Bill Hodson
Australian politician

William David Hodson (20 February 1891 – 12 July 1971) was an Australian politician.
He was born in Buxton to farmer John Hodson and Elizabeth Scott. He attended state schools and served with the Field Ambulance during World War I, in which he was wounded. On 27 September 1919 he married Margaret Pritchard Phillips, with whom he had four children. After the war he became a foreman for the Forestry Department, and from around 1925 worked as a postal linesman. In 1940 he was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as the Labor member for Castlemaine and Kyneton. He held the seat until its abolition in 1945. Hodson died in Bundoora in 1971.
The public source identifies “Bill Hodson” as australian politician. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bill, Hodson and Australian.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q22018686. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1891, 1971, 1919 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Hodson” 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.