People Australia

Robert (Bob) Stevenson (?-?) shearer, trade union official and farmer 

Birth: details unknown. Marriage: details unknown. Death: details unknown. 

• Organiser for Amalgamated Shearers' Union (ASU).
• At Bourke, New South Wales, in 1888 he sponsored a successful motion that Chinese workers who were already members of the ASU should be permitted to retain membership.
• At 1889 annual conference of ASU at Wagga, NSW, he represented the Adelaide branch. In 1890 he was secretary of the Shearers’ Union in Victoria.
• Reportedly shearing at Benduck station in the Hay district, NSW, in 1891 he was described in the Hummer as “ one of the best known and best liked agents who ever travelled Victoria and Riverina”.
• Though he was an unsuccessful candidate for the position of secretary of the ASU in opposition to David Temple, nominated by the Wagga branch, in 1892 he did not attend the annual conference of the union at Sydney in March that year. In 1893 he was ASU organiser in lower Murrumbidgee, NSW.
• Was delegate of the Wagga branch of the Shearers’ Union to the conference at Sydney in February 1894. There is no record of his attending the annual conference the following year.
• After four years as an agent, reports of his shearing at various sheds appeared in the Worker in the late 1890s.
• A brief item in 1938 indicated that Stevenson had “closed his shears” and taken up farming.

Sources
John Merritt, The Making of the AWU (Melbourne, 1986).