Wilfred George Petersen was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n politician, affiliated with the Australian Labor Party

Australian Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...

 and elected as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly

New South Wales Legislative Assembly

The Legislative Assembly, or lower house, is one of the two chambers of the Parliament of New South Wales, an Australian state. The other chamber is the Legislative Council. Both the Assembly and Council sit at Parliament House in the state capital, Sydney...

.

Petersen was born in Childers, Queensland

Childers, Queensland

Childers is a town in southern Queensland, Australia, situated at the junction of the Bruce and Isis Highways. The township lies north of the state capital Brisbane and south-west of Bundaberg. Childers is located within Bundaberg Region Local Government Area. At the 2006 census, Childers had a...

, the grandchild of Scandinavian migrants. He was educated at Bundaberg High School, later working as a telephonist for the Postmaster-General's Department and as a pensions officer and special magistrate for the Department of Social Services from 1937 to 1968. In the war

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 he served in Queensland and Borneo

Borneo

Borneo is the third largest island in the world and is located north of Java Island, Indonesia, at the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia....

 as a military signaller in a commando squadron from 1942 to 1946.

In 1947 he married his first wife, Elaine Tout, and had two children in 1953 and 1956. Later, they divorced and he married Mairi Gould. They had one daughter.

In 1943 Petersen joined the Communist Party of Australia

Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...

. He left in 1956 after Khrushchev's Secret Speech

On the Personality Cult and its Consequences

On the Personality Cult and its Consequences was a report, critical of Joseph Stalin, made to the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It is more commonly known as the Secret Speech or the Khrushchev Report...

, which denounced Stalin. He joined the Australian Labor Party in 1957, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly as member for Kembla

Electoral district of Kembla

Kembla was an electoral district of the Legislative Assembly in the Australian State of New South Wales for a single term from 1968 to 1971, named after the Mount Kembla or Port Kembla. It replaced part of Wollongong-Kembla and Illawarra and was replaced by Illawarra. Its only member was George...

 in 1968. He represented this electorate until the 1971 election, when he moved to the seat of Illawarra

Electoral district of Illawarra

Illawarra was an electoral district of the Legislative Assembly in the Australian state of New South Wales. It was originally created in 1859, replacing East Camden. It was replaced by Wollongong in 1904 and recreated in 1927. In 1968, it was abolished and partly replaced by Kembla. In 1971,...

, which he held until his retirement in 1988.