Henry Ernest Boote, the friend and confidante of numerous prime ministers and a true believer who spent his life seeking the light on the hill, was passionate in his opposition to conscription in both world wars, arguing it was nothing more than the compulsion of working men to fight and die to protect the interests of the wealthy few.

Like George Orwell, he was turned off communist internationalism by developments in Russia in the 1920s and the 1930s, leaning instead towards the development of a more moderate philosophy that could be embraced by all members of the Labor movement.

This led to friction with the hard-core left, including many of the supporters of J. T. Lang, who Boote viewed as a potential dictator.

Boote was well aware there was just as much potential in Australia for a left-wing dictatorship as a right-wing one and spent much energy cutting party members with what he feared was an inordinate degree of ambition down to size.

He edited The Australian Worker, the newspaper of the Australian Workers Union, from 1914 to 1943, and was instrumental in raising the quality of political debate across all classes.

Boote was also poet and a satirist.

Included among his papers in the National Library of Australia collection is a folder entitled: "Poems to Bonzer, his pet dog".

A former printer's apprentice who emigrated to Australia at the age of 24 in 1889, Boote was a well-travelled man who spent time in the outback, Melbourne and Sydney.

Writing in the Australian Dictionary of Biography in 1979, Frank Farrell expressed the view: "Boote has been all but ignored by literary historians". That appears to still be the case.