Hon. William Anderson (1828–1909), J.P., was a Scottish-born, colonial Victorian farmer and politician.
Anderson, the son of James Anderson and Hannah his wife, was born at Montrose, Scotland, on 3 January 1828, and was taken to Launceston, Tasmania, in Oct. 1841, arriving on 1 April of the following year. The family removed to Port Fairy in Victoria, in 1844; and in 1849 he took over his father's business as a builder, which he managed until 1854, when he joined his father in purchasing Rosemount Farm. He became a member of the first Belfast Road Board, was elected president of the Belfast Shire Council, made a justice of the peace in 1864, and sat in the Legislative Assembly for Villiers and Heytesbury from 1880 till April 1892, when he was defeated. In 1854 he was elected an elder of the Presbyterian church, and was for two years president of the Protection of Aborigines Society. He succeeded Chief Justice William Foster Stawell as president of the Royal Horticultural Society of Victoria. In 1887 he was awarded the Minister of Agriculture's prize for the best managed farm in southern Victoria. He was appointed Minister of Public Works in the Gillies Government on 2 Sept. 1890, and resigned with the rest of his colleagues in the following November.[1]