The Councillors involved, Dennis Thomas and George Knight, were prosecuted under the Secret Commissions Prohibition Act 1919 (NSW) for receiving bribes from a development company to influence planning and development decisions, and both received gaol sentences.
As Stubbs says, incarceration in the plague-filled gaol "was all but a death sentence": he only lasted a little while.
Having served his time in gaol, he was educating himself.
A gaol from the same time reflects Tasmania's convict past.
Until three years ago, Reading gaol, where Wilde served most of his sentence, was used as a place of incarceration for young offenders.
Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.
He spent most of his two-year sentence incarcerated in Reading jail and later wrote the Ballad of Reading Gaol in France.
They got a fright, but no one was hurt.' He and his accomplice got away with £15,000, but were caught and sentenced to four years in gaol.
The ruling was that the five men had "joined a mutiny, not accompanied by violence", and they were sentenced to imprisonment in Goulburn Gaol: two for a year, one for eighteen months, and two for two years with hard labour.
He read that he was standing "on the edge of some crazy cliff and kept seeing kids playing a game in a field of rye". The judge then pronounced sentence, ordering that Chapman should receive psychiatric treatment in gaol.
