Walter Wiseman appears in the 1920 photo of the Returned Soldiers team which played in the Brisbane league that season. Wiseman followed when the team merged into a reborn Brisbane City. While most match reports in the 1920s list him as simply W. Wiseman, the Brisbane City line-up in the Telegraph on 15 June 1923 gives his full initials of W. R. A. Wiseman.
Wiseman was a 20-year-old labourer when he enlisted in Brisbane in 1915. He made it to Anzac Cove with the 26th Battalion in November, a month before the Gallipoli campaign was abandoned. He was back in Alexandria by early January and was soon admitted to hospital with a hernia. He spent much of the next year in and out of hospital in Egypt and France with various conditions including influenza, diarrhoea and pleurisy. It was not until April 1917, when transferred to the 69th Battalion, that he fully recovered.
In October 1917 his unit moved to Belgium.Gassed in November, Wiseman suffered from bronchitis but was only away from his unit for a fortnight. His record is empty until August 1918, when he was wounded again and evacuated to England, where he remained until returning to Australia.
He married Beatrice Claydon in November 1918 in Greenwich. The couple departed for Australia in February 1919, and their only child was born a year later in Brisbane.
Wiseman joined the Returned Soldiers team in 1920, which morphed into Brisbane City the next year. The club went north in 1921 to play Mapleton, where Wiseman came up against future Socceroo Wilf Bratton. The team from the Sunshine Coast hinterland beat the capital side 3-1. He was elected a delegate to the Queensland Football Association in 1924, though there was some confusion whether he was still at Brisbane City or junior club Natives at the time. Someone named Wiseman played for Shafston in 1926, but it is unknown whether it is the same player. Otherwise, Wiseman’s association with soccer disappeared in the middle of the 1920s.
Wiseman later worked for the Post Office and was active with the Council of the Postal Institute during the 1930s. He died in 1958, while Beatrice lived until 1991.