People Australia

Walter Scobie Nisbet (1882-1934) blacksmith and coalminer

Birth: 29 June 1882 at Riccarton, Ayrshire, Scotland, son of James Nisbet (1845-1902), brickmaker, and Margaret D,, née Scobie (1844-1933).

Marriages: (1) 18 October 1907 with Presbyterian forms at Strathfield, New South Wales, to Agnes Russell Hoggan (1881-1953), born at Dunfermline Burgh, Fife, Scotland. Agnes had come out to be married to Nisbet, and married him on the day she arrived in NSW. They divorced in July 1912. (2) 30 August 1912 at Brisbane, Queensland, to Catherine Strang, née Gray (1893-1976), born at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland. They had a daughter and two sons. Death: 28 October 1934 in Collinsville hospital, Queensland. 

• Walter was educated at Cowdenbeath school in Scotland and in August 1891 was admitted to St Leonards school, Dunfermline. In the 1901 Scottish census he was shown as a blacksmith living with his parents and siblings at Dunfermline.
• He left Scotland in the early 1900s and spent some time working as a blacksmith in South Africa before arriving in Australia about 1904. From 1907 he lived at Weston, near West Maitland, NSW, and worked as a miner.
• Following a strike, he left Australia, in about August 1909, to take a position in New Zealand and abandoned his wife. A NSW Police Gazette missing persons notice in May 1910 described him as “about 27 years of age, 5 feet 7 inches high, stoutish build, round shoulders, fair hair and moustache, blue eyes, thick lips, left fore-finger missing; a blacksmith by trade, sometimes works as a coal-miner”.
• Following his second marriage the Nisbets lived for ten years at Tannymorel, Queensland, and from 1922 at Collinsville, where Walter was engaged as a blacksmith at the local state mine.
• His son James Alexander Nisbet was employed as a miner at Collinsville and was a local trade union leader and Communist.