his low standing in a society differentiated by income or appearances more than intelligence or respectability. There is ample plunder here for social historians of the more predatory sort.

Brian Charles Fitzpatrick (1905-1965) was a journalist, historian, socialist and defender of civil liberties. He was a founder of Farrago and the Melbourne University Labor Club. He contributed to The Age, Bulletin, Melbourne Punch and the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
Fitzpatrick's economic analyses were presented to the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration by the Australian Council of Trade Unions as part of its case in the Basic Wage Enquiry in 1940, and also to the Standard Hours Enquiry in 1949.
He was a foundation member of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties in 1935 and its General Secretary from 1939 until his death in 1965. His children are Sheila Fitzpatrick, a historian of the Soviet Union, and David Fitzpatrick, a historian of Ireland.