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 Wurundri Woi Wurang people of the Koolan Nation.

And a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

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

in wormwood scrubs for 80 years.

But no, in fact, it was a man called William Wallace, who was born in August 1881 in a place

called Cuddle Creek near Young in country, New South. Farming family, Scots Presbyterians,

typically big family of the time, moved on a settlement at Tumora. 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. 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. So he goes back to Tamora.

He share farms for a while.

He gets burned out.

There's a bushfire and he has to leave the district.

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