Who Is Wallace? - The Enigma of the World’s Oldest Prisoner

On 9 December 1925, a forty-four-year-old man giving his name as Bill Wallace was arrested in Melbourne for the shooting of a young electrician Ernest Williams, following an altercation over whether smoking was permitted in a cafe at lunchtime. ‘Who Is Wallace?’ asked newspapers. Yet Wallace would make no statement, refused to give evidence, and offered no personal information. He was deemed unfit to stand trial, and turned over to the Department of the Insane in the town of Ararat – where he died, inscrutable to the last, in 1989, aged almost 108. The Guinness Book of Records still accords him the status of ‘the world’s oldest prisoner. Who Is Wallace? is the story of a man time forgot, of the asylum system that swallowed him whole, and of Wallace’s strange journey from instant infamy to late-life celebrity, when he was used both to justify and to denounce Australia’s treatment of the mentally ill.