Arthur H Collett
Australian Politician (1870–1930)

Arthur Henry Collett (18 April 1870 – 20 August 1930) was an Australian politician who served as Mayor of Parramatta from 1912 to 1913 and 1928 to 1930 in his second term.
His second and last mayoral term came to a sudden end when he died, making him one of the few Mayors of Parramatta to die in office.
Biography
Collett was born in Mudgee during Colonial New South Wales. His father, Henry Collett, was an English soldier and came to Australia with one of the regiments. Later his father joined the Prisons Department and saw service at several New South Wales gaols.
At the age of ten, Collett came to Parramatta with his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters. He said he helped support his family by selling newspapers at Parramatta Railway Station. He attended Parramatta Public School. On leaving school he went to work at Hudson Bros carriage works at Clyde, where he remained for a few years.
In 1895, he married Frances Maud Bailey at Parramatta and shortly afterwards entered the dairying business, though later on in his life he remarried to Georgina Eliza Sarah McDonald.
“Arthur H Collett” enters the record as australian Politician (1870–1930). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Arthur, Collett and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q115626072. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1870, 1930, 1912 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arthur H Collett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.