Labour Australia

A long and enviable career ended on August 10 when the well loved A. A. [Arthur Allan] Wilson, who represented Collie in the Legislative Assembly for 38 years, died at the age of 84.

Arthur "Dalry" Wilson started his working life at the age of 12 years in a coal mine in Scotland. He came to this State, via Victoria, in 1904. He was for a time Secretary of the Collie Miners' Union and was elected to Parliament in 1908.

Arthur Wilson's life was devoted to securing better conditions for coalminers. As a boy in Scotland he had experienced some of the hideous past of the coal mining industry.

His "Lays and Tales of the Mines," first published in 1916, tells of some of the "sore trials and long sufferings of the workers in the mines." His experiences in Scotland, Victoria—where he arrived in 1888—and in this State, enabled him to tell of some of these trials and sufferings at first hand. And he had the ability to tell them in good verse and picturesque prose.

Of Arthur Wilson it can truthfully be said that he played no small part in making the world a better place for the toilers than he found it to be when he started work as a wee laddie in Scotland.