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- [00:00]
A
The butcher comes out the front of his shop. He's only seen the last stage of this altercation. He said, what have you done? You've shot a man in cold blood. And the one thing Bill says, which he will repeat at intervals over the next little while, is, I had to do it. I had to do it.
- [00:17]
B
Gideon Hay is one of the world's preeminent cricket journalists, but his other great passion is historical true crime. Gideon's latest book in the genre is called who Was Wallace? It's an investigation into the life and circumstances of a man who was Australia's oldest prisoner. He joins us on Australian True Crime to talk about it. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
- [00:55]
A
So, look, you know, I've done a number of true crime books. I think I've talked to you probably about all of them, but they're all slightly different, and they all kind of explore a slightly different aspect of true crime. I think there's a lot of true crime that's very formulaic, you know, victim, perpetrator, detective, solution.
- [01:11]
B
The context is always really interesting. It's interesting to think about Australia in the not too distant past, but very different. You know, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, pretty brutal, pretty harsh in a lot of ways. You know, we like to think of ourselves as a pretty relaxed society, a very lucky country. But when we read your books, oftentimes.
- [01:32]
A
We go, whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the last time I was on, I think I talked about the Cabin, the girl in Cavern 350. Yes. Which is about a woman who disappears.
- [01:41]
B
Yes.
- [01:41]
A
But now with who is Wallace? We have a man who was incredibly visible. There's absolutely no ambiguity about the crime of which he's committed. But it's all about punishment. It's all about the consequences. How does society deal with a ruction like this? An aberrant behaviour in the case of William Richard Wallace.
- [01:59]
B
And again, it's brutal. It's pretty harsh.
- [02:02]
A
A man for whom society could really find no place. Well, they did find him a place. He languished there for almost most of his natural life.
- [02:10]
B
Because the question goes on and on, not just in Australia, but what to do with certain individuals with antisocial behaviour. Let's say, you know, sex offenders, people like that. It's like, okay, they've served their sentence, but we don't want them back.
- [02:23]
A
Yes.
- [02:24]
B
What do we do with these people? Very violent people. What do we do with them? We've decided against capital punishment for crimes. We've also decided we don't want to live near them. So what do we do with these people?
- [02:34]
A
Yeah. Well, Bill Wallace was mad. That's the word. That's the easiest word to describe him. Mad, according to the lights of society. 100 years ago, probably. Probably mentally ill by our present formulations. We still don't know quite what to do with people like that.
- [02:53]
B
No.
- [02:53]
A
And when they transgress, when they take a life, for whatever reason, the system really struggles to cope.
- [03:02]
B
You got me thinking about our facility in Melbourne now, the Thomas Embling Centre.
- [03:06]
A
Yeah. Right.
- [03:07]
B
Which is where people go who have been judged mentally ill and they can't face trial for violent crimes. Let's say that joint is packed. They just added another 80 beds, I think, a year ago, and it's still. It's packed. And so there are people in prison who should be there, but they can't fit them in. So this problem has not gotten any better.
- [03:26]
A
No. Thomas Embling succeeds. The place in which Bill Wallace was incarcerated. J Ward of the Ararat Asylum.
- [03:32]
B
J Ward sends a shitter down my spine.
- [03:35]
A
Yeah. If you were gonna come up with a sinister formulation for a place where you put people. Jay Ward. Not H Ward, not Kay Ward. J Ward.
- [03:43]
B
J Ward. Cause there are still. I've spoken to people who spent time in J Ward. I mean, it's not. Again, not that long ago. So please tell us Wallace's story, which will encapsulate all of these aspects.
- [03:55]
A
My daughter came up with the idea. She said to me one day, dad, who was the world's oldest prisoner? I went, gee, I don't know. That's a great question. We had visions of, you know, someone being sent to an arctic gulag or confined to death row in America or languishing wormwood scrubs for 80 years. But no, in fact, it was a man called William Wallace who was arrested in December 1925, 100 years ago for the crime of shooting a man in a dispute over whether you were allowed to smoke a cigarette in a cafe. Yeah. And so he was found unfit to stand trial.
- [04:34]
B
Did he know this man by the way?
- [04:35]
A
He had encountered him at lunch. They had been involved in an angry altercation. Perhaps we can describe that in due course, But. So he sent to Jay War, which was a former colonial jail turned into an adjunct to the Ararat Asylum. It was an adjunct for the criminally insane. And he stayed in J Ward until 1962, whereupon he was moved to the Ararat Mental Hospital. Aradale. And he died there in 1989. He was nearly 108 years old. Nearly 108.
- [05:09]
B
I mean, that says more for the mental health system than I thought it would do, you know what I mean?
- [05:15]
A
Yeah.
- [05:15]
B
That's an extraordinary age to live to. He must have been well cared for.
- [05:19]
A
Well, that's the paradox, isn't it? Probably in the outside world, he would not have lived anywhere near so long.
- [05:23]
B
Yeah.
- [05:24]
A
He was spared the ordeal of having to make a living, how to scrape together three meals a day. All his physical needs were provided for, but none of his psychological needs. Because as far as I can tell from looking at the records, of which there is an enormous quantity, he languished in the system for so long, he was never treated in any meaningful sense. Doesn't seem to have been managed through any drugs. He never seems to have undergone any therapy. He never seems to have. His encounters with psychiatrists are fleeting and florid because he's not an easy man, you know, he's not an easy man to sympathise with either. But he just goes on and on and will not stop living. It gets to a certain stage where it becomes impossible for him to return to the outside world. His view of the outside world has become so detached from reality that there's really no place for him in contemporary society.
- [06:20]
B
So he's got an untreated mental illness this entire time, Essentially. Even though he's living in a mental health facility, it's untreated. So it's like they've just put safety rails around him to prevent him hurting anybody else. Prevent him getting hurt?
- [06:33]
A
Yeah. I mean, he's originally put there, the diagnosis paranoia. He's also defined as delusionally insane. In the late 1960s, he's classified as paranoid schizophrenic. But once again, he gets very little specialist treatment. The thing about Bill, though, is that he runs his own race almost completely. He has no friends. He doesn't really seek companionship. He just goes on living. He reads the paper every morning after that, he burns it. He's quite a dandy. He dresses well. He takes some pride in his appearance. He takes some pride in his personal hygiene.
- [07:10]
B
In hospital.
- [07:11]
A
In hospital, yep. He requires very little attention. And for that very reason, he doesn't get very much attention. He strikes a kind of a balance. It's like an armed neutrality with the system. The system ignores him. He ignores the system. And the two kind of continue on parallel paths.
- [07:32]
B
Wow. It must have been hard to find out information about him, about who this person was before this.
- [07:38]
A
Yes, it was. It was the title, who is Wallace? With the headlines in the newspapers in late 1925, when Bill was accused of this crime because he refused to speak about it, he would not speak to the press, he wouldn't testify at the inquest, he wouldn't give a statement to the police. He talked in only very abstract terms about the circumstances that he found himself in. So. And he certainly divulged nothing about his family background. So who is Wallace that newspapers continue wondering until they don't, by which time, you know, he's well and truly in the asylum system. But every man leaves traces, and that's the notion behind my imprint, the Archives Liberation Front, which is all about trying to use public records to put back together obscure lives and obscure times.
- [08:37]
B
And you're one of the people who we've spoken to on this show a couple of times who are just great research. You just know where to look and you just keep looking. Everyone says to me, go to Trove. And I'm like, I've been to Trove. It does nothing for me. I don't get it. I'm not a good researcher. So how did you do it?
- [08:54]
A
Trove is good. Trove is a great start.
- [08:57]
B
It's where there's the digital archives of.
- [09:00]
A
Old newspapers, digitised newspapers, and they are terrific. They are hugely helpful, but they give you a very superficial acquaintance with the facts. And once the media's attention moves on, people can just disappear. And that's what happened to Bill Wallace. He was completely neglected and completely forgotten. So Bill Wallace was born in August 1881 in a place called Cudgel Creek near Young in country New South Wales. Farming family, Scots, Presbyterians, typically big family of the time, moved on a settlement at Temora. Probably the only unusual thing about Bill in the first 20 to 30 years of his life is that he serves in the Boer War. He enlists when he's 19. He's part of the third New South Wales Mounted Rifles. He spends a year there. I don't think he sees very much action.
- [09:50]
B
Boer War was in South Africa.
- [09:51]
A
It is. He doesn't come to any harm. He's quite proud of his achievements there. There's a lovely photograph of him in the Temora Museum and his campaign medals, remarkably. And his pay records. So you can see that his money was paid to his father while he was. He looked after himself all the while afterwards. He had a Kruger sovereign that he attached to a keychain that was his souvenir of his service.
- [10:18]
B
What's that? Was that their currency?
- [10:20]
A
Yeah, their currency. So he's a soldier. In fact, at the time that he died, he was the last Australian survivor of the Boer War. Not that anyone knew this because he never talked about it. He never talked about anything to do with his past.
- [10:33]
B
Well, at 108, he was probably Australia's last surviving lots of things.
- [10:37]
A
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It would have been a fascinating life if you'd ever been able to draw him out about it. But only one person, only one person ever did. And I'll get to that person. She's extremely interesting. So he goes back to Temora, his share farms for a while. He gets burned out. There's a bushfire and he has to leave the district. He moves up to Dorrigo in northern New South Wales. He begins to build up a little farm, about 150 head of cattle, about 15 head of horses, sulky shed. He never marries, so he's actually able to concentrate on building up his sort of his farming expertise. And he becomes quite successful.
- [11:21]
B
God, this is the tragedy of mental illness, isn't it? This is a guy who's doing everything.
- [11:26]
A
Very capable. Very capable.
- [11:28]
B
He's a hard worker.
- [11:28]
A
Hard worker, exactly.
- [11:30]
B
He's smart.
- [11:30]
A
Yeah. Yep.
- [11:31]
B
He's succeeding in life as a young man.
- [11:33]
A
But for whatever reason, he doesn't seek out company. He's a loner. He's a loner even before he ends up alone in the crowd in the mental health system. So there is something that sets him to one side. In 1918, he goes to the Royal Easter show in Sydney and he begins to talk about people following him. He begins to suspect that there is a clairvoyant on his trail. There's a woman who's following him. He never actually sees the woman, but he senses her presence. When he leaves the Easter show, he's unwell, he's got headaches, he's running a temperature, he's talking in agitated fashion. He goes to stay with his family in Goulburn for a period. Then he returns to Dorrigo. He's involved in a dispute with a neighbour. He accuses the neighbour of sabotaging his farm. The neighbor accuses him of stealing a horse. It all gets a little bit confused, so he goes to the police. Bill goes to the police. But unexpectedly, having gone to register a complaint, he becomes the subject of the complaint. The police go, this man's a bit weird. I know. Let's put him before the magistrate and see what the magistrate thinks. And the magistrate says, actually, I'm gonna certify you because you're clearly a bit strange. So he gets sent to the Kenmore Asylum in Sydney and he's confined there for a period of about a year.
- [13:10]
B
What's confinement in an asylum like in those days? Are we talking, is everyone having shock therapy or.
- [13:16]
A
No, it's, I mean, we are talking at the very primitive stage of the asylum system really. They are simply confined. There is some work available, but it's work of a very menial kind like washing and laundering and cleaning. But other than that it's a regime of soul destroying idleness. That's what one of the doctors calls it.
- [13:36]
B
They just lock you in.
- [13:37]
A
They just lock you in. They lock you in, they feed you, they lock you up. So he's there for about a year.
- [13:43]
B
Doesn't help paranoia.
- [13:44]
A
It doesn't help paranoia, does it?
- [13:46]
B
When you actually are victimised by the system.
- [13:48]
A
He writes a fascinating letter to his neighbour, a guy called Justin McCarthy, where he thinks, he says, I've been locked up here for the sole purpose of being murdered, that there are people conspiring against me. I hear them talking about me, but I don't know what to do about it and I don't know what's at the bottom of it. He starts to talk about something called the Influence, which is this weird amorphous force that wishes him ill. His delusions don't abate, so he's sent to Gladesville, another mental hospital. Interestingly, he's there, put to work. He's put to work in the asylum store and he's an intelligent man, so he's quite capable of handling money and dishing out goods. And his condition begins to improve, so he starts to write different letters. He writes to what's called the Master in Lunacy. It's a great title, isn't it?
- [14:45]
B
That's a real title.
- [14:46]
A
It's a real title.
- [14:47]
B
I thought that was one he'd made up in his delusion, the Master of Lunacy.
- [14:51]
A
So the Master in Lunacy in New South Wales was a barrister who was appointed to run the estates of those who were certified. Because being certified, you weren't allowed to own property, you certainly weren't allowed to own a farm. So what happens while Bill is in Gladesville is that his farm is sold and all his equipment is sold and all his livestock is sold. All the money is given to him, is placed in his bank account. But his life is completely transformed so that when he is at length released from Gladesville. He's quite a wealthy man, but he has nowhere to return to. Yeah, yeah.
- [15:31]
B
He can't go back to his life.
- [15:32]
A
He can't. So the letters that he writes to the Master in Lunacy are kind of quite fascinating. They're quite lucid, they're quite well written, they are very polite. They are almost intimate in the sense that he's writing to someone who. Bill is writing to someone who he sees as his peer. He thinks he's quite a sensible man and he thinks that he will be amenable to a sensible proposition. And Bill says, you know, if only you could give me access to a good lawyer, I'm sure I could get myself out of here. But the rest of the letter kind of degenerates into these weird sort of fabulations about the influence. So it's a man who's trying to make sense of his surroundings and they make sense to him, but they wouldn't make sense to any outsider. And this is kind of fundamental to schizophrenia. You construct a view of the world that is as concrete a reality as your reality is to you. But you find it endlessly frustrating and thwarting and confusing that other people do not see things the same way. You are permanently at odds with the rest of the world and you experience in a kind of a distorted and amplified way. So it's intense. It's often acutely. You're acutely sensitized to very, very tiny things. And we'll see that that's a symptom of Bill's pathology.
- [16:59]
B
But as I said, it can't be helping his pathology that he is actually being victimised.
- [17:04]
A
In many ways, yes, you're right.
- [17:05]
B
He has had his property stolen, his life stolen from him. And, yes, they put the money in his bank account. But I. I can't imagine having your home sold from under you while you're in hospital.
- [17:15]
A
Yes. And the terrible thing is that you're surrounded by people who you think wish you harm. So that intensifies the experience that he's had in the outside world, in that environment.
- [17:24]
B
Maybe some of them do.
- [17:25]
A
Maybe some of them do.
- [17:25]
B
You're surrounded by untreated mental illness. So, you know, it feels like in many ways it's probably not unreasonable, but because of his illness. Yeah, he can't make the distinction.
- [17:36]
A
Interestingly, even at the time, there were people who thought the mental health system was cruel and unnatural and aberrant. There was a movement in New South Wales at the time called the New South Wales Lunacy Reform League, which had very revolutionary ideas for the time about basically dissolving the asylums and letting people return to the community. And we know that Bill followed their workings quite closely because later, when he completes his will, he makes the New South Wales Lunacy Reform League his sole beneficiary. Unfortunately, by the time he dies in 1989, it's long ago dissolved, it's long ago disappeared, long ago been completely forgotten.
- [18:18]
B
But as you say, he was living in an alternate reality for many reasons, not least the fact that he'd been.
- [18:22]
A
Locked up for so long. So they let him out in 1920 and he disappears. He's very, very difficult to trace. In the next four years, he's cashed.
- [18:32]
B
Up and he's freaked out.
- [18:33]
A
The only thing that we know about him really is, is that he becomes a lender to people. In those days, people with a lot of cash would lend it out on terms to people buying houses or buying property or buying factories, because in those days bank finance was very strictly rationed. And we have some traces of Bill being a mortgage or for people who are buying houses. But he tries to disappear because of course he's a man with a deep persecution complex, so he doesn't want to to leave traces. At some stage in the middle of 1925, he comes to Melbourne, he moves into a boarding house, he keeps, once again, keeps to himself. His landlady doesn't know very much about him. All she finds him rather taciturn, rather rather aloof. He starts going to a place for his luncheon, which is a cafe in King street called the Waterloo Cafe. It's a very, very standard greasy spoon of the time. You know, working men would go there for their soup, meat and sweet, at tea time in the middle of the day, they'd sit at long benches, they probably wouldn't talk very much. So Bill kind of blended in to that environment. He was almost became an invisible man. Almost, but not quite.
- [19:58]
B
If you'd like to talk to someone about abuse that's taken place in your life, no matter how long ago it happened, your GP is always a good place to start. If that's not going to work for you, you can contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or via their website, 1-800-Respect.org au. Or you can call Lifeline's 24 hour phone counselling service on 13, 11, 14.
- [20:30]
A
Why pay when you can slash TikTok slash and free lets you cut prices all the way to zero. Download TikTok search/free and share the link to get free items. Start slashing now. So on this particular day, December 9, 1925, Bill is sitting at lunch and two young men come in. A guy called Ernest Williams from the Bendigo area, and a guy called Gene McRobertson, who is. Well, that's what he says his name in. We'll get to that in a moment. He's American and he's got a loud American accent, which would have been interesting, actually. I began to think about American accents in the mid-1920s. Now, they wouldn't have been familiar because we didn't have talkies yet. There were very few Americans in Australia.
- [21:20]
B
Wow.
- [21:21]
A
It really would have stood out in a very, very Anglo Australia. So when Gene McRobertson starts to talk loudly in an American accent and lights a cigarette and offers one to his companion, Williams, Bill snaps, hey, you're not allowed to smoke around here. And you Americans are all kind of, you're unpleasant. You shouldn't be here. It's quite. He's quite antagonistic.
- [21:47]
B
Bit of, go back to where you came from.
- [21:48]
A
Bit of go back to where you came from. And Gene McRobertson returns his ire in kind, you know, says, you know, what's it to you, mate? You know, keep your nose out of things. But he puts the cigarette out and the conversation moves on and things return to normal. But as Williams gets up with McRobertson, they mutter to Bill, we'll see you outside. Yeah. So Bill finishes his meal, he comes out, and by this stage, there's a group outside, it's McRobertson and Williams and a few of their lusty mates. And McRobinson says, you know, what did you mean by referring to me as a Yankee bastard in there? And Bill begins to kind of, Bill doesn't want to fight. Bill doesn't want to fight.
- [22:36]
B
I'm looking at all of this through the lens of paranoid society. Precisely.
- [22:40]
A
Precisely. And unfortunately, for the last 18 months, because Bill has been so paranoid, he's been carrying a gun.
- [22:46]
B
Yep.
- [22:48]
A
Because he's got money and he's worried that people are going to try and extort him or steal from him, so he feels the need to defend himself. So as these. As this group of toughs home in on him, they sort of chase him down the street. He's kind of trying to keep them at bay. But finally he's cornered out the front of a butcher shop, and he pulls a gun and shoots Williams. He shoots the young Australian. Everyone is horrified. A policeman is called. The butcher comes out the front of his shop. And he says he's only seen the last stage of this altercation. He said, what have you done? You've shot a man in cold blood. And the one thing Bill says, which he will repeat at intervals over the next little while, is, I had to do it. I had to do it. That's all he'll say when the police arrest him and a detective comes to talk to him. He just says, I had to do it. He says he's asked the question, did you know these men? And he says, no, but I think I recognize them. And over the course of the next month or so, while he's on remand in Pentridge, he begins to talk to the prison doctor, who's a man called Clarence Godfrey, about who these men might have been. And they do seem to have been agents of these nefarious forces, the influence who wished him harm. And there is an inquest at which Bill does not testify. And various witnesses portray the crime as one of self defence. Yeah, really, Bill was cornered. Bill had had no option but to. But to do something.
- [24:25]
B
There'd been a threat and there was a gang of men waiting for him.
- [24:28]
A
A premeditated threat.
- [24:29]
B
Yeah. And he was chased.
- [24:31]
A
He was chased. So even though Bill is up on a charge of murder, the likelihood is it would have been knocked down to manslaughter. The man who defended him, interestingly, was a guy called Thomas Brennan, who was the same man who defended Colin Ross in the Gun Alley murder, the great Australian murder of 1922, where Ross was probably wrongfully hanged and retrospectively pardoned in the 1990s.
- [24:56]
B
So again, it's like there's paranoia and there's like genuine things to be scared of going on here.
- [25:01]
A
Had it ever got to trial, I suspect Bill might well have got off. And even if he had been convicted, if he'd been convicted, I suspect he would have got off on a mercy plea. It was common in those days to sentence a man to hang and to commute this to life imprisonment. So Bill would have served a term in jail at worst and probably got out at some stage. But he ends up, of course, getting the worst of both worlds. He's never tried, he's never convicted, and as a result, he has no status in the system. He's confined at what they call the governor's pleasure. And I think there are like a dozen governors over the course of his life, but none of them pay any attention to their pleasure or otherwise.
- [25:45]
B
No, that's the thing with that. The governor's Pleasure, I think. Surely. I can't imagine that when a new governor sits down at his desk, someone runs in with a file about Wallace.
- [25:53]
A
And goes, what would please you, Governor? Yeah.
- [25:55]
B
By the way, this is yours now.
- [25:57]
A
Yes.
- [25:57]
B
They just forget about it.
- [25:58]
A
Yeah. So they sent him off to Jay Ward. And Jay Ward is infamous. J Ward is the archetype of the old, cold, bleak, bluestone jail. It had served as Ararat's jail up until the 1880s. Then, after a royal commission called the Zox Commission, it was decided that the criminally insane within the group of the mentally ill should be segregated. So J Ward was turned over to what was called the Mental Hygiene Department. Mental hygiene. Great phrase, isn't it? Mental hygiene. And it's got people who are just too weird for the system, potentially violent, potentially depraved, unclassifiable. There's some really fascinating cases in there. There's a man called Sidney Jefferies. He was the first man to send a radio message from the Antarctic to Australia. He was on one of Mawson's expeditions. But he began to suffer paranoid delusions when he got back, when he was in Antarctica, and they worsened when he to Australia. And he was eventually confined to J Ward. There's a man called Charles Fousard, who ends up, I think, staying there for about 72 years for having murdered an old man for his boots. There's a man called dummy Freeman, 14, so called because he was a deaf mute who strangled a friend of his when he was 14. The system put him in there. Bill is an incongruous presence in there because he's not obviously violent or his incidence of violence was not premeditated, but it's the closest that the system can find for a niche for him.
- [27:42]
B
Does it feel merciful to them? You know, is it that idea that he'd be better off in J Ward than in jail? Does it feel like a mercy or not?
- [27:50]
A
I guess it feels as though he's just too strange for the system and can't be reached by any other means. Wouldn't understand punishment even if it was inflicted on him. Him. But he is still lucid. Now, one of the great finds of this book was. So I went to the public record office and I pulled out all the miscellaneous files to do with the Ararat Asylum, which, you know, administrative, bureaucratic things like, you know, ordering food and repairs and correspondence with the department. And in the last box, I think there was. There were more than 20 boxes that I went through. In the very last box, what should I find? But A sheaf of letters that Bill Wallace wrote to what was called the Inspector General of the insane through the 1930s.
- [28:43]
B
Is this the same bloke as the General for Lunacy or whatever he was?
- [28:46]
A
No, this is a different guy. This is actually a clinician called Ernest Jones, who was the head of the mental hygiene department for more than 30 years. Once again, Bill writes these extremely courteous, perfectly well spelled, grammatical, seemingly quite intelligent letters in pencil, cause he's only allowed a pencil to use. And he writes ceaselessly about everything in his world. The way in which the teapot is put down on the table, the flies on the meat at dinner time, the gruff way that the warders address him.
- [29:29]
B
So it's like a diary you found?
- [29:30]
A
It is almost like a diary, but it's like stream of consciousness. And he's not happy about his surroundings, but he never at any point protests about him being sort of unlawfully or wrongly detained. He's simply communicating his circumstances to someone who he thinks might be in a position to influence them. Now, I guess Ernest Jones is in a limited way. There's no evidence that Jones ever replied to these letters. But like a good bureaucrat, he retained them and he filed them. And there they were waiting for me 90 years later. And you can hear Bill's voice in them. You know, he's very meticulous, he's very considered. He's not angry or florid or hallucinating. He just experiences life in a very, very particular way. He's like up this close to life and everything about it. He feels a response to it and he feels the need to communicate. Interestingly, he doesn't talk very much to other people there. He doesn't talk to the superintendent, who's a man called Whitfield Henty, or any of the subsequent superintendents with whom he really forms no relationship at all. But he writes and he writes voluminously and fascinating. If you really wanted a case study of a schizophrenic, reading these letters gives you a fantastic insight into the condition. It is life, distorted, amplified, wonky and off center, but making complete sense to the person who's experiencing it.
- [31:13]
B
How was his behaviour in hospital? I mean, I know he was there for a very long time, but did he ever have any violent outbursts?
- [31:19]
A
He occasionally remonstrated with warders. He occasionally had disputes with people, you know, sitting at the dinner table if they. If they touched his food, for instance. He experienced that as a personal violation. Every now and again the superintendent would have an audience with him and Bill would just say, I'm not gonna tell you anything. I'm not gonna tell you anything. You can ask all the questions you like. I'm not mad. I'm not mad, you know, I'm fine. The influence ceases to become a factor and he begins to blame the Jews.
- [31:55]
B
Well, I've read about schizophrenia that oftentimes people will, rather than invent a new conspiracy, they will latch onto an old one.
- [32:03]
A
Pre. Existing one. Yeah, One that's familiar.
- [32:04]
B
Aliens, Jews, Illuminati, something.
- [32:08]
A
Yep. But these are periodic and they only happen every few years. There's no evidence that he ever had a bad experience with a Jew or had any particular understanding of the conspiracy against him. He knew there was a conspiracy. He knew something had to be behind it. He just didn't know who. And he latched onto a familiar antagonist.
- [32:30]
B
Yeah, a storyline that's already been fleshed out. You don't have to do all that yourself.
- [32:36]
A
So he becomes this weird still point in the moving world, because the mental health system does change over the next 50 years a lot.
- [32:44]
B
Hard and fast, really, doesn't it?
- [32:45]
A
Yeah, yeah. Bill doesn't really change. Bill becomes a kind of a state within the state. There's something sort of weirdly admirable about his determination and his absolute resistance of the world in which he finds himself. He just will not give in to it. He persists in his idea that he's not mad. He persists in his regime, which is very, very regular. He is a man of fixed habits. He retains a sense of 1920s fashions. Towards the end of his period, in fact, in the late 1970s, early 1980s, the mentally ill began to receive the pension. And so Bill accumulated further monies in his account. And one of the things that he spent his money on was clothes. So he would outfit himself at this particular shop in Ararat, and the owner, Mr. Foster, would come in and take his measurements and fit him out for his sports jackets and his shirts and his cardigans. So he's quite the dandy. He looks the part. He looks like, you know, rather avuncular, rather a nice old man. You wouldn't have, if you'd passed him in the street, you would not have noticed him. But once again, you know, he's at odds with the world surrounding him.
- [34:07]
B
And the clinicians, to the extent that they were sort of working with him, still believed that he was a danger, I guess, to himself and to others.
- [34:15]
A
Look, once he gets to 80, he gets to 80 in the early 1960s, and it's decided that look, Jay Ward's probably not the place for him now, so we'll move him to the main mental hospital, which is now called Aradale. A slightly less rigorous regime, some occupational therapy, some activities, some occasional experience of the outside world. And Bill does change to a certain degree. He begins to take an interest in chess. He becomes an absolutely obsessive and almost unbeatable chess player. He plays chess against everyone and it absolutely consumes him. In fact, on his 100th birthday, he's given a chess set, a. A rather beautiful chess set that's still in the museum at J Ward, which now occupies the old J Ward premises. And because he's quite presentable, because he looks like, you know, your old uncle, he becomes quite popular. He becomes a well liked figure. He's a guy who looks after himself. He has very extensive systematised delusions, but they don't do anyone any harm. And by the 1970s, people are going, yeah, it's remarkable. This guy's quite old, he's about to turn 100, he's going to get a telegram from the Queen, he's going to get a message from the Australia Day Council. So it becomes quite a big event. When he turns 100, there's a big cake, the local member comes to visit him, the head of the RSL comes to see him. He's presented with various gifts, he's featured in the local newspaper and in fact, over the last seven or eight years of Bill's life, he became a weird celebrity.
- [36:01]
B
But still in the hospital.
- [36:02]
A
But still in the hospital. By this stage, as I'm saying, the mental health system has changed. There's been this strong movement from the early 1960s to medication. The first sort of antipsychotic medications are becoming available, specifically chlorpromazine, marketed in Australia as ligactyl to treat schizophrenia. There's no evidence that Bill was actually treated with that. It was maybe considered that it was too late for him. There are other things, like electroconvulsive therapy. There's leukotomy, lobotomy, which is practiced for some patients in the mental health system. There is a desire to cure mental illness rather than simply to sequester and confine them. But Bill's not going anywhere. Bill is entrenched, Bill is institutionalised and in fact is a bit of an advertisement, having lived so long for the efficacy of the system.
- [37:06]
B
Absolutely.
- [37:07]
A
And Ararat, which is a town in country Victoria, where Aradale and Jaywater located, had a fascinatingly ambivalent relationship to the.
- [37:19]
B
Mentally ill. Well, Ararat still has some really interesting mental health facilities, like sex offenders, for example.
- [37:26]
A
Yeah, yep, yeah. It's a big industry. It's a big employer in the town. And in fact, they thought of deinstitution as quite a threat, potentially a threat to long term employment prospects in the town.
- [37:39]
B
It's their industry.
- [37:40]
A
The building, they used to call it the Building on the Hill. You could always get a job on the Hill. You could always sell your produce to the Hill. It was quite benevolent institution for those who worked there. It was two days on, two days off. They were relatively well paid. It was pretty secure, it was pretty undemanding.
- [37:59]
B
We had one where I grew up to in Toowoomba in Queensland. Bailey Henderson. Right, Bailey Henderson Hospital. And it was called Bailey. Everyone talked about, oh, you'll end up in Bailey or. But doing business with Bailey, getting a job at Bailey. Yeah, very similar. A huge hospital. Yeah. So I really. I can hear what you're saying about the Hill. It sort of becomes part of local folklore and I'm sure that Bill Wallace assisted in that, in that he's become a celebrity up there on the Hill.
- [38:29]
A
Features in the local paper.
- [38:31]
B
Yeah.
- [38:31]
A
He appears in the Herald.
- [38:33]
B
You'll end up with Bill up, all that kind of stuff.
- [38:35]
A
Yeah. And they're quite, you know, they're quite friendly, affable, genial presentations of his predicament. He's a voluntary patient by this stage, so there's absolutely no reason for him to stay there. The only reason that he stays there is because he's got nowhere to go. In 1987, there's a push to close the system altogether. And a journalist from the Australian called Stuart Rintoul goes up to Ararat and he encounters Bill there and he's told the story and he goes up and asks, Bill, do you know why you're here? And Bill says something like, there was a man. He has a very sort of rather metallic and rather robotic voice. There was a man. And then he pauses and he said, to tell you the truth, I don't know why I'm here. He's completely forgotten.
- [39:31]
B
How long has he been there by that stage?
- [39:32]
A
He's been there for 62 years. Yeah. So. And that story, when it's published in the Australian, attracts the interest of the Willacy Program. And the Willacy Program sends a young reporter up there called Deb Byrne to interview him. I mean, it's a. She's very junior and it's Melbourne Cup Week and it's kind of. It's a bit of a. It's a Bit of a Hail Mary, you know, see what you can get. But amazingly, she gets an interview and it's really quite a good interview. Yeah, yeah. She asks quite good questions. She establishes a rapport with him. He's fascinated by the equipment. So he's in it. He's by this state. He's in his own room in a ward called Ward M18. And they get the sound recordist in there and the cameraman, and Billy's actually quiet, fascinated by this. And he gives some answers. He's asked where he's from and he actually says, I'm from a place called Hanani. I was a grazier in Hanani. He talks about how he was sent here by the magistrate. He's asked, is he happy there? And he says, no. He's asked, where would you like to be? And he says, I'd like to be in Vaucluse, of all places. From what I can ascertain, one of the properties that he acted as a mortgage or for in the 1920s was a property in Vaucluse. I have the address and I know what the building was like. But I have not been able to trace whether he actually lived there or what his relationship was to the mortgagee. But he had a connection and a sense. He talked about, I had businesses at the time, so maybe he was an investor in other things. So he has a memory, a weird memory of a preceding life that.
- [41:23]
B
That was successful.
- [41:24]
A
That was successful. Exactly. That was functional on its own terms, was completely functional. And he has a strange sense that the world hasn't changed. He doesn't. Even though he's read the newspaper every day, his idea of what the world will be like is completely detached from reality, almost as detached as his own delusions.
- [41:42]
B
It's hard to fathom being removed from life for 60 years but still living, isn't it? It's such a strange idea.
- [41:51]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [41:52]
B
Put aside, yes.
- [41:54]
A
But there were lots of people like this, weren't there? Like you said in Toowoomba, there were people who were confined to these institutions and they were not spoken about publicly and they were the subject of sort of shame in the family. As far as I can ascertain, only one of Bill's relatives ever wrote a letter to find out what was going on with him. His sister Margaret, in 1929, wrote a letter to Henty, the superintendent at Ararat, saying, is there any change? Henti replies, no.
- [42:31]
B
Well, yeah. You told us early on he came from a big family.
- [42:34]
A
Big family, yeah.
- [42:35]
B
Meaning siblings, nieces, nephews, and only Ever one letter.
- [42:38]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yeah.
- [42:40]
B
Asking after him.
- [42:41]
A
Yes. But I was actually able to trace the family. I put together a genealogy of the Wallace family in Australia. It's a classically big family. There were lots of loose ends. Every sort of contemporary address I had, I wrote to and I found Bill's great nephew. And he said, yeah, I sort of know about this. You know, it was only ever discussed in a very sort of sotto voce way. But, yeah, we knew there was this old great uncle who'd just killed a man and been confined in an institution, but we didn't really know any more about it than that. So Richard, who was kind enough to write a stat deck for me, saying that I could act as his agent and I could apply for the various health records, because otherwise they would have been sealed. So they are so voluminous because he spent so long in confinement that they had to be released to me in tranches of 200 pages each. And they're a great case study of how the system dealt with someone like that. They monitored them very closely. Physically, he was extremely well looked after. You know, his weight was measured, his blood pressure was taken, he was physically examined. Although Bill didn't like being physically examined, he tended to keep the doctors at arm's race.
- [44:04]
B
But, I mean, he must have been well fed as well and things like that.
- [44:07]
A
Yeah, so. But there is no evidence that he was treated for his mental indisposition at all. He's almost too early to have attracted any sort of constructive attention. And by the time that those constructive attentions come along, it was too late for him. So he's a man who's completely lost in the system and completely forgotten.
- [44:34]
B
Schizophrenia is still famously hard to diagnose, hard to treat, hard to get a regime that works and is comfortable for the sufferer. And also, we know that people suffering schizophrenia are overrepresented when it comes to victims of crime as well. So his survival is miraculous on many levels, isn't it? When did he die? What were the circumstances of his death?
- [44:58]
A
He just conked out. 1989. Yes, he did.
- [45:00]
B
It was 108. Listen to me.
- [45:02]
A
Yeah, so he's buried in the Ararat cemetery. He has quite a nice tidy tombstone. The funeral was attended by a handful of people from the hospital, but no members of the family were contactable. So it's a rather lonely affair.
- [45:19]
B
And yet I wonder. I sort of can't help but think he must have had relationships with staff, as in day to day staff. I feel as though for him to live so long. He must have felt. He must have been cared for on an interpersonal level.
- [45:32]
A
Well, he was liked.
- [45:33]
B
Yeah.
- [45:33]
A
He was Old Bill. He was Old Bill. He was a character. And his story was amazing to people. And he was treated with a certain fuss and a certain. And of course, once he goes on television, people start to write to him.
- [45:48]
B
Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [45:49]
A
And the health records have all these letters that were written to him, none of whom were ever answered. But, you know, it would be people writing to him saying, you remind me of my old uncle, or could you possibly be related? Or I remember that my family told me about this guy who was locked up. Or maybe you're lonely. Maybe you'd like to write to me. Teenage girls wrote to him saying, you must be a lonely old man. What if I write to you and told you about my dog or I told you about what I was going to do at university? And they're quite frank and friendly and warm. And of course, they fall on deaf ears. Cause Bill is quite deaf by this stage, and quite. His eyesight is poor.
- [46:37]
B
But also, he's never been one to open up to people, has he?
- [46:41]
A
Yeah. He gets one visitor in this time, and it's terribly tragic. This woman comes to see him because she lost her father, who was also called Bill Wallace, in the 1920s and had never been able to find out anything about him.
- [46:57]
B
And she was him.
- [46:59]
A
That it was him. And of course, she turns up with her son and Bill doesn't want to see her. He's got no interest. He's apathetic by this day, he's got no interest in the outside world.
- [47:10]
B
So he could have been like that?
- [47:12]
A
No, no, he couldn't have been. No, no. It's a completely different family. I did a genealogy for her, and they're unrelated. But in some ways, you know, Bill's terrible experience teases out other people's terrible experiences. One of the women who writes to him is just sort of. She's a widow and she's lost her husband, and she's lonely and she never sees anyone. And she thinks Bill Wallace is a lonely person. I'll write to him. And she writes to him several times. Of course, he never applies, but she tells him because he's someone who doesn't respond. He sort of becomes like a good listener, your paradigmatic good listener who doesn't interrupt. So she tells him her life story.
- [47:51]
B
He never makes it about him.
- [47:52]
A
He never makes it about him. Exactly. Yeah.
- [47:55]
B
I don't know if it's Bill or if it's your Storytelling, but it definitely. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking a lot about my grandmother, my mother's mother, who spent time in Bailey.
- [48:05]
A
Yeah, right, yeah.
- [48:06]
B
And so this story's teasing out lots of thoughts for me and emotions. And maybe you're right. Maybe a lot of us in some way can read into Bill's story and engage with it.
- [48:18]
A
It's extraordinary, but it also has a kind of an every person quality to it. Yeah, it does.
- [48:23]
B
And again, you make me emotional. You make me so emotional about these people who are long gone. But I always think it's so moving the way you. You care about them. You find them first of all when they're lost, then you learn about them, you care about them, and then you bring them to us. It's so nice, Gideon, what you do.
- [48:44]
A
My daughter lost interest in it. She went, dad, you don't have to write books about everything I'm interested in. I went, yeah, but it's kind of so interesting. I just couldn't help myself.
- [48:54]
B
Well, I'm glad that she asked the question. I'm into it still. Thank you so much. Who is Wallace is available. I also love the way you. Your attitude to writing books, which is that we essentially buy them from you. Right.
- [49:05]
A
You do. You write to me@gideonhagueotmail.com Earlier, Dr. Slow Changer, and I sell them to you from my kitchen table.
- [49:15]
B
But they're beautifully made, they're beautiful. We're getting a stapled.
- [49:18]
A
It's a lovely book and it's printed on very high quality paper. It's got lots of pictures in it.
- [49:23]
B
And the photo on the front. Gorgeous.
- [49:24]
A
Yeah, Yep. Taken by an old colleague of mine, really? On that trip, on Stuart Rentil's trip to the Ararat mental hospital.
- [49:33]
B
These are the media years.
- [49:34]
A
Yeah, the media. The celebrity years.
- [49:36]
B
Celebrity years. God bless him. What a shock to the system to have these people. And as you said, just even the equipment and everything. He's living in the 20s, still getting his waistcoats handmade, and then they rock up with all this equipment. How wonderful, in a way. Wonderful life. My nan lived to be 99 and I thought, God, everything you've seen.
- [49:57]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [49:58]
B
The changes and everything. And in his own way, he did.
- [50:01]
A
See a lot of change. Yeah. He just didn't respond to it. Yeah.
- [50:06]
B
Thank you to our guest today, Gideon Hay. Gideon's book, who is Wallace, is available now and there are links in the show notes to help you get your copy. If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-RESPECT on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800Respect.orgau. Indigenous Australians can contact 13 YARN on 139276 or 13YARN.orgau.
- [50:46]
A
The producers of this podcast recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.