William Clackson was born circa 1799. He was a shoemaker living in Glasgow at the time of the "Radical War" of 1820. He was sentenced to death for his part in the uprising, but this was subsequently communted to transportation to New South Wales. He left Scotland in the convict ship Speke on the 22nd December 1820.
William Clackson arrived in Australia on the 18th May 1821. In the 1828 census he is recorded, age 29, as working as a shoemaker in Sydney, living with his wife Margaret, aged 28, who arrived in the colony on the Orpheus in 1826.
On the 10th August 1835 William Clackson was granted, in common with the other Bonnymuir insurgents, an absolute pardon.